Installing barbed wire fence - part 2 of 3

To tell you the truth, lugging those heavy, sharp rolls of barbed wire through the brush was one of the hardest things I've done. The footing was uneven, and you had to hold the roll out from your body or it'd shred your jeans, so you kind of had to hold it out at arms length and those rolls are very heavy. Maybe 150lbs each. Yucky.

So this is version 1 of the barbed wire deployer. It's a piece of angle iron attached to the bottom bolt of a trailer ball on the back of an ATV. Unfortunately, this design failed.

The problem wasn't with the metal, it was with the hitch attached to the atv. The 18" length acted as a lever and just bent the ATV hitch when the barbed wire was put on it. A second problem was that the roll would probably catch on the bar. So back to the drawing board. Here's version 2:

This is 1/8" steel, about 18" long and 22" wide. It has a concrete form spike welded in the center. The vertical plate is to make sure that the spinning coil of wire doesn't contact the ATV driver. The two braces are to keep everything square.

It's attached to the ATV frame using existing bolt holes. A couple of pieces of angle iron welded to the bottom of the plate, 4 bolts, and it's good to go.

We used this to deploy four strands about 1200' long each. We could do a 2mph run and the wire peeled off without any problems. The only thing I'd changed about this design is to make the supports on either side out of triangular plants instead of the angle that we used. If the wire chatters and the ATV slows down, a loop of wire can go out that little hole and then catch when you start going again. A solid plate would prevent that.

We also used it to ferry concrete out for the bottoms of posts. Here's 180lbs of concrete on its way out to be used.