Talk:Steel fence post

Regional variations

In the UK, steel T-posts (or come to that star posts) are unknown for modern agricultural purposes (though I have sometimes seen the remnants of very old fences of flat or angle steel posts) – only in solid rock would we use a rock drill, angle steel and cement. For permanent fencing we use wooden stakes (3" or 4" diameter round, or 5" half-round). For temporary electric fence corners these are perfectly adequate, and can easily be got in and out with hand tools. Perhaps softer ground helps (some of our own fields have 2 metres or more of soft peat...), but we do have very hard ground too. --Richard New Forest (talk) 10:33, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, more regional variations. Interesting. Yes, your ground is VERY soft. Probably also soil too, we have a dry climate, soils vary, mostly clay and decomposed granite with some nice topsoil, but no "peat" anywhere. Some places we measure topsoil in inches.

Your 3"-4" "stakes" are called "fenceposts" out here! (LOL!) 4-inch is the standard post diameter for permanent wire fencelines here, but many are smaller (really old fences you sometimes even see twisted juniper trunks only 2-3 inches in diameter). Many of posts are lodgepole pine, which takes quite a while just to get that wide. For GOOD braces and corners, we use old Railroad ties or posts that are closer to 6" dia. But you can't drive more than about a six inch stake into the ground without tools, no way could you pound in even a pointed post more than a foot by hand, and it wouldn't stay upright. Maybe in the spring you can get a driven post to wriggle a little if it isn't driven in deep enough, but unless they have rotted at the base, usually you have to pull them with the bucket of a tractor or something. Fenceposts are either driven in with a tractor or put into hand dug holes and packed in...steel posts can be driven in with a sledgehammer or a (safer) "post pounder" tool. I noted somewhere in wiki that Australians use steel posts too...probably a dry soil thing, I do know that they don't stay upright worth a darn in moist soil.

Good to figure this out. I think it's fascinating to see how different places manage these things. Geography is destiny! Montanabw^(talk) 17:37, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

"Stake" and "post" are used rather loosely in Britain. Most commonly, the corner post is, well, a post, and the intermediate stakes are stakes or indeed fence posts. In this area (Dorset/Hampshire border) the local term for stakes is "piles". What you call a stake we might call a peg... Corner posts are usually round, 6" diameter, or we also use what we call railway sleepers, or sections of telegraph pole. Stakes are knocked in with a mel (big rubber or wooden mallet), or a post thumper, & in harder ground we make a pilot hole with a crowbar (not your crowbar, it's our name for your spud bar). For longer lengths of fence, both corner posts and stakes are knocked in with a tractor-mounted driver (usually a big weight lifted and dropped). Corner posts can be dug in as you describe, or a right-sized hole is made with a hand, motor or tractor auger. Those Aussie steel posts seem to be star posts.

Ah, separated by a common language again. A tractor-mounted driver, yes, we colloquially sometimes call that a pounder or a driver (though a hand tool for steel posts is also called a pounder. No real logic, just is). In my case, yes, temporary fencing definitely needs more of a brace if not in a straight line, but the wind CAN blow over a temporary fence with one inch webbing on posts with shallow stakes (learned that the hard way), depending on which way the posts are oriented, so even on a straight line it doesn't hurt to toss in a few steel posts. Marsh? You mean you have WATER? If we have a marsh, it's so close to a body of water that the only real worry is getting the tractor stuck for the last three or four posts! (grin) What I find interesting about this whole discussion is that climate and soils make such a difference...dry versus wet climates--wow. What we really need now is someone from the Australian outback (where they are REALLY dry) and someone from the tropics to weigh in. Montanabw^(talk) 22:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Interested in the difference in prices. Saw the prices of T-posts in the ref (presumably those figures are US dollars?). These are a good bit more than I pay for wooden posts – our local suppliers are currently charging £1.60 each for 3 in diameter machine-rounded, treated stakes – perhaps US$3.20, compared with the ref's US$6.60 for the same length T-post. What do wooden posts cost in the US?

I can see the advantage of the thinner steel posts in hard ground, and if they were cheap enough I'd certainly consider them, for example, for fencing on the downs – in places only 2 inches soil above solid chalk. However, they'd not be much cop on peat – on one of our fields I can push a steel rod at least 1.5 metres (4 ft) straight in (and out) by hand. That's in dry weather – T-posts would just fall over. One strainer post on that site was a 9 in diameter telegraph pole, pointed, thumped in until solid and cut off to 4 ft 6 in high. It used an 11 ft length... This is however unusually soft ground, being in a flat valley bottom (River Avon, Hampshire). Our ground on the hilltop nearby is on compacted sandy gravel, and we can't do fencing at all in very dry weather. --Richard New Forest (talk) 14:03, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

(Above discussion copied from Agricultural fencing --Richard New Forest (talk) 13:49, 13 March 2008 (UTC))