oldestguy
Geotechnical
- Jun 6, 2006
- 5,183
Came across a metallurgy example at my house that is interesting. We have a flower garden in town where there are many deer. They love to eat peoples flowers for some reason. So I surround the flower area with a fence of steel bailing wire on fiber glass rods at about 30" height. A timed fence charger (only at night) feeds the shocking voltage. Every so often a deer will get caught up in the wire and it breaks. So I go out and re-connect the wire where it broke or opened a twisted pair. Interesting that I usually don't have to do any re-stringing because the wire has stretched sufficiently. This situation probably has occurred at least 15 or 20 times in the life of the fence. During the repair, I usually have found no problem getting sufficient wire length to make the repair by hand, no tools. However today, I noticed (for the first time) how difficult it is getting to be to make these repairs due to the lack of the usual softness of the wire. Twists at the repair don't give me much stretch ability and the stuff is brittle. It's almost like working with spring wire. After the next episode, this old guy might end up using a new wire and starting the cycles all over again. Overall length of fence is about 30 or 40 feet and it has many "repairs".