Instead of paying $150 for a tool to unroll wire one strand at a time, Will Bass built a vertical tower to unroll up to 6 wires at a time.
“I built it with mostly all scrap metal that I had laying around, using oil field pipe for the main upright,” Bass says.
The 2 3/8-in. pipe used for the 4-ft. mast is welded to a 2-in. receiver tube that fits on the 3-pt. hitch of his tractor. Shorter 6-in. pieces of 2 7/8-in. pipe slip over the main pipe to create adjustable arms that can be tightened in place with a bolt. Each arm has a foot-long piece of 1 by 1 1/2-in. square tubing welded to 16-in. long 1-in. round tubing going through the center of a plywood base to hold a wire roll. Bass noted that later on he welded 1-in. fender washers near the bottom of the pipe to lift the wire rolls so they spin more freely.
To roll out the wires he uses his small tractor and drives near the fence posts and loosely attaches wires with clips to every other T-post. He stops the tractor at the end, then works with one wire at a time, cutting and stretching it, before moving on to the next wire. Then he goes back and installs clips on T-posts he missed and tightens the others.
“This saved multiple trips walking back and forth while carrying heavy spools of wire. I was doing up to an eighth-mile stretch at a time,” Bass says.
Friends have borrowed the unroller for their fencing projects, and he plans to use it again when he acquires more property.
Bass, who works as a CPA, is a regular contributor to the homemade tools forum and has several YouTube videos. Other farm related inventions include a fence post driver that attaches to his truck and drives metal and wood corner posts into the ground without digging a hole, and a clam bucket for picking up logs on the back of his tractor.