December 02. The Fencing Master

First off, I have to say that Mrs Sandy's little boy Handy did a marvelous job on the floors. T did have to spend much of the weekend vacuuming sawdust off everything other than the floor including the walls... but it was a small price to pay (aside from the actual price) for aesthetic beauty such as has been revealed....

It was about 150% humidity last weekend, so while walls were being vacuumed, and then I think, a couple of doors were painted. I headed for the great outdoors with my new Indiana Jones/CLint Eastwood in the spaghetti western days hat (to keep the drizzle off my head), and new fencing tool (think pliers cum wire cutters cum hammer, all in one nifty little drop forged accessory), and 20 patent wire tightening devices (think double headed spurs with a ratchet sort of thing) packed in boxes of 10 which, as the girl at Farmlands enthusiastically demonstrated, could be opened & folded in such a way as to form two very useful carry packs with handles (but which in fact, turned to cardboard pulp & disintegrated totally after about 30 seconds of extremely light drizzle), to tighten up the fence in the first chosen paddock for the arrival of sheep (that's the one that needs the least doing to it).

But first, I made a detour for the only wire fence in view of the house, which is seriously slack, and which any self-respecting sheep could walk through without a backward glance, with the intention of tightening the sucker up & beautifying the panorama visible from the back door.

SO I chose my spot ready to install a neat column of seven wire tightening devices. And I cut the top wire with my new pliers device. And I attached the tightener to one side of the newly cut wire, in a fashion vaguely reminiscent of the diagram in the small farming manual. And then I spent about 45 minutes trying to get the other segment of the cut wire connected to the tightener.

And then it promptly snapped due to its age & state of rustification.

So I abandoned that section of the fence & headed off to the real bit that needed tightening. I'll come back to the dry-run site sometime soon with a roll of mesh & replace it all.

And here folks, I experienced my first success in the now slightly less mysterious world of fencing. This particular section of fence was clearly strung up by someone even less proficient than myself. Even I guffawed (ruefully, since I had to deal with it). Y'see when you hammer the staples in which hold the wire to the posts & spacers... you're not supposed to bash them in real tight, so that staple & wire cut about an inch into the timber, like this clown had done. the idea is that the wire is supposed to be able to move through the staples in the event the next person ever has to tighten the damned things up.

But through brute force & much bashing about with a hammer, I got my seven tightening devices installed & all seven wires tight as ... fairly tight wires actually. The tighteners are not all perfectly aligned like the ones the next door neighbour put in another paddock, and some of them are upside down (I experimented to see what was easiest to actualy ratchet up). But hey, who but he will notice?

And finally (telling T I'd only be about 15 minutes more), I spent an hour & a half trying to tighten up the last shortish section of slack wire in that paddock. There were already some tightening devices on some of these wires. Unfortunately two of them broke when I applied the wrench. Replaced these easily enough luckily. The slackest wire of all finally proved the last straw for the day (before a big thunder & lightening storm drove me & my hat & my tools back indoors). I spent ages fiddling around in a cramped spot under a tree getting the tightener on the wire, and started to wind it up tight, and it wound & wound.... and wound... and I finally realised the other end wasn't actually attached to anything (which of course is when the next door neighbour dropped by to see how I was going).

SO fled that scene without a backward glance, promising to return next week with the next weapon in my ever growing arsenal... The Mesh. Unless Tim the neighbour gets all his old fencing equipment out that he mentioned he had & fixes it for me (you never know your luck).

SO there we are... this coming weekend, it's a return visit to the very thrilling Farmlands to pick up a 50 metre or maybe even a 100 metre roll of fairly serious mesh (I dunno, maybe 6 inch squares or so? Or whatever the gaps in mesh are called), to finish off the boundary fences & possibly to put some sort of protection around the trees.

then it's just a case of getting the local council inspector guy around to confirm the boundaries are all stock-proof & it'll be sheep ordering time! I fancy 3 black ewes or wethers (castrated rams), of a fairly docile breed not known for battering through fences.

Does anyone actually know how you go about buying sheep? Or is it a case of getting the hat on & heading for the stock sales to stand among the agents (after saying "Gidday!" a lot) buying hundreds of thousands of head of god knows what, looking to bid for 3 black sheep?

Coming soon: The Return of Drunken Fencing Master.