How to Build a Strong Cattle Panel Arch Trellis!

There are many ways to

build

panel

ed

arch

ed

trellis

es for

cattle

. We needed one that could withstand Florida storms and the weight of the vegetation we planned to grow, but also be freestanding and quite attractive. We'll show you how we

build

. here's what it entails and if you stay until the end, we'll show you how to use the clips that come with the T posts to make the most secure connection we know of, so we want to put up an

arch

ed

trellis

correctly. here you'll see that we've already marked it with boards showing roughly where we want it to go, but we're not entirely sure how wide exactly to put it, so we don't want to put up stakes to guide it. or something like that, we want to get the

panel

in place and then move it narrower or wider and see what it looks like, so we'll show you how we do it if you've ever tried to wrangle one of these.

Livestock panels are quite heavy and if you are going to fold them they can always be closed again, so having a way to do it yourself is great, but if you have a helper to make it much easier,

cattle

panels cattle are quite heavy. metal, so even though they're not sharp, you probably want to wear gloves to protect your hands, so I just want to show you real quick what we're working with here, we have standard T posts, the T posts that we get from tractor supply look like be a little heavier than the ones we get from big box stores.

They may be a little more expensive, but they seem to have better sizes available and usually always have them in stock. They have some too. ratchet straps the ratchet straps that we are going to use to control the panel as we change its size and figure out how wide we want the arc to be, we also have the clips that are used, we will talk more about them at the end of the video we will use them to attach parts of the cattle panel to the T-posts. You would think that the clips were a really easy thing to use, but they don't give you any instructions and they aren't. intuitive if you don't know how they work so we'll show you at the end and then a tape measure if you want to measure how far apart they are and make sure your ends are even and then gloves are always a good idea.

When it comes to something metal, let's go get our cattle panel, so Daisy holds the panel for us. The first thing you have to decide is how you want the bars to be oriented. If you look one way the bars run in one direction and they are on the outside on the other side the ones based on how they are welded go the other direction and you have to decide if you want the long bars to run on the outside uninterrupted or short bars that run uninterruptedly outside. We want the short bars. on the inside of the arch when we're done, so that's the way we're going to set it up.

The other thing you need to keep in mind is that on many cattle panels the end squares are a different size on one side than they are on the other, so if you look at these squares here at the top, they're about the length of my finger, if we go down, you can see that that one is significantly longer than my finger and goes all the way to the bottom and the ones at the bottom are the long squares and the ones at the top are the short rectangles, so you have to keep in mind if you want them to be behind or in front and that's how you're going to orient your panel based on whether you want the short bars to be inside or outside and wherever you want those smaller squares to end up, there are other panel sizes available.

The main difference between them is the thickness or gauge of the metal bars and the spacing between the holes, so your best bet is to check out the tractor supply or whatever your local farm and food supply store has. and simply select based on what you can afford and what you want. Keep in mind that the

strong

er or heavier the gauge of the metal, the more weight the panel will be able to support. So here is our first panel, it will actually be two panels for this bow, one in the front and one in the back to make a longer bow and what we have done is use a ratchet strap in the middle of the bow to keep it in place while we set up the rest of the frame and ratchet straps are really the best method we've found for when you're not 100 sure what size your bow should be and want to be able to try it out.

A few different variations without having to drive a stake into the ground to hold the bow in place, deciding if you want it narrower or wider and having to pull the stake out and drive it back in, we found straps work great for this. They allow you to make very good adjustments very quickly and maintain enough structure in the panel to prevent it from falling over or to prevent one end from jumping out and hitting someone, which is a risk with these metal panels until you install and tie them down. down, so now we're going to show you how we fasten the bottom straps, uh, and these are the ones you'll be working with the most and they're the most important because that's where most of the spring tension ends up. up, so it can be hard to see on camera, but you should be able to see each of those little cross sections where the bars are welded and where they join together, and you don't want to use the ones on the end or the outside because then the latch can move, whereas if you put it at one of the intersections, preferably right at the top, in a square and then on the other side, you pull it and it does exactly the same thing, the only other caveat here is to try make it so the hooks are facing down that way, if for some reason tension is released from the strap the hooks will stay attached if they are upside down, they can fall off if you lose tension when When we are moving the thing we do the exact same thing with the bottom that way you can just pull the strap and hook it and now you have three straps that hold the entire panel and keep it in place. look at that and think why don't I use the two at the bottom if you only use the bottom straps then what happens is the middle ones can bend outwards and the top can collapse and the bottom will go in so you lose your structure. and someone might get hurt a little if they get hit in the face with a panel.

I found that three straps or even four if it's easier for you makes it hold its shape much better so now we can start fixing it. We place it where we want and then we can measure how wide it is. We think we want this five foot panel, so Daisy just took the tape measure and measured from one bar to the other, exactly where the ratchet straps are. are and that's five feet and we just shortened each of the ratchet straps so they're all the same length so now we can test what it looks like five feet wide so here Daisy is holding the cattle panel after we've put it up we've set it up for the five feet we think but you can see you can easily hold it on one side without any problems it doesn't move it won't go anywhere because of the ratchet straps but be careful .

Aware that it is not completely structurally sound, if you let it go it may fall, so you only need one person to hold it in place, but other than that it will prevent it from jumping back, you don't have to worry about it moving into a side. and the other one doesn't, it just needs a little help, it makes it a lot easier to handle if you have the ratchet straps so daisy and I stepped back and took a look at where it is. Five feet, we're not sure, but we might want to take it to five and a half feet so the top isn't so high and we want to see what it looks like, so that's where we're going to stretch each one. of the straps in place without unclipping them, we'll just stretch them six more inches and see what it looks like and see if we want to keep it at five feet or go to five and a half feet, so this is the bow at five and a half feet and that's actually lower the top to about 78 inches, at five feet it was about 80 inches and I think we actually prefer it to five feet, so let's reset it back to five feet. and that should be our final adjustment, so here we have sped up the process.

I'm just using longer T posts to line everything up and use them as a reference for where I want the final T post to go and where we want the second panel to go and then I check the first T post where I'd like it to be and then we're going to remove the mulch to make it easier to place the post in the ground. then I use the T-post controller to hit the T-post and start. You can see that Daisy is moving the panel away from the T-post just because if I hit one of those metal pieces of the panel with the t-post it will dent it and I don't want to do that.

We are also checking to make sure all the t-posts are set at the same level if you look at the flat side of the t-post that is against the panel there will be knobs used to set different panels at different heights. You can just make sure that all of those knobs are essentially at the same height against the bars of the T post and you'll see that when we're putting the clips in where we put ours against the bars that are there and then once we have all the posts in the right places, we'll go ahead and remove all the straps and we can see. how it is aligned, this is the final result.

We added a second panel behind the first using the exact same method, although we didn't have to measure as much as the first. We use three clips for each post at the top center and bottom. The result is seen when you look at the arch from the front, the side parts are quite straight and the top is a nice uniform arch. You can tie the bow at just one or two points per post if you want, but I don't think that's the case. It holds its shape quite well when loaded with greenery and fruits. You can also use just one post per panel if that's all you can handle, but we try to build with hurricanes and weather in mind, so we decided two posts per arch would be better.

For us too, if you are leaning the arch against something like the raised edge of a bed, we prefer to attach the panel directly to the bed so that a panel maintains its rigidity, it should be attached to a stationary support and not just leaning against it. If you don't have to do this the way we've done it, we're just trying to show you some options and what works for us based on the previous ones we did after putting the two panels in place and trimming them. Galvanized wire to hold the two panels together. We like galvanized electric fence wire, which is light enough that we can shape it quite easily with pliers, but

strong

enough to still be effective in supporting whatever we use.

I simply wrapped the wire around the intersections. A couple of times to keep the panels together, I tuck the cut ends into the center of the joint to prevent people or plants from getting caught in them. We've mentioned the clips a couple of times in this video. I'll just show the process. To use the fence clips correctly and install them on the T-posts in the easiest and safest way as we know, let's take a look at those clips to install the clips, which is probably the safest way to do it. Set up your T's so that the flat side with the notches is against the panel, push the panel towards the T post and you will see that the clips that come with the T posts have a short hook on one side and a long hook in the shape of a loop on the other side. this is the hook, this is called a horn, you take the hook and wrap it around the panel wire, you pull the panel towards the T, the first pair will be tight and then you take the horn and put it on the panel, then you take a screwdriver . through the back and through the hole in the speaker and you twist the speaker around the panel and that's now secure and that's how you secure a T-post clip if you make it through all that thanks for hanging out with us thanks for taking At some point you may not build the arc we have, but I hope you get something out of this.

If you don't mind, a like and subscription goes a long way to new channels. We would appreciate it, thanks again. See you next time with five feet wide, we'll go with four and a half feet wide and see what that means, we're not going to go with four and a half feet, we'll go with five and a half feet, no. let's go with five feet