MAKING A MACHINE TO MAKE FENCING CLIPS

[Music] hi g'day welcome to farming live australia through the week one of my subscribers asked me about an australian made fence clip that i had seen on youtube so i went back and had another look at it just to refresh my memory and it sort of got me thinking about it it's something we don't use with cattle i think it's more probably cheap people than that use it but i sort of got thinking about i thought well it'd be pretty easy to make them you know they're nothing special and then i sort of got thinking further i thought well would there be a better design and i'm going to bend up one of these clips myself just with the pliers and show you what they look like and then see if we can make something that actually makes them okay very roughly this is the idea and i just bent up a bit of wire out of pliers to try and show you the idea and how and that will hold the wire it goes that way and your post would be on there like that that would hold the wire and then a screw could be put through there like that and it would be screwed to the post now i think it has some merit i think there's a little way to go but it has some merit to hide here because everybody's got battery tools and let's face it we've come a little way and in australia with hardwood it's really hard to drive staples into hardwood anyway i do think a battery rattle gun is a lot easier for a lot of people to use particularly with the good screws we've got today i'm going to now see if there's any way i can make something to make those clip and also maybe even improve on the idea a bit this disc that i'm using on the grinder at the moment it's called a surface conditioning disc and probably some ears aren't familiar with them but if you want to really give your stuff a really good finish they're excellent [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] okay i've got my basic thing worked out how i imagine it might work and i'm just going to play around with it and see what's possible what i thought with this was that i'd be able to bend up the basic shape of the cliff and then just bend it in half and that would create the clip but bending the clip in half proved to be fairly difficult without distorting the shape of it here's one clip that i created with that machine although it proved fairly difficult to bend it in half but i did get there and i think if you made that out of eight gauge it'd be a really strong clip obviously once you got going you'd have your wires the right length i'm still experimenting here and i'm cutting it as i go but if i was doing a heap of them i'd have it the right length and i wouldn't need to do that step so the machine so far bends up the actual clips in the right shape and works fine now all we have to do is bend that at 90 degrees to the way i just bend it and it will make the clip easy unfortunately i run into trouble at this point after thinking all night on it wondering what i was going to do i changed completely it took a lot of thinking and drawing drawings and mucking around but i think i might have come up with the answer now so this is what i've made this block of steel so far and i actually made it out of two pieces and drilled the holes in two pieces and then welded it together to make it with a bit of luck this is going to work luckily the key that i've got is going to still work because that that took the most amount of manufacturing the idea is that's going to go on there and i'm going to have to put something here perhaps the machine's nowhere near finished what i'm just doing is trying it out so far and seeing if the principles seem sound and it seems okay but it's obvious that i've got to make some modifications well not really modifications i've got to add more to it to make it a bit more user-friendly so you can see even at this stage it does make a workable clip but i think it's got a little bit more to go i can improve this a lot here i'm just tapering the end of the rod that goes through the machine just to make it a little bit more user-friendly i've now added a couple of bits of angle on and i'm going to grind a groove on each side for the wire to sit in so it contains the wire and makes it fairly good and snug in those grooves i should mention this is not a thick grinding disc it's one about two and a half mil thick it's actually called a blending disc and they're made of a lot finer substance than the normal grinding disc again i don't know how long the wire needs to be or anything about it and i'm just sort of playing it by ear and seeing what happens on this first attempt when i had the machine reasonably finished i sort of i did a few things wrong and i had to learn as i went along and it is important later on that i work out how long that wire needs to be and cut it before i start as i went along i sort of realized i was doing things a bit wrong and i did get a lot better although it did make a clip straight off this was one important area where i found i was going wrong bending both those wires up at the same time that was a mistake in between this one and the last one i had a bit of a think about it and i managed to work out that i needed to just bend one arm completely and then do the other arm and then i start to really get somewhere again the length of the wire it's not quite right but it is making clips and actually they turning out okay after a fair bit of trial and error what i discovered was that if i had the wire about one inch past the angle line at the end there where my finger is now it worked out pretty right [Music] again i cut the wire one inch longer than where the little post is now i feel as if i'm really starting to get somewhere i can knock them out pretty quick at this stage however i just think there's one little improvement i could do to these clips to make them a little bit better again i've got a good inch sticking out past the end and same procedure but this time i'm going to change how i make the clip a little tiny bit and i think it's going to improve things a fair bit by this stage it's getting to be fairly automatic for me i've still got to think a bit like here i lifted that up only to get it out of me right but i didn't need to this is the bit where i think there's an improvement i'm bending this around further than it is in the original clip and you'll see the result of this in a minute again i'm cutting this off a good inch past the end of the little bar where you turn it round [Music] you'll notice now that i've bent those little legs around a lot shorter and it makes the screw become completely encapsulated in the clip i thought at this stage i'd give it a bit of a go and see if i could actually make one work so that piece of wood in the vise represents the post and i've just used an old screw that i had that i happen to think it'd work we're the appropriate screw it seems to work in metal no problem at all and actually i'm quite enjoying making them now and mucking around with it and i have actually thought of a couple of areas where i could change the way we do fencing and use them and i probably will on a wet day go over the shed and enjoy making a few clips for a bit of something to do i'm just going to wait one more i can't stop making them now i should say with this machine there's a few things you could do to improve it and make it a bit more user-friendly here where i'm doing this you could make a handle to do that if you wanted to you could also make a gauge for the length of your wire pre-cut your wires and help a bit i suppose the blake that manufactures these won't be too happy for me to promote making them yourself but i only need a few and i don't want to go and buy a box of a thousand of them thanks a lot for watching this edition of farming live australia we'll see you next time

Channel: Farming Life Australia

Views: 15,083

Keywords: fencing clips

Id: uKMMFlLPRRo

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021