Wow, what a weekend. On Friday afternoon I went to Masterton to pick up the timber , wire netting,a new fencing chisel, a book called the “Hand Made Fence Book”, the new PTO drive shaft, a bucket of tensoners and of course the weekly shopping!.
Trying to unload the trailer was fun, I dragged the bundle of stays and strainers of the side, then dragged the next bundle of 40 posts of the back, but then the next 40 had had the wire that held the bundle together cut so that they sat on the bottom of the trailer better. As posed a problem that I could not get the snig chain underneath all of them easily. After thinking about the problem I realized that with a bit of a shove from the FEL on the tractor I could push them all towards the safari and wrapped the chain around them when they were overhanging at the truck end of the trailer. A few shoves later and I had the chain around them and was lifting them out of the trailer. A quick scurry back to Masterton to drop the trailer off before 5:30pm (just made it) and then home to do some house work as we had guests for the weekend (Matt and Kylie were coming up to help build the fence).
Once we had picked up Matt and Kylie and had dinner, I rigged up the halogen lights outside and replaced the PTO drive shaft, surprising easy to do.
Saturday morning I was up around 6am with the intention of mowing Jenny’s paddock around 6:30 before we got into the fencing (because we’re in Auckland next weekend and the grass is getting quite long). At around 6:30 Steph and I took the tractor over to Jenny’s and the tractor was starting to get a bit reluctant to start, it seemed like an electrical problem, putting the gear stick into “start” and nothing would happen. We got a bit of the paddock done, but the grass was too long so I’ll have to work out a way of keeping the mower much higher and make a couple of passes at the paddock. I stalled the tractor once at which point I checked the oil and realized that there was none! I must have lost a bit too much oil whilst changing the PTO drive shaft. We abandoned the mowing, and as soon as the tractor started we took it back to the barn…On to the next job.
Once we got back, Matt and Kylie were up and Matt and I headed into Greytown to pick up the post-hole borer and 22 litres of oil for the tractor. After getting the borer, we worked our way up the country visiting each town (well, Greytown, Carterton and finally Masterton) trying to find a cheaper way of buying oil (instead of 4 litres at a time). Ended up at a tractor place (how obvious!). Then it was home to start digging.
Whilst Matt and I were out driving around the countryside hunting oil, Steph and Kylie were marking out the fence and where each hole should be dug. The general idea for the day was to put in the 3 strainers (the fence is L shaped), tension a wire around the bottom (as it acts as a better guide then thin string) and then put in the rest of the holes and then the posts,stays and finally the fencing.
For some reason Matt and I did the first strainer, and it’s stay straight away. Digging the hole with the post-hole borer was soooo easy, still had to use the manual borer to clean the hole but took us about 10 minutes to have the hole ready! The strainer was in and rammed in about 45 minutes, and then another 1;15 was spent putting the stay in. Meanwhile Steph and Kylie were continuing laying out the other 2 fence lines and dismantling the old fence lines, including the water troughs that were in the way.
After lunch, Matt and I dug the other two strainer holes and rammed those in, which was quite easy, and then put down the first wire and tensioned it up. With that in place we were able to change auger to the smaller one and bore all the holes the girls had marked out. We found out after a bit of trial and error that instead of pushing on the borer, lifting it slightly out of the hole made a significant positive difference on the speed of boring. We did 37 holes to a depth of 600mm between 1pm and 4:30pm! Steph was following along behind us putting the poles in and ramming them, meanwhile Kylie was up in the house baking muffins for afternoon tea.
By the end of the day, we had rammed in the long edge of the “L” fence (15 posts), dug 37 holes to a depth of 600mm, dug 3 holes to a depth of around 1100m, tensioned one wire and fitted 1 stay.
Whilst I dashed back to Greytown to return the borer, Steph went around the paddock and collected all the fallen branches etc incase we wanted to burn things later on! Unfortunately whilst Steph and I were taking the bike and trailer into the back paddock were the fire was to be, we caught one of the branches on the side of a gate and it shattered the front sheet of plywood on the trailer, nothing we can’t handle though.
Whilst everyone was showering, I drained the oil in the tractor, the oil is supposed to be a golden toffee color, it came out of the sump a very pale caramel color (which apparently is due to being contaminated with water, so I guess an oil change was in order anyway!) I did discover than hydraulic oil isn’t a very good hair product!
The initial plan was for a BBQ, but since we were all so exhausted we went to the “Gladstone” (the local) for dinner. Very very yummy food, a good couple of games of pool,over all a good night. Once we got back we burnt all the fallen branches and Steph and I ended up turning in around 11pm once the fired had burned down.
Sunday morning saw a slightly later start to the day, around 8am – since we were running out of dishes I thought I would get into them as soon as I got up. Most were finished before everyone else was up, and the house was looking a bit tidier.
The weather was very pleasant, as it was overcast and a slight breeze. Whilst Matt, Kylie and Steph headed down the paddock with the bike and all the kit, I put the 22 litres of oil in the tractor, and just like magic it tried to start (but I left the electrics on all night and the battery needed charging, sigh) I then joined everyone down in the paddock.
Matt and I got straight on to ramming the short edge of the “L” fence, and then I started on the corner stay whilst Matt supervised with a beer ( After reading our book on fencing it turned out our first stay block was way too deep, so by altering the depth, and having a sharp chainsaw (on Saturday is was quite blunt, so I sharpened it in the afternoon) to prepare the end of the stay we managed to get the stay installed in around 30 minutes and it looked really good. We then moved on to the last stay and instead of doing all the mortising on the post with a chisel I decided to try the chainsaw, wow what a difference, it was so much easier. Once more a really good fit!
Whilst Matt and I were doing that, Steph was ramming in the other fence line (the other side of the race to the long edge of the “L” fence) and Kylie had headed up to the house to prepare something for lunch. By the time Matt and I had finished Steph only had four posts to go, so I gave her a hand whilst Matt prepared the final strainer hole (it had got some water in it). Then we headed up for lunch.
After lunch all that was left on the fence was to put up the wire, which we needed the tractor for (as it was dropped in the wrong place, and 100m of sheep netting is quite heavy and the cargo tray would make life much easier. So I gave Kylie a quick lesson on tractor driving and she took the tractor down to the paddock. Once we moved the netting to the other end of the fence we rolled it out and stapled it in at one end. I then started installing the 8 permanent tensioners, after the first 5, my hands were getting sore (installing a tensioner, involves tying 2 knots in high tensile wire (about 4mm thick) and cutting it a few times in different places) so Steph took over and did one, and then Matt did the last two.
The next step was taking up the slack in the wire using chain tensioners. There was heaps of slack and we ended up having to reset the tensioners halve way through! Once the tension was in the fence we trimmed the excess and removed a few upright wires so that the horizontal wires could be fed into the permanent tensioners. With the tension transferred to the permanent tensioners we released the wire ones and started straighten up the fence and within a few minutes, we had a fence!
All that was left to do for the day was catch the sheep and find out why the lamb was lame. After chasing the *?$@%^# things around for a while, we cheated and rolled out the old fence in a big funnel shape, still not easy, but we caught all except the black and white spotty ones, oh once we have the race this will be so much easier. It turned out that the lamb was lame due to reasonably bad scald (as was Bully (the goat), so we sprayed their feet, all the others got a feet trimming, drenching for worms and dipped for keds.
Whilst we were on the second to last sheep we realized it was 4:45, the train back to Wellington for Matt and Kylie was 4:24! And it’s about a 20 minute trip. A frantic packing and we bundled into the Safari around 4pm, and got to Woodside around 4:20, phew!
Steph and I went home, stapled in the bottom edge of the “L” fence, and then relaxed for the rest of the evening…Ah, we’re at the train station, what good timing.
No comments:
Post a Comment