Weather or not, we fence

We’re often really lucky with the weather for our Best Practice Days (including sun on the West Coast!) but it wasn’t to be for our Feilding Best Practice Day. Thankfully, we didn’t have the rain that the hardy souls at the Hamilton BPD endured, but the WIND! So. Much. WIND!

Burne Maxted, Wilton Weeks and David Swansson were our demonstrators for the day, and due to the sheer amount of rain the area received in the lead-up to the day, the plans had to be changed at the last minute. Unfortunately, the digger driver wasn’t able to get in to prepare the ground for the retaining walls that needed to be built, which meant the focus had to shift. Luckily, that’s one of many things that fencers are great at – adjusting their work based on the weather!

The chaps demonstrated stay techniques on a strainer/angle assembly, then did some sheep netting end straining using end gripples and crimping. They also end strained the hot wires, before heading to the front gate, where Wilton demonstrated a double mortised box stay assembly.

These demonstrations were followed by discussions about the merits and applications of different types of footings, before testing the strength of each of them. The soil was still really wet, and quite loamy, so the footings behaved quite differently from those tested at other BPDs.

David from Kyne was so impressed with the footer testing we did in the South Island in September that he built a piece of kit specifically for the job (see the article on page 15). While the process of using this great piece of kit probably needs refining, it was brilliant to have it there since there had been a delay on the delivery of our measuring tool.

After lunch (which was kindly provided by FMG and cooked by Farmlands), everyone headed over to the paling fence that Wilton didn’t know he needed until the Best Practice Day. Wilton and Burne demonstrated how they build paling fences to the specifications they had followed for a school fence tender they had been working on. Many of the attendees don’t usually build paling fences, so it was an eye opener for quite a few people. The workmanship involved in ship-lapping rail joins was quite the discussion point, and the tips and tricks used by the crew to ensure a good-looking yet strong fence that could be built at pace were invaluable. The discussions about why they did certain things, and what caused them to reject certain palings was informative and interesting. It was also incredibly satisfying to see the fence go up so quickly once they got in their rhythm.

All in all, it was a great day, despite the wind making it challenging to hear at times. While some of our seasoned attendees may have seen these demonstrations before, those who hadn’t been to a Best Practice Day before said things like, “It was a good day, I’ll definitely do another one,” and “Pretty good day, contractors were friendly and easy to talk with.”

Written by Jaime Bigwood