Necessity as mother of invention
This week as I was messing around outside I decided I needed a faster way to measure the distance between posts. I was fighting the mud from recent rains as I was trying to set pipe posts for a lot. The orange panels in my lot are about done. The last couple of years if anyone comes over to help us work cattle I joke with them that they need to show proof of a tetanus shot before getting in the lot.
Usually I have a string and a tape measure when I’m setting pipe posts. That’s a good way of doing it to make sure the posts are in a straight line and spaced out evenly. The only down fall is when you are by yourself it’s hard to hold the tape measure at one end and measure from the other. The mud in the lot was really sticking to my boots and causing me to become very aggravated.
So I got to staring at that string and I realized that I’ve got small plastic conduit left over from wiring my shop. The more I stared at that string and the boot deep mud the more a plan began to develop.
The plastic conduit is in ten foot sticks. I needed an accurate way to measure off eight feet and sixteen feet, because I was putting those sixteen foot wire cattle panels in under my pipe top rail. I needed a post in the middle of the wire panel and then at the ends of those wire panels. So, I glued two pieces of conduit together and cut it off 2 3/8 inches short of sixteen feet. Then I drilled a couple of holes in the pipe. I drilled two holes at eight feet and two holes at each end. Then I ran baling wire through the holes and bent it so it would hook on my string. It took me about ten minutes to rig it up. I made a measuring stick that slid on my string. I could move it from one end of the lot fence to the other. It measured one hundred seventy five feet long.
My “measuring stick” allowed me to dig my post holes accurately. This way I could set posts without having to dig out the holes when I got a little bit off. The last few years I’ve been buying extra concrete because my post holes are always a little off and I have to make them bigger.
When I was almost done my son came in from school. He watched me work for a few minutes without saying a word. After he seen me move the measuring stick he finally spoke. He said, “I hope we don’t lose that before we build something else, that works pretty slick.”
Shoot, I felt so good about my measuring stick I thought about trying out for that shark tank show. After I got all the posts set I realized my invention had served its purpose and it would be awhile before we needed it again. Jakob put it up in top of the horse barn, so we wouldn’t lose it.
Usually I gripe at myself when I am building fence, today was special though. I was kind of amazed that it worked as slicks slick as it did, like they say, necessity is the mother of all invention…..
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.