With every post hole I dig through this thick sod I regret not having brought the tractor. It doesn't help that each sack of concrete weighs 80lbs, and that we need two or three of them for the base of every post. I'm missing my tractor and its hydraulic bucket and post hole digger right here.
The key point to this design is the exact swing and coverage of the gates. So I finish one side of the design, and then carefully measure the radius of the swing of a gate. This takes a while, but after carefully measuring, I place the pole that the gate will be mounted on.
The pole closest to the camera is canted to allow the boards that form the diagonal corner to be flat against it.
So here's the final version. The green T post closest to us marks the corner of the corral, but this is the corner that's got a diagonal across it. to place the posts on either side, I measured from each side the length of the gate. In this case, the gate is 14' long. So i measured 14'2" in from the face of each side. Then to determine where the diagonal needed to go, I measured 14'2" from the mounting post (first post in line with the two green t posts) and then planted a T post there. That's how the second T post got there. I then placed two posts so that they would miss the green post -- representing the swing of the gate.All of that is to make certain that the crowding gate allows minimum space between it and the wall.
It is probably too late for this particular set of pens, but if you set the crowding gate post first and then hang the crowding gate, you can easily mark and set the remaining post placements by simply swinging the gate.
ReplyDeleteThat would probably have been faster than the fiddling with the posts that I did.
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