Securing the fence line

A rainy Saturday is a great day to catch up on the blog post. Mainly because it’s too rainy outside to do any fence building. I started securing the fence, last week, with the help of our eldest, Nathaniel. We had set the pallets upright and tied half of them with braided wire. This did not work as well as I’d hoped and the fence line fell within a day or two. Improvements were required.

I needed to keep the fence from falling over. The problem was the space between the pallets. I had to stop one pallet from moving while the other just kind of sat there. My solution was to put a block of wood along the horizontal slats and nail that to each pallet piece. I thought I’d need two per pallet. I had some shorter 4x4 pieces of wood in the shed, so started with those. They are short and sturdy, so they’ll probably (hopefully) stay put.

This picture has a 4x4 across the bottom slats and a ¼ across the middle slats

After inserting the blocks, I shook the fence pieces. They were satisfactorily stable. Success! However, I had a limited supply of the 4x4 pieces and I’m trying to do this “on the cheap.” The 1x4 on top worked well, and I had a bunch of pallets, so had an ample supply. I was going to have to cut some cross sections. My son and I also decided, while I did want this to be a flexible fence, the cross pieces were going to need to be secured. Normally I would use wood screws. My supply of nails, however, outnumbered my supply of wood screws. I quickly decided on nails. So, we got out the power tools and started cutting cross pieces.

I have a sabre saw with a simple 10 TPI blade. That’s 10 Teeth Per Inch. It cuts fast and sloppy. The blade is not designed for smooth, splinter-free cuts, hard and fast. I lined the blade up with the 2x4 and just cut along the edge as well as I could. It provided short pieces that were about the same length.

We found that driving nails into the pallet wood was rather difficult with the galvanized nails we were using. Why galvanized? Because that’s what I had on hand, that simple. Though I wasn’t using screws, I decided to use a common practice of that method… pilot holes. We got out the drill, found a bit that was almost as large in diameter as the nail and went at it. We slid two cross pieces onto the horizontal bars of the pallet, positioned the next pallet in line, and slid the cross piece back to a position we could hammer a nail into it. We then picked up the drill, dropped a hole toward each end of the cross piece, and inserted a nail. My son got pretty good at whacking the nail into the wood. After a few pallets, I let him handle the drill and hammer, while I held the pallet steady and took care of any nails that didn’t go into the wood properly.

It was going along pretty well until we encountered some cross pieces that would not fit flat. The 1x4 cross pieces were more like 1x4½. I tried a couple of whacks with the hammer in an attempt to persuade the wood to lay flat, but it was having none of it. Luckily, I had not put the sabre saw too far away. I just had to shave off about a quarter to half inch of the long edge.

We found, also, that we needed a good way to transport the cross pieces, hammer, nails, drill, bits, saw and blades around the surpisingly wooded goat yard. Yes, I’ve lived here for years and know what the land looks like. It surprised everyone in the family, though, how quickly the barren area, made up of leafless twig-like trees, turned into a lush, leafy woodland of new life.

 

So, we used the kids little red wagon, named “The Larson Express” by my father when he presented the wagon as a gift. All the tools and, with a bit of adjustment, we had our “crash-cart” ready for any emergency.

Nathaniel and I went along well until the fence fell. I don’t know if a slight wind came through or if gravity just paid us a visit, but the fence started to fall. I dropped what I was doing and ran to get under it. I did not relish the thought of trying to lift a half dozen pallets. We were able to save them and get them upright again. I was thrilled that none of the nailed cross sections were coming out! Success… again. But we did need something to keep it upright. So, taking from my online research, I positioned a pallet at a 90º angle to the fence. While this might provide a perch for a mischievous goat, I’d deal with that later. If I tried to figure out every which-way that a goat could escape, I’d never get this goat yard complete.

I placed the pallet so the section cut from the pallet to allow access to the forks of a forklift were situated next to the upright portion previously placed in the fence line then placed the cross piece to pass over this(see pictures).

 

In this way, we worked through two sides of the fence. I’m not happy with the corners, so I won’t detail those at this time. But we were able to work with the slight undulations of the land without too much difficulty. I already plan to put in another long piece over one section. Somehow, I ended up with a stretch of shorter pallets in one area. I’m going to have to nail in a couple of uprights and fence-top-extending 1x4 or 1x6.