Comment by sigmaprimus
4 years ago
Barbed wire might be a great invention but my personal experiences with it are not so rosy.
I was cleaning up my property and found some laying on he ground from where there once stood long rotten fence posts that had since decomposed completely.
While cleaning it up by wrapping it around a piece of wood, I learned the hard way that safety glasses are essential when working with it...An end of a strand in an almost lifelike manner whipped up and slashed me across the the bridge of my nose and my right eye lid.
That was but one experience, since that time I have had the pleasure of laying under my backhoe with bolt cutters to remove 100s of feet that ended up wrapped around the front axels and walking through puddles in my gum boots only to realize the dreaded stuff had struck again by putting invisible holes in the bottoms of them.
I believe I have managed to collect the majority of the abandoned wire but now I face the dilemma of what to do with it. I don't want to take it to the land fill and make it someone else's problem but don't want to have it in my way either as it is very heavy and cumbersome to move.
My only idea is to get a forge or smelter and transform it into a less menacing product.
Scrap yards don't want to deal with a tangled mess of barb wire - some won't accept it at all, some pay an extremely low rate for it. But if you cut it into short pieces (3ft or so) and neatly bundle it, most scrap yards will happily take it at their regular scrap steel rate.
Yeah barbed wire is tricky. I grew up on a farm and built a lot of barbed-wire fence. With the right PPE (mostly boots and good gloves) and tools (fence pliers [0], comealongs [1], etc.) it gets easier. Plus when you're building fence the wire comes on a roll which is much easier to manage than random barbed wire lying on the ground in a pile.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/fence-pliers/s?k=fence+pliers
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Torin-Come-Along-Double-Cable-Puller/...
Shred it. That will allow you to get the regular price for rusty steel for it.
You may be able to rent a shredder or you may have to pay someone who has one to shred it for you. In the past barbed wire was a problem for shredders but the latest models eat it up like so much candy.
Yuck, I know the feeling - just for me it was a piece of lightning rod conductor that snapped out of its coil, still have the scar in my face, but it has faded thankfully. Hope you did recover from your injury!
> I believe I have managed to collect the majority of the abandoned wire but now I face the dilemma of what to do with it. I don't want to take it to the land fill and make it someone else's problem but don't want to have it in my way either as it is very heavy and cumbersome to move.
Sell it at a scrap yard. They will sell it to a smelter and that's it.
> My only idea is to get a forge or smelter and transform it into a less menacing product.
If you go that far in yak-shaving, there are some pretty amazing how-to videos on Youtube that detail how to build a proper forge - and actually make an axe or other medieval weapon out of ore.
I wonder if you can do an interesting Damascus with it like those guys who do the same with old chainsaw chains.
In landfill it's a waste of embedded energy but not likely to be a hazard so I wouldn't worry too much, but clearly made something cool >> efficiently recycled >> just junked.
Just snip it up. And you can get special gloves for when you're handling.