A slow start

This was the scene that greeted me when I peered outside my caravan this morning – a carpet of frost that almost looked like snow. The image below doesn’t really do it justice.

So I couldn’t get cracking very early, even if I’d been ready to, which I wasn’t as I had some other minor things to attend to, because quite honestly it was too darn cold! However, it soon warmed up in yet more bright sunshine and then I was able to start work. The trouble was, though, that as well as doing the work today (main task: putting the diagonal bracers in place ready for when the suspension wire is hung and tensioned) I also had to work out the best way how to.

I tried just cutting a bracer to length, adding a point to its end and banging it into the ground with a club hammer. It wasn’t very satisfactory and to cut a long story short I eventually found that the best method was to prepare the bracer with a point on one end and the angle to mate with the fence post on the other, then to notch the fence post to take it and prepare the ground before banging it in with the pick-axe. Once the bracer was in place and secured with a single large nail the ground around its bottom end could then be replaced and hammered back down again, possibly with a few rocks of which I have plenty, to hold the end of the bracer even more firmly than it would be without.

As you can see from the following images, the trickiest bit was accurately notching the fence posts to take the bracers. I only managed three today (four actually, as I had to re-do one) and I think that when I’ve finished putting the rest of them in tomorrow I’ll have to pin some small blocks in the tops of the notches above the bracers. This will prevent the bracers loosening in time and moving upwards, which would have the effect of allowing the posts to sag inwards.

Here’s the bracer for the topmost fence post.

Here are the two bracers either side of the posts in the longest border that will carry a gate. Don’t be misled by their appearance in the following shot that seems to show that they’re splayed outwards. They’re not, they’re vertical and parallel. It’s just distortion from my phone’s camera.

In the event I am happy with the results. I was never expecting this fence to be a thing of beauty – it’s a rustic rural barrier after all – but I think that when it’s finished and the woodwork has had a splash of wood preserver on it, it will do the intended job and won’t look too bad, especially if I can eventually mount three rustic, rough cut horizontal boards on the posts on top of the wire. Time will tell… 🙂