05/29/2011: "A Big Ball of Mess"
Like most small-holdings, we have a burn pile: a place to throw branch trimmings, cardboard, scrap lumber, and fence posts. Periodically we'll check with the DEQ to see if it is OK to burn that day, and then light off the pile during cool and cloudy weather (never in summer, of course). This spring Lou undertook to clear some old fencing out of the pasture; this was a good and noble endeavor, since old fencing will tangle up in the rotary cutter or pop the teeth off the sickle bar mower. He apparently brought it up to the burn pile with the tractor. It had a bunch of old fenceposts tangled up in it, and I think his hope was that they would burn off, leaving only the fencing behind. However, it turns out that when you have too much air space in the burn pile, as you do when the pile consists of 50% metal fencing and 50% scrap wood, the pile doesn't really get a good burn going.
Since Lou has got other projects on his mind at the moment, I've had to take over from where he left off. It's been a real job, since the fencing is all balled up at this point, and the blackened fence posts are still attached to the old fencing. I started out cutting into the ball of fencing with some fencing pliers, and managed to cut out a few mini-balls of fencing. These I mashed flat so that they would become manageable little pancakes of fencing that I could take to the scrap yard.
However, this was taking forever. I was basically making dozens of cuts with the hand nippers to free a small section of fencing. I decided to concentrate on freeing the blackened fence posts from the pile, and this helped some. Eventually, however, I decided that the only thing I could do to advance the project was bring the tractor back into play. I went and got some chains, and then hooked into the fencing ball; I put the tractor in low gear, and then just started pulling a skein of fencing out of the pile. This worked surprisingly well: I could get 30 or so feet of fencing stretched out, and all I had to do was cut it into sections and roll it up. I didn't waste a lot of time cutting bits of fencing that weren't necessary to the objective.
Pulling with the tractor stretched out a section of fencing, which allowed me to cut it and roll it up fairly neatly. It was still a bit of pain to stomp it into a pancake, but it was do-able.
With this method I was able to create some larger pancakes of fencing.
So, what did I learn from all this? Don't jam a bunch of fencing into a giant ball. Stretch it out, cut the posts off it, and then roll it up. Jamming different sections of fence, especially when there is barbed wire involved, just makes a huge interlocking mess that is too large to get into the truck, too heavy to lift, too hard to cut up. Dealing with it in sections is a much better approach!