pole peeling

[cyberstag]

I don't know if this would be useful to anyone here but I had to peel a couple of hundred poles for deer fencing recently. My own deer fencing has been up for 32 years now and I am just beginning to get some stakes going rotten. These were all tantalised by Calders and Grandidge back in the day when timber treatment actually worked. I used to buy peeled and pointed from the forest and dry them for a year before treatment. I will not waste money on modern treatment other than pukka Creosote but that has got prohibitively expensive.

 

So a neighbouring farmer was having a larch plantation thinned and I bought about 200 plus stakes and strainer posts. I bought a disc to go on a 9 inch angle grinder and peeled them all myself. I made up a cradle with 4 wheels and originally had it rotating with a hydraulic motor but that was not wonderfully successful so took the motor off and just rotate the logs by hand.

 

Here is the peeler

 

 

And the poles

 

 

 

I have just bought a tank that will take the lengths and will order an IBC of creosote and give them the 10 day immersion treatment. Very satisfying to have the timber come from next door and do the work myself. Keep it local!

 

John

 

 

[arbwork]

if poles are still green you may get away with something similar to  Husqvarna Bark Spade  , in a past life i spent many a day hoping for top £'s peeling telephone poles 

[trigger_andy]

31 minutes ago, cyberstag said:

I don't know if this would be useful to anyone here but I had to peel a couple of hundred poles for deer fencing recently. My own deer fencing has been up for 32 years now and I am just beginning to get some stakes going rotten. These were all tantalised by Calders and Grandidge back in the day when timber treatment actually worked. I used to buy peeled and pointed from the forest and dry them for a year before treatment. I will not waste money on modern treatment other than pukka Creosote but that has got prohibitively expensive.

 

So a neighbouring farmer was having a larch plantation thinned and I bought about 200 plus stakes and strainer posts. I bought a disc to go on a 9 inch angle grinder and peeled them all myself. I made up a cradle with 4 wheels and originally had it rotating with a hydraulic motor but that was not wonderfully successful so took the motor off and just rotate the logs by hand.

 

Here is the peeler

 

 

And the poles

 

 

 

I have just bought a tank that will take the lengths and will order an IBC of creosote and give them the 10 day immersion treatment. Very satisfying to have the timber come from next door and do the work myself. Keep it local!

 

John

 

 

Love it. Would be good to see that in action. Where did you buy it from?

[openspaceman]

1 hour ago, arbwork said:

if poles are still green you may get away with something similar to  Husqvarna Bark Spade  , in a past life i spent many a day hoping for top £'s peeling telephone poles 

We just sharpened a spade but "hoping" is the operative word, very few that we peeled anded up being accepted, that was 40 years ago and we never tried again.

[Khriss]

@cyberstag, good result but bet its hard on yr shoulders. Nice finish. K

[Mrblue5000]

Nice looking stakes, I hope it's European larch though. Any chance of a photo of the cradle. What was the problem with it?

[cyberstag]

The peeling disc came from 

www.lahzit.ee

There is a video on his website, good chap to deal with.

 

Here is the peeling cradle upside down showing the drive mechanism I cobbled together for it and subsequently abandoned.

I could just make a better job without rotation, partly because I couldn't run it slow enough from the tractor hydraulics and was too mean to have the tractor running at idle speed for hours on end.

Wheels and axles came from neighbours scrap heap, hydraulic motor and bearings were kicking around in my workshop, all I had to buy was 2 lengths of box section.

 

 

Here it is in working position.

 

It wasn't particularly hard work as the poles are at the right height when on the cradle but I did need a good thick leather apron to protect against high speed chips and chunks.

 

[woody paul]

Great idea, why not fit a valve block that you can hit with foot or knee to rotate it. 

[Baldbloke]

I don't know if this would be useful to anyone here but I had to peel a couple of hundred poles for deer fencing recently. My own deer fencing has been up for 32 years now and I am just beginning to get some stakes going rotten. These were all tantalised by Calders and Grandidge back in the day when timber treatment actually worked. I used to buy peeled and pointed from the forest and dry them for a year before treatment. I will not waste money on modern treatment other than pukka Creosote but that has got prohibitively expensive.
 
So a neighbouring farmer was having a larch plantation thinned and I bought about 200 plus stakes and strainer posts. I bought a disc to go on a 9 inch angle grinder and peeled them all myself. I made up a cradle with 4 wheels and originally had it rotating with a hydraulic motor but that was not wonderfully successful so took the motor off and just rotate the logs by hand.
 
Here is the peeler
 

 
And the poles
 

 

 
I have just bought a tank that will take the lengths and will order an IBC of creosote and give them the 10 day immersion treatment. Very satisfying to have the timber come from next door and do the work myself. Keep it local!
 
John
 
 

I used to work on an estate that had around 300 farmed red deer within fencing. We fed in wild deer from the hill and had to construct a massive funnelling system to trap them. We cut our own strainers and posts from larch and left them out for the deer to strip. A kick to rotate them every few days until they were pristine, then lay up to dry them. After that we sunk them deep into an enormous tank of creosote for a week and then hung them up to drain. I remember doing miles of deer fencing with a home made post chapper on the back of a three point linkage, or on the high rocky ground boring holes in rock with a 1960s road drill and setting steel posts in with molten lead. That was until we discovered sulphur powder was less likely to explode out of a wet hole in the rock you’d just bored unlike molten lead that was prone to jump out and get you[emoji23]

[cyberstag]

3 minutes ago, Baldbloke said:

I used to work on an estate that had around 300 farmed red deer within fencing. We fed in wild deer from the hill and had to construct a massive funnelling system to trap them. We cut our own strainers and posts from larch and left them out for the deer to strip. A kick to rotate them every few days until they were pristine, then lay up to dry them. After that we sunk them deep into an enormous tank of creosote for a week and then hung them up to drain. I remember doing miles of deer fencing with a home made post chapper on the back of a three point linkage, or on the high rocky ground boring holes in rock with a 1960s road drill and setting steel posts in with molten lead. That was until we discovered sulphur powder was less likely to explode out of a wet hole in the rock you’d just bored unlike molten lead that was prone to jump out and get you

That's interesting. I have fenced over 70 properties for deer and I also design and sell complete deer handling systems; that is raceways, corrals and a building with all the penning to sort, weigh etc and recently developed my own hydraulic crush for the jobs like de-antering and artificial insemination.

Did the deer eat all the larch bark or just knock it off?  If they ate it how hungry were they?

I only have 100 acres and when fully stocked would be up around 300 deer at the end of summer. Now supposed to be semi-retired but as you know farmers never retire, we just work slower😀