Home-made tools best for emergency fencing
Delving into some past issues of my Practical Farm Ideas magazine revealed some useful home-made gadgets that make the job not only easier to do, but better as well. Some of these will be more than familiar to some readers, but I’m confident that few will know them all.
If you have or know of other home-made fencing tools out there, maybe better than the ones we have here, I’d be grateful for a call, and I will send on a copy or two of Practical Farm Ideas, by way of reward.
Here’s something from South Wales — a half ton weight (which can be used as such on the three-point linkage) that fits on the loader quickly. Using the loader’s down-thrust, it pushes fence posts in, and will work on surprisingly tough ground. It’s useful for emergency jobs where you’d otherwise use a sledge hammer, because getting the King Hitter, Sumo or Parmiter post knocker up and running for a few emergency posts is often more of a problem than it’s worth.
Farmers have made tools to tension barbed wire since its invention in 1867. The ag merchant wants €320 for a tensioning tool which comes with its own problems, like needing its chains to be straight, or getting in the way when stapling.
My steel bar with two-way grippers has the kind of sophistication we can cope with in an emergency. Plates are welded on to make a narrow gap for the wire to slip in to — and the gap can be adjusted with a lump hammer.
The combine finger has a long career as a fencing tool, particularly removing staples, and here you see it in another role. Tensioning both back-side and front-side of the post, the stretched finger looks the business. Pity the poser chose to stretch the slack side of the wire!
The combination strainer and staple remover is made from half-inch square bar, with a T-end shaped to get under the staple.
The wire gripper uses a plate that’s bolted on and raised slightly, so the wire fits in. Here, the end part can be used to hook around tree trunks.
For an emergency wire unroller get a couple of wheel rims around 14 inches or more in diameter, and two reasonably strong plates which you weld across the centre, having first drilled a hole through each to take a one inch tube. The roll of wire slides onto the bar, the wheel is added and held in place with an R-clip through the bar. How much easier than the strong man approach of holding the bar up, and walking backwards for 200 metres! That’s a task that can defeat some lady fencers, and cause their male counterparts to puff, if not worse!
Finally, here’s a happy group of fencers I pictured some years ago on a Severn Valley farm. Due to deep and wide rhines (drainage ditches), they had to do a lot of fencing by hand, and made some useful tools to help. The post guides meant that no arms were broken when the brother missed with the sledge, and allowed the posts to be pulled straight. The hook is used to get the wire heights accurate without using a tape measure — it’s marked with various colours which relate to the wires they are using.
(Behind them is their reinforced workshop door, another necessity unknown a generation ago.)
I hope your summer will pass without a bovine break-out, but you can’t bank on it.
