Straight Fence Line? Long Distance...

   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance...
  • Thread Starter
#61  
Hey Keith I did the same thing as you last year. Buried auger. Hooked chain from bucket on other tractor and applied some upward pressure. Worked good. Someone on TBN advised not to turn auger too slow and I believe he was right. Good luck with your fence.
Too fast don't work so well either! We found a "good" speed and kept it there for the duration (althought there were mistakes in "speed" on day one). It's not only the speed of the auger that's important, but the speed of the decent as well. I learned to "feel" the auger as it went down by the second day. When I felt the auger beginning to pull itself down (screw itself in) I immediately yanked it back up. We stuck the auger 3 times the first day, but none the next 3 days - although I did kill the tractor a couple of times on the last day when I didn't quite get it yanked back up quick enough. Ths always occurred when we were at the very bottom of the depth we were going and I just knew if I had just one more second in the hole I'd be done with that one. Luckily I was able to restart and pull the auger up with the hitch. The "up yank" became part of the process and was repeated several times on each hole. Our soil varies the deeper you go - starting off with sandy loam, then turning to clay at about 2 feet, then sand stone at 3 feet. The layer of sand stone is pretty shallow. It's HARD, but can be bust through.
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance...
  • Thread Starter
#62  
The pallet forks are working great for moving the "logs", but the posts are still a handful when we load them onto the forks from the "pile". So - took a minute to look at our "process" to see what I could do to improve load times. The forks were somewhat difficult to get under the logs (they tend to dig into the dirt), so I figured why not use the logs against themselves. We took two of the posts and put them horizonal to the steel wrapped bundle of 25 posts - then cut the bands and rolled the posts onto the two we had set horizonal. Now the "logs" are at least 6" off the ground and it's very easy to move under them with the forks to grab a set.

I've got 4 bundles of 25 and another of 22. I went through two bundles before I got tired enough of man-handling the logs to try something different. Luckily I didn't get all the way to the end before I figured this out! :laughing:

Assuming everything goes as planned, we should be finished setting posts next weekend. I'm actually hoping to get at least one roll of wire up as well. :thumbsup:
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance... #64  
Maybe some one has posted this trick. I used friends with flash lights and cell phones in the dark. One guy at the back corner, one guy acting as middleman and me at the front. I line up the back and mid and tell the the middle man to set a stake. Keep going 'till done. Set fence in 2 feet.

Close enough for many

Patrick T
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance... #65  
One little hint I learnt from a professional farm fence guy: If you are using wire fencing you must have substantial posts in the ground at all the highest and lowest points even if they dont exactly space evenly. So basically he would place all his high and low posts first then evenly space the remaining posts or stardroppers between them. It makes for a fence that nicely follows the contour of the land without extra large or small gaps under the wire. This is probably more important for a fence that uses posts and stardroppers as they will be soon pulled out of the ground when the fence is under strain.
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance...
  • Thread Starter
#66  
I'm pretty sure I did this the "hard" way, but I hate an uneven fence... so I used the box blade and cut "lanes" all around the vineyard to eliminate the high and low spots. This - of course - turned out to be a lot of work, so I can't say I'd recommend it, but the fence "should" look nice when we're done.

We're on the last sections this weekend with plans to throw up a roll of wire on Sunday. It's nice to now have a visual to go with the "paper plans". We're better than half way done now with post setting. Should finish up on Saturday!
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance... #67  
Look on the bright side. By doing it the hard way you got in more tractor time
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance... #68  
I hate an uneven fence too, but every one I've built in the last twenty years eventually ain't straight any more. We have a lot of what I call black gumbo clay. Ten miles away where I grew up it was redder and just different soil. Never used sackrete, just tamped really good around corner posts and never had a problem. Here, I've tried that and also tried sackrete at bottom of hole with sod to finish off. Doesn't matter is this soil its gonna lean sooner or later. Also built one using treated 4 x 4's and 1 x 6's. After three years many posts and boards are twisted all out of whack. Good luck on yours.
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance... #69  
Keith, the fence project is looking good. Those pallet forks are a great help.
 
   / Straight Fence Line? Long Distance...
  • Thread Starter
#70  
Well, we got our butts kicked today on the first hole we drilled. Took over an hour to correct the issue - and to be honest we finally just gave up and left the post slightly off. Issue was a berm that was evidently created by bringing in sand - lots of sand. At any rate, the hole went in "off-center" and we spent the better part of an hour trying to redig the hole. But no matter what we did the hole kept collapsing on itself. We finally filled it back in, tramped it down as hard as we could, and re-drilled. Then we went forward to the next flag and drilled hole two - with the same exact issue, and unfortunately the same hour or so trying to correct. By the time we finished we had three logs up in four hours and we were exhausted. The wind was bitter cold today, we couldn't get warm, we wasted everything we had on holes one and two, and our bodies simply quit on us. We broke for lunch and took a loooong one - returning to the game around two. After that things went better and we finished the day with 5 more posts for a total of 8 posts for the day - by far our worst day since day one. Needless to say, we'll not get to the wire this weekend - still have a full day of posts to install tomorrow.... :cool:
 
 
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