Our high tensile fence, mostly through the woods, is underway. This post is the actual work on progress. To see my planning/notes post, Click Here. I’ve cut 30+ trees, split and hauled out the big stuff and stacked it. I’ve got smaller logs laying out there that I’m bringing up a little at a time in cool mornings when the bugs aren’t so bad. I cleared enough to set the corner posts, run some bailing twine on them and see what else needs to be cut. This is the Ozarks so I had some spots where I had to roll some small boulders out and fill the holes to make it drive-able with the little tractor. I’ve got so many that in some spots, I filled all but the smallest holes with other rocks I rolled out. Big rocks go into holes left from huge rocks. Medium sized rocks go into holes left by big rocks etc etc. I just got some gravel for the driveway so I used some of the gravel to do some filling in on the fence line trail. This is a little of the front line out by the road that you can barely see to the right.
Here’s one end of the back line which is also the longest line.
I think I’ve got a total of maybe 10 trees left to cut with most of them being on the front line and leaning towards the road so I’ll have to have someone out there to watch for cars. I got the post in for the top corner by the road a couple of weeks ago. Went pretty good for Ozarks soil but the top end is pretty flat and even though it’s our top end, there’s another property higher up the hill. I imagine some of the dirt I dug came from that higher property.
Today, I got the corner post for the lower end by the road put in and the hole dug for the lower back corner post. I’m a few inches shy of my 42″ depth because I hit a rock and I ended up flaring the bottom of the hole to try and get the rocks out but it’s big. Since my hole is flared at the bottom now, I’ll just add a couple of bags of ready mix to the hole to make up for lack of depth. There’s water in that hole so all I have to do is dump the mix in and then finish filling it up with the mostly gravel dirt I dug out. I needed that lower back(away from road) post in before I can do my upper back post because the 7.5 acres is surveyed but the 8 acres isn’t. I do have an old marker back there but it’s further up than that corner of the fence so what I’ll do is attach my wire to the lower back post and stretch it with my tractor and measure of the old marker to make sure it’s parallel to the property line. I’m coming in three foot from the property line with the fence to give me a little room to maintain the outside of the fence. I had my orange bailing twine on the property line going by the survey markers and then eyeballing the back, plus going by the old marker, which is about 40 foot off.
Update 8/28/2019 As of mid Spring all four corner posts were in and the seed ticks were out so I pretty much had to quit for the year. I still need to pull the bottom wire around the perimeter and then I can dig my brace post holes and set my brace assemblies as below. I was planning on single braces but I think I’ll do the double brace for one corner. When I set the corner post in for that, I didn’t hit any gravel so when packed in, it’s not as solid as the rest, where most of what I dug out was gravel. Those packed in solid like they are in concrete.
I do have an electric fence completed, just a wee bit smaller. I moved the dogs away from the house as two of them are to be LGDs, although only one of those two is an actual LGD type breed, Great Pyrenees. The other looks to be Old English Sheep dog which of course haven’t been used for their original purpose in many generations. The Border Collie replaced them because they are better at herding and a whole lot cheaper to feed. So I set up a pen against what will be the inside of the perimeter fence.
Funny thing is, on that little fence for the temporary dog pen, I used a good portion of my insulators and hardware because it still has four corner posts, eight brace posts and some line posts. I electrified every other wire starting from the bottom which leaves the top wire non-electrified but that top wire is 51 inches off the ground so I might just leave it that way. The design I’m going by has the two bottom wires hot and then every other one from there up, leaving the top wire as a hot wire.
So this little 85×85 fence with a fence charger made for 10 acres – 30 miles of fence is quite hot. I measured close to 9000 volts from hot wire to the earth or ground wire. The dogs touched the fence once and only once, letting out quite a yelp when they did.
