Tag Archives: T-Post Driver

A Farm Toolbox: T-Post Jack

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Fencing, that constant companion of all that we do on our farm, is made easier with the metal T-post—which itself is made easier to put in with a T-post driver and easier still to remove with the post driver’s first cousin, the T-post jack.

All fences that go up will someday come down. After some years of using brute strength to pull old T-posts from the ground, often finding them bent and unusable, I spotted this beauty at a local farm supply store.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Brilliant: a jack, one of the oldest of man’s tools, designed to tackle one of his oldest chores, fence building. Among the simplest mechanical devices invented for applying force to an object, the T-post jack makes lifting and removing T-posts remarkably effective and easy. A simple downward popping action on the handle and posts emerge from the ground a few inches at a time, straight and reusable.

And my back, likewise, remains straight and reusable.

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Reading this weekend: Xenophon’s March: into the lair of the Persian lion by John Prevas. Terrific story that makes me feel shame about complaining about the daily walk to the mailbox.

A Farm Toolbox: the T-Post Driver

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When reaching for the t-post driver one knows they are in for a workout. A two-foot cast iron pipe, capped on one end, with handles on each side, it is used to drive a t-post into the ground. It weighs 25 pounds. A t-post is a steel post, typically six feet in length, used to support fencing such as barbed wire. Slip the driver over the post, level the post in all directions, then raise the driver up and bring it down with force. Repeat until the post is buried a foot in the ground.

T-post driver 2 001Its design is simple, primitive and highly effective. Brute energy directed on a single point accomplishes the task in short order. We have set over a thousand t-posts with the driver on our farm. Unlike its cousin the rock-bar, the driver has no other function. It hangs in the barn on its lonely hook for months at a time.

Many have been the day when, with the driver in one hand and several t-posts in the other, I’ve hiked a half-mile to a back fence. There to retire an old wooden post or two that had finally rotted away into mush. Or, other days, setting a new row of fifty posts, Cindy and I take turn pounding them into the dirt.

The act itself, the methodical raising and hammering down, is thoroughly satisfying. A release of accumulated aggressions into a constructive channel; where the ache between your shoulders the following day is an echo of work well done. And a sturdy fence, well made, is a reminder of the value in physical toil.

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Reading this weekend: In Ruins by Christopher Woodward. A hard to characterize book, it is part travel writing and part meditation on the attraction of ruins. Think Ozymandias meets Haunts of the Black Masseur and you might be close.