2011 - Volume #35, Issue #5, Page #27
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Skid Steer-Mounted "Wire Winder"
“I’m a fence contractor as well as a cattle rancher. I recently got a contract to remove 72 miles of woven wire. Normally we would cut the wire loose from the posts and roll the wire up by hand. After about 50 ft., you end up with a big, bulky roll of non re-useable wire, and then you start over again. Then there’s the problem of hauling all those bulky rolls of wire to a scrap dealer or a landfill.”
Sloan had to come up with a better way so he invented a wire roller that attaches to a hydraulic post hole auger on a skid loader. “You just take the auger bit off and install the wire roller, then tilt the auger horizontal with the ground,” says Sloan. “The wire roller has a pipe in the center with a slot from one end to the other. There are two half pipes on either side of the center pipe with rails and wedges on the inside. You slide these wedges in to expand the core of the pipe when you start rolling the wire. When the wire roll is full you pull the wedges out, which allows the wire to slide off freely.
“The roller pulls the wire in and puts it into a nice, tight roll, much like a new roll of wire looks. We put 300 to 400 ft. of this wire onto a roll at a time. We’ve pulled up to a quarter of a mile of wire at a time without moving the skid loader to another location. This has not only saved me a lot of labor, but I was able to sell all the wire to other ranchers to re-use instead of having to pay for disposing it in a landfill.”
Sloan manufactures the wire winders in his shop during the winter. They sell for $2,400 plus S&H.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Randy Sloan, 405 Hill Dr., Craig, Colo. 81625 (ph 970 629-1760; barbwiresloan@yahoo.com).
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