No recent posts about my fence rebuild along the road, but I've been working on the rebuild. I didn't want to make posts about each section rebuilt as that would get old/boring. But I got the short rails sections done, so time for a post about it.
These short rails I got from my neighbor Curtis. These rails are made by a local company that has very old - old - equipment. I often ride my bicycle by the place when I ride to town. I should take my camera along some time and take a picture of their cutting equipment as it is outside under a roof. It is different.
Anyway, they have rejects. Curtis was able to talk them into selling him a couple bundles of the rejects, and Curtis cuts them up to use as firewood in the large wood stove that he uses to heat his building. Last month while he was cutting up his last bundle I saw some of the rails that looked decent enough to use as fence rails. The rails are not perfect and some have cracks in them. I wouldn't buy any of these rails. But they are good enough to use as rails in some of my fencing.
Initially I just wanted three rails as I thought they would be good to use where my fruit tree area fence meets up to my NE pasture fence. My other rails are 16 ft long and where the two fences meet needed a rail much less than 16 ft. Curtis's rails are 8 ft. 9 inches long. I later learned the last section where the two fences meet was a little under 6 ft. So both type of rails were too long. I didn't want to cut any rails so I went with the 16 ft rails as they looked better going past where the two fences meet. Having a rail go only 3 ft past looked off. 10 ft looks okay.
When going through Curtis's bundle I found 18 rails that seemed decent. I gave Curis some of my logs in exchange for the rails as Curtis preferred that instead of money.
18 rails... I had enough rails for 6 fence sections. Not enough rails for a complete fence section. Okay, what to do with them? I decided to put the rails on part of the fence rebuild along the road. I had already used three 16 ft rails for the fence from the south end. I will use the 8 ft rails for the fence rebuild from the north. What the heck. It may not be perfect but I will have less of the old barb wire fence along the road.
It should be easy and quick to rebuild these fence sections. But no. The days are getting shorter and colder. The inversions - as you can see in the last photo - settled in. To dig a hole for the last number of posts meant I had to use an iron bar to break the frozen ground initially. No frost at the start, then an inch of frost, then two inches, then three inches. Once I got past the frost I could use a post hole digger to dig the rest of the hole.
Here are the Curtis rails sections. Dang, they only made it about halfway across. Oh well, better than nothing.
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