Saturday we finished building the pasture fence. Wow … what a slog! We started working on this project 4 weeks ago. I rented a Bobcat and built a 200 foot/70 meter driveway through the woods up the hill to the top of the pasture. There, we installed a 14-foot/3.5 Meter gate and then we built a 1200 foot/400 meter pasture fence (see photo).

We set 76 posts  (6-inch posts in the corners and at the terminations and 4-inch line posts) and strung 5 lines of coated, high-tensile conductive wire.

For the post holes I used the Bobcat with an auger attachment and an 8-inch auger bit. We have red and brown clay with plenty of rocks in some places. So the Bobcat S175 with the  auger was the right choice.  It still took 2 days to auger all the post holes. And rocks kicked my butt in some places.

In the top South-Eastern corner, the brace post was a real problem. When I tried to auger it in the measured place I got nowhere. I moved it over a foot, and hit another rock about a foot deep. I ended up hand digging this one and I pulled out a water-melon-sized rock and another, smaller one 3 feet deep. But I got the post-hole to 4 feet and cemented it and it’s good now.

So next we need to build the shelter for the horses, clean up the brush around the pasture and we’re ready for our horses. Yes – plural … we bought another horse today …

The horses name is Waldo … he is a 13-year-old gelding – a Walking Horse mix , (probably with a Frisian), jet-black about 15-16 hands tall. We’ll pick him up tomorrow in Oxford, NC. I’ll post pictures once I have some.

The fence cost us about $2 per foot … or $6 per meter.  That cost includes material – 76  posts, 5 x 1300 foot rolls of wire, 2 x 4-foot gates and 1 x 14-foot gate … plus all the hardware (insulators, tensioners, lag bolts …) plus the Bobcat rental.

We used Centaur HTP “White Lightning” wire for the fence, which we purchased from  HorseFenceDirect.com. The fence posts we got locally, from Hurdle Mills Feed and Farm Supply, and from Lowes.

We built 3 corners and 6 terminations (3 gates = six terminations – one gate is also a corner) using 6-inch posts, cemented, with 4-inch braces. Here’s a picture of a termination with a gate:

Here is a corner (South-Western corner):

We used the same coated wire for the wire braces from the top of thebrace post to the bottom of the corner/termination post. We had some left over wire and we had some extra tensioners, so that was easy and it looks really good.

See the gallery for more pictures.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 10:53 pm and is filed under diy, horses, Our gang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.