Homemade wire dispenser

[1Admin]

So I've been having to improvise a bit as the family has been sick the last couple weeks.

I needed to reel out multiple long runs of barbed wire to top some of the fence I put up in the other thread listed.

Rolling it out on the ground didn't work well with another roll of barbed wire. And I had some scrap lumber so I improvised a bit.



There are 3" pipe/conduit straps/holders that the pipe lays in. The pipe goes through the roll of wire as you can see in the photo.

It works relatively well. The pull should be steady and as straight as possible. Every so often, or if the pull isn't straight, the roll of wire moves to one side, grinds against the wood and can catch on the wood. When that happens and your 200-300 feet away, the tension increases and then the unit falls over. A spacer or larger size connector glued on the pipe to keep the roll away from the wood side might help.

This would work for anything that you could deploy this way including some rolls of phone wire, other types of wire, etc.

It's saved me some work, for sure.

Now if I could just figure out how to tension the barbed wire correctly for a better looking end result.....

[Tackleberry]

The summer after my freshman year in college I strung up a 3-strand barbed wire fence on a 300 acre property. Now this was about 29 years ago. But as I recall, we first set the corner post then tied off the lower strand to it. We ran the wire out to where we wanted to go and used a come along attached to a truck bumper to take up the slack and put the desired tension in the wire. Once we did that we pounded in the posts at regular intervals then attached the lower strand to the posts then repeated the process for the middle and top strands.

I like your idea for the building the frame around the spool of wire. We weren't that smart. We just ran a fence post thru the spool and put a guy on either end of the post to run the wire out. We learned real quick, and painfully, that we had to walk at the same pace otherwise the lagging guy would end up with the spool grinding his hand into a bloody stump, even while wearing heavy leather gloves.

[1Admin]

That's how I"m tensioning the wire, but it's not coming out too pretty.

The posts and 4' fence is already in, this is just two strands of barbed to top it off.

I'm running out the two strands, tacking the end well. The wires are run past the corner post, then tacked to a fence post. The fence post is cabled to the come along to the back of a truck. Then racheted to tension.

This way, the 4' fence comes out nice and tight. The barbed wire, not so much.

Maybe it's just lack of experience with the barbed wire. I've run some over the years but always kinda purposely loose.

[Tackleberry]

We made sure our terminal fence post was on a barb so when we tied the post to the wire it had something to hold on to rather than slipping back. The guy we were working for made us rerun wire more than once. We didn't make the wire super taut either but it was definitely not sagging. As long as the wire was reasonably taut the fence stays twisted on with relative ease. Good luck with that project.... I certainly don't admire the work you have before you but if I was there I'd definitely offer a helping hand even though I running wire is about as fun as hanging sheet rock.

[Lowdown3]

Hanging sheetrock sucks too... although I prefer that to finishing it!

Last run of the barbed we did wasn't too long, so we ran it individually and tightened it individually. It seemed to be a lot tighter than trying to save time and pulling two strands at the same time.