Originally Posted By: Donald
Originally Posted By: GreeCguy
Originally Posted By: Andy636
The oldest and best method so far is to burn(scorch) the portion of the posts that's going to be underground.
Don't know if you guys use this method on the other side of the pound but we have miles of barbwire fences with posts burned like that and 70% of them are like the first day even after 40 years
This is what I'm talking about :
http://www.eurofence.ro/ro/galerie/
I don't know why I didn't think of this, but your post reminded me of it -
Back when my parents built their house, my mother wanted an old timey dinner bell in the yard, (she grew up in Georgia and it reminded her of working on the farm). My Dad went out in the woods and cut down a cypress tree. He then brought the tree home and built a fire, rolling that log around in the fire until the entire log was scorched. That pole with the bell on top sat in my parents yard for 30 years before it finally started giving out. Oddly enough, it rotted where the bolts passed through the wood at the top.
However, I would only try the scorched method on untreated wood as burning the treated wood releases all kinds of toxic chemicals.
Cypress would last forever untreated.
Not true. While "old growth" cypress lasted a long time, the current stuff doesn't last as long. I've put in plenty of cypress fence post only to replace them within a five year time period.
My Dad also had some cypress boards stored in his barn for a number of years, (left over from when they built their house). I used these boards to make raised beds for my garden thinking they would last a long time, (they were rough cut boards - a full 2 inches by a full 10 inches). Termites ate them to pieces in about two years.
Even the post my Dad used for the dinner bell did not rot where it was scorched, it rotted where he bored holes through the wood to insert the bolts which held the bell.
However, here's an interesting side note regarding cypress. Where my parents live, there used to be a railroad bed that ran on the front of their property. The area was low and swampy and when the railroad vacated the right of way, my Dad bought the property. We leveled the roadbed and discovered the original builders had first laid a bed of cypress logs before building the roadbed, (a corduroy roadway). Those logs had laid there for over 100 years and yet, you could still see the axe marks from where they cut down the trees and the wood itself was hard as iron. We tried giving them away to several wood workers but no one wanted them. Sadly, we ended up burning them in a big bonfire.
