Days of Pounding End Post

It is getting toward the end of the season and winter is quickly approaching (tomorrow! according to the weather forecasters). We are finally getting our black locust end posts in the ground, with the help of an Extreme Driver post pounder, a loaner from our generous friends. To fill in a little background, we spent a lot of time looking for black locust that we could use for our end posts because we didn't want to use the conventional pressure treated end posts that contain CCAs (i.e. chromated copper arsenate). After a lot of searching, my husband located a dealer in Barkhamsted, CT who provided us with 90, reasonably straight 10 foot posts. We were ecstatic!
Taking the advice of our friend, "Start from a place where you can experiment on how to use the pounder", translation "Make your mistakes where not too many people can see", on Tuesday morning, we started at the north end of our field, with our first try. It took us 2 hours to put in our first black locust end post. The major hurdle was how to position the black locust that was so dense, it felt like concrete, into the clamping device of the post pounder.

We went home to regroup and think about how to speed this task up. So, on the drive home, my husband was mumbling to me something about modifying the fork lift on the John Deere so that he could put a chain on the plate. All this talk about forks and plates was making me think of how hungry I was for lunch. (Focus Gayle, focus!) He also wanted to know how much each end post might weigh, so my husband looked on the Internet and found the answer. Here is what Wikipedia had to say about black locust:.

Wood: Pale yellowish brown; heavy, hard, strong, close-grained and very durable in contact with the ground. The wood has a specific gravity 0.7333, and a weight of approximately 45.7 pounds per cubic foot.

If we were paying attention, the statistic approximately 45.7 pounds per cubic foot, should have jumped out at us. We purchased 10 foot long locust posts with diameters ranging from 6-8 inches. So, dusting off my middle school math with a little help from the internet on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder, I calculated how much an average log of black locust might weigh and came up with 157.8 pounds!

The fortunate thing is that we do have 2 tractors. My husband took the forks out of the John Deere fork lift and hooked up a chain to the "plate" in order to move the log into place. This modification worked like a charm and we are now down to approximately 45 minutes per post!