Wood Fences

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The fencing urge in North Americans harks back to the days of the frontier and land rush. A property owner's need to stake out his or her parcel and set it apart from the rest can come on in a heady rush. Too many country people are tempted to get a fence up quickly by purchasing prefabricated sections of split-pole picket or stockade fence at a discount building supply-house for $8 per 8' section (called a bay) and one line post, installing it themselves—often by just pounding in the scrawny little vertical members.

But such fence is cheap for a reason: posts and the rails that run horizontally between them are thin and warpy, and pickets or other vertical "infill" boards are merely wired together or stapled on little 2 x 2 rails. These are barely worthy to even be called fence. You don't need to be an experienced carpenter to build flat-board fence; it requires only elementary, straight-cut carpentry, a strong back, and a careful hand at design and measuring. Most styles of residential fence can be built from stock lumber available at any building-supply outlet or fencing contractor.

Design

With your plot-plan decided, sketch out a scale plan of the fence design. Again, use square-ruled graph paper and draw your front gate and at least one full bay. Nearly all fences consist of a frame made up of vertical posts anchored in the ground and horizontal rails fastened between them—with or without vertical "infill": butted planks, spaced pickets, solid panels of plywood, or other sheet goods fixed to or between the rails.

In your plan, draw in the frame; then add infill over it, either by drawing boards on the paper in pencil or cutting them out from paper. Draw each post and picket or other vertical board to scale, so you can select the most economical board lengths and draw up an accurate bill of materials. Most important, drawing helps you get your rail length and infill board spacing correct.

At this point, it's a good idea to take a steel tape-measure and notebook to a lumber yard and record dimensions of possible materials. You'll find that 6' boards are a true 6' or more in length but that 2 x 4s actually measure 1 3/4" x 3 3/4", and 6 x 6 posts are a fraction of an inch smaller all around than their "nominal" size. Record "actual" measure and use it in drawing your fence to scale. Design your fence to resist sag by arranging flat-board rails up on their sides—with the narrow dimension facing up, the broad dimension facing out.

If installed broadest side up, any board that's wider in one dimension than the other will give in to gravity and bow down in time. If using 2 x 4s left un-infilled or carrying lightweight, well-spaced pickets, never have rails longer than 8' between posts. A 6' minimum is better if using heavy pickets and is essential to prevent sagging if building a high, fully-boarded fence. Using 2 x 6 rails installed on their sides, spacing can be greater if the infill load is not too great.

I was once chastised by a Northern California fence contractor for publishing a recommendation to use an 8' rail if building with 2 x 6s. "Six-foot rails are the minimum," he maintains. Of course, he was used to building 6'-high, fully boarded redwood fences along the windy shores of San Francisco Bay. Rails can be simply nailed on the inside or outside of posts, their ends butted tight together.

This makes a quick and easy farmer ranch-style post and rail fence. However, such rails hold any infill affixed to them out away from the posts, making the fence look flimsy and amateurish. This design is (only marginally) satisfactory for an infilled fence if the frame is to be hidden from view by planking of solid butted boards. You're better off setting rails between posts. For a fully boarded fence, align front of rails with the front edge of posts. For spaced-board infill or if you want posts to stand out from fully boarded rails, align back of rails with the back edge of posts.

Or, if you want posts to stand out as a vivid design component, rails can be set into notches sawn in the back of posts so that front of posts protrude an inch or so beyond the outer face of infill boards. On paper, match your infill size and spacing to rail length. The length of rails supporting butted boards will be a simple multiple of infill-board width. (Remember, nominal 6"-wide boards will probably measure an actual 5 1/2" wide.

You'll be able to squeeze 13 of them into 6' rails set in as the rail boards come of the lumber pile—without having their rough-cut, dyed ends trimmed off. Better is to design the fence with rails to be trimmed from 6' (72") to 66" so they'll hold an even dozen boards.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print