The 3 secrets to ROT PROOF POSTS and how to make them

hello friends is a common problem these days gateposts that just don't last they don't rot off at the bottom they often go all down the center where the tantalizing process doesn't reach and although the chemical isn't much less brutal these days it means they just don't last hardly any time there's three key things to making gateposts that last let's make some one I'll show you what they are the first and in some sense is most obvious factor affecting longevity of posts is the material they're made out of now in many ways this choice will be determined by where you live the environmental conditions in your part of the world what we have available is this honking great log of Welsh oak will talk see some of the other materials and methods as we go along but for now I want to establish a straight cut on this log and melt some 8 foot lengths oak according to my handbook of hardwoods is considered durable as a material meaning it survives 20 years in the ground we'll see why actually turns out like this is going to like the rough we're getting a little bit of down the bottom in the corner here I'm not too worried about just a tiny bit for the gateposts we can always pack it off it may be like a lot of woods are considered durable the SAP wood of oak is still very attractive to insects and bugs and is just much less durable in the process of chain saw milling we'll be removing the SAP wood and the bog leaving nice solid heartwood the reason for removing the bark just from one side of the log is that that side gets pulled all the way through the cut by the chain and removing it limits the potential damage any bits of sand or dirt on the bark will do so essentially your chain stays sharper a bit longer in fact if you're using any kind of wood I'll talk through the pros and cons of other materials you probably want the bark to be removed as this is where the majority of the bugs will kind of get foothold a first sort of beachhead for their attack on the inner post a super popular choice for posts of all kinds and all different parts of the world really is pressure treated ort analyzed timber it has a customary green tinge to it and you hear me rubbishing it at the beginning of this video so the logs on quite a big slope which is excellent for chainsaw milling because you don't put any effort in it just glides along itself the chain but we really don't want this giant slab slipping down into the river when we do the next bit so I'm just putting some screws in here and that should hopefully hold it quite steadily to create some 90-degree edges on this massive slab we're using the same harder we used earlier with this exceptionally crude contraption you can see bolted to the chainsaw guide bar it's literally just a piece of round bar with two guides bolted to it and a spacer between the runs along the ladder this is the first time I've used it and it actually worked quite well I did discover that the rails of the ladder don't run perfectly parallel down its length which led to some binding shenanigans with that mill attachment but apart from that it worked quite well anyway let's not get distracted why else might you choose a word like oak cedar black locust Osage orange or a number of other durable woods over some industrially pressure-treated pine or spruce well it is cheap yeah but it just doesn't really last so unless you really enjoy replacing gay posts and fan posts it's just not worth it some of them don't even last five years by law in a lot of places in the world pressure treating chemicals can't contain arsenic any more as companies have scrambled to create effective alternative chemical recipes and in the most part failing there's a lot of variance between what's in the pressure treating chemicals these days which why you see variants amongst how long the posts actually last the environmental impact of some of these mixes is not really well known at least not long term oh yeah that works treat I have a friend who uses pressure-treated posts and he feels that he's forced to put creosote on the bottom of them to allow them to last any length of time creosote though is becoming very difficult to get hold of and there's very good reason for that and that's because it's considered carcinogenic another thing that you wouldn't necessarily want to proliferate in the environment okay I don't want to make it sound like what we're doing is easy here or possible for everyone if you watch the video carefully hopefully you'll get the sense that this actually takes quite a long time for example that's to post a few other bits and bobs and some slabs and that was so strong yesterday you can already see the difference in color between this side here and this one where the Sun was covered the Rays on this are amazing it's a shame to be using it as a gate post that needs must I know what you're thinking flowering elbow what about metal and concrete gate posts well longevity-wise they can actually be a good option if you are the one who installs them it's unlikely you're gonna be the one to have to replace them in other words they'll last a lifetime my primary bias against them is cost both in terms of dollar and environmentally unlike oak or chestnut or cedar they neither grow locally or on trees at all on top of that they can be a bit fiddly err to install the holes for hardware or the fence being precast or drilled into the post so there's that to consider as well having said all that as an off the peg solution if you don't have any wood like this on your property and you don't want to be replacing posts every five to ten years it might well be a better option ban pressure-treated posts plastic posts plastics becoming more popular these days for posts probably purely to prove just how short-term humans and species can think let me sum it up by saying flimsy junk lightweight probably quite convenient for exceptionally short term UV damage is a problem for them to send shivers down my spine let's talk about moving heavy solid things and tempo here's an example when moving really massive things it's amazing what you can actually shift when you coordinate max effort just think of the fishermen hauling in a net sometimes much more about tempo than strength for example I could never let some above my head just like that unless we perfectly time our tempo anyway this is probably a slight distraction we've talked about material and its importance we've got a bunch of hardwood oak posts let's fly on to the second key thing we need to consider to increase their durability this is all to do with how you treat your posts before you shove them in the ground this goes together with part one in a sentence in that depending on what you choose will change the way you treat them if you choose a soft wood like spruce that's just not durable at all naturally you're essentially gonna have to drench them and use high pressure the Bush toxic chemicals in them if you want them to last any time lots of dubious things have been tried with plastic sleeves bitumen creosote all that kind of thing some treatments have stood the test of time here we're using fire call it show Sookie ban shoo sugar Sookie burn or anything else you want charring it's a process that seems to have develops throughout history in parallel in multiple cultures and it's still used today to great effect there are a number of benefits and I'll go through them in turn let me just say a thing about our setup here though we're using the rocket stove and this ladder this was our first go at doing it and we soon decided the ladder was not the best solution we couldn't rotate the beams inside the rungs of the ladder and this kind of shenanigans kept on happening too so we improved upon that with my dad scaffolding tower which we ended up actually fitting a roller to that was from an old treadmill and it just fit absolutely perfectly in the rungs there it made it relatively effortless to move the beams back and forth over the flame question never to be roses how much or how deeply should you char the posts the answer seems to vary between about two and five millimeters depending on lots of factors like the wood species and all the rest of it and if you understand the benefits perhaps that gives you some clue as the flame drives away moisture it's also killing fungus and bugs that might reside in the wood but that's by no means the only benefit knock her up volatile organic compounds a burn away to leaving just this inert layer of charcoal which is probably quite unappealing to further insects and fungus but between the outer layer of char and that unaltered wood inside is a layer of torrefied wood which has a much reduced potential for decomposition this is the Paleolithic sharpened spear type effect where they found they could get much harder more durable point using this torrefied layer that's super desiccated and just slightly altered kind of wood there's two important points here one never tried burning pressure-treated wood that'll give off horrible fumes and two the process doesn't seem to work well with soft woods the very outside layer of charcoal can be scraped away or at least in our experimental rendition of this this is what we're doing the theory behind that is the outer layer of charcoal can car trap and hold moisture acting a little bit like a sponge the rocket stove works great for this it was getting dark though and a few patchy bits that we didn't char as deeply as we liked we're just hitting with the propane torch and we sure are glad that we reused the rocket stove because that's a lot slower in a little mini experiment here we're charring three of the six new gateposts and we'll report back in 20 years or so we've talked about the material and the preservative treatment of post let's move on to the third key thing when it comes to durability that is the way the post is installed in the ground we know all too well where posts rot off and it's at that interface between the ground and the air where the topsoil provides the perfect environment for decomposition we want to do everything humanly possible to avoid the contact with that organic rotten matter a big stone or a few big stones at the bottom of the hull provides excellent drainage and bears the weight of the post and then once we have the post jiggled around a nicely leveled and wedged in place we want to pack round it with about fifth sized stones again so that the post itself isn't touching any of the surrounding soil so that needs to be bared in mind when digging the hole once you get compacting stones it's surprising how far they don't go and you actually need a lot of stones to fill around a post so that's why you don't want the hole to much bigger or wider than the post itself you can get rid of all crockery and other junk you have to after plenty of hydraulic fettling and fixer-upper e we've got the old JCB going now that probably be a subject of a different video but anyway it's extremely useful in terms of digging the holes and delivering stones when you get to the top here comes the tricky bit as you try and arrange flat long big stones to cast the water away from the hole it's kind of like slates on a roof yeah that's feel quite sturdy ideally these big stones would also be preventing plant growth and all other organics rubbing on the gatepost and imparting moisture and bugs and other stuff and again should prevent decay a little bit because oak react very strongly with steel we're just putting a slip of plastic in this case you'll go pop between the post and the receiving latch and that just prevents the black staining you see and the corrosion this area is actually a joining of three different fields and so we've got two other gate posts we need to replace this one here is one that hangs that gate you can see in the top left and in the middle you can see the big lump of concrete and there's other bits of concrete in there they're from a once removed gate post most people think of concrete as quite a poor solution for putting timber posts in in terms of durability although it is exceptionally rigid to begin with my own dad put that post in so it can't be that long since that one went there's being a whole other pressure treated post that was just round to him quite shallowly in that same location hopefully this oak post will be there a little bit longer this is how we're compacting the stones and ramming them into place the idea is that you do a few inches of extra stone and then you Ram that all home do another layer round that down doing a layer compact it back down and that way by the time you get to the top you've got absolutely rock-solid post the top of the gate that would be under tension when it's mounted it's quite something to drill such a big hole through all the way through such a large post the bottom one of course is just round home and that's got to be very tight because it's under compression from the gate after a little gate test fit we can work out the position of your the hole and that was quite an interesting one to dig just cuz it was so close to that trough there and I'm still very much on the steep part of the learning curve with this JCB we made this receiving gate Post not one of the charred treated ones and installed in exactly the same way with the same compacting top stones all the rest of it it should be really fascinating to see how it compares in longevity to the other two durable isn't necessary to stop the droppings and other things running the top and water in general which can have a little Vogue's and gates never been so satisfying well friends hope you enjoyed that and got something useful I bet you've got different ways that you do gate posts or any posts and if so let us know what they are in the comments and share that if you haven't then do something in the comments anyway bye from Sam and I see you next time subscribe we have let's make some gate posts that actually love

Channel: FloweringElbow

Views: 688,214

Keywords: Flowering Elbow, Chainsaw Mill, Rot proof Posts, Gate post, Fence Posts, Timber post, rot proof timber posts, Durable posts, oak posts, installing a gate post, sugi sugi ban, charing, wood preservative, wood preservative treatment, natural wood preservative, natural wood fence, how to, stone gate posts, chainsaw milling posts, cutting wood posts, rot resistant wood fence posts, rot proof gate post, chainsaw posts, pressure treated wood, pressure treated, alaskan mill

Id: apIpQXM4eqo

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020