Fenceman doing what fencemen do these days

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I lost my bud LWFrisk which sorta changes the way I post on projects from now on.

You see I used to post pictures and prose here on an ongoing project and Leo would capture it and post it on harveylacey.com.

Harveylacey.com was Leo's passion. It was his baby. He's been fighting cancer since August of last year and that's why harveylacey.com hasn't been updated since October.

I haven't decided what to do about harveylacey.com. There's a part of me that wants to keep it going because it makes my life easier having a place to send someone when they ask how I do something. But then I also realize the reason it's there and so navigatable is because it was Leo's.

I'm doing a fence job in Josephine-Nevada-Farmersville Texas. Yeah, I get confused too. My customer has a Nevada address. Across the street they have Josephine addresses. And a block away they're in Farmersville. And it's all county. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Customer has ten acres that came fenced.

 

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That kind of fencing is okay for guys like Vinnie Van Goat. But it isn't worth a flip for valuable horses.

 

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Even old goats have buds. Vinnie's bud is Pascal.

 

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I've got to share a funny story about Pascal. First is him and Vinnie are pets of the worst degree. They came with the property.

So Pascal wasn't halter broke nor had he ever been trailered even though he's two years old and will forever be nothing more than a boy at heart or anything else for that matter.

To put in a new fence we had to remove the old one. That meant putting Pascal into a trailer. But first we had to catch him.

Normally catching him is accomplished with a feed bucket. Think honey and a bee. But Pascal knew something was up. Ten acres is a lot of room to chase a donkey.

So I had the client (We'll call him Gary) go into Pascal's stall and be ready to shut the gate when he went in. Then I jumped into Iris the skid steer and we went on a round up.

In any round up the first rule of thumb is intimidation. I had that one down with Iris' bucket in the up position and rattling like a grandma over a new grandbaby.

When I got Pascal at the door to the stall he decided to have a Mexican face off.

As I approached with the bucket full up and in the rattle loudest position he assumed the cornerback anticipation position.

I stopped and stared.

He stared back.

Then I launched forward rattling the bucket as I yelled at the top of my lungs.

Gary caught the gate behind him.

That was the easy part.

A little donkey can be awful big when they don't want to go into the trailer. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

I need lots of dirt to build up a pad where we're going to put a four stall horse barn.

There was lots of dirt in the dried up pond (we're in a drought).

 

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So we removed a lot of dirt from the bottom of the pond before I started anything else because you never know when it's going to rain and then rain some more. And once it starts raining there'll be no more digging in the pond for Iris.

 

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And believe it or not, we to some rain last weekend, three and a half inches in about a twenty four hour period.

There'll be no more intentionally driving Iris into the pond.

 

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We're looking at thirty two hundred linear feet of five foot high V Mesh horse fence on a welded galvanized two inch (2 3/8 O.D.) pipe framework.

Gary is a helper-student-homeowner-client on this project. We agreed he'd have fun. He's paying for it on a couple of different levels. One of course is physically, he swears he's got an intimate relationship with every grain of sand and piece of stone going into the concrete for the posts.

One of his first chores while I was being the fenceman was to cope five hundred posts. We set up the pipe notcher and let him get after it. And get after it. And then he got after it somemore. In fact, he got after it until he got it.

 

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Here's where Gary gets to have his fun.

There's the sand and gravel, the concrete mixer, ninety four pound bags of Portland cement, he just has to add water. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

The water tank on top of Iris was required because the clay soil is just about perfectly wrong right now. The big rain soaked down enough to make it clingy. It clings to everything. Mostly itself. And itself gets on everything which attracts more itself to cling to if you know what I mean.

So the old fence man waters his holes as he's augering them in. Not only does it make the holes easier to dig. It also gives him nice even straight up and down holes.

The even straight up and down holes is very important in this contractive-expansive clay soil. One of the biggest mistakes I see others making doing their post holes is they make them cone shaped, bigger at the top than at the bottom. This enables the soil when it expands and contracts to move those posts around like they're marshmellows in a cup of hot chocolate.

Also in this picture you can see where we put the old fence until the scrap man gets over to haul it off.

 

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Keep in mind these are eight feet long posts. The holes are a minimum of three and a half feet deep and they're one foot across.

 

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Fencemen don't use strings to set posts.

Fencemen do it by eye.

This line is eleven hundred feet long, about a hundred and thirty eight posts, seventeen cubic yards of concrete (thanks
Gary).