Replacing wood posts

When you pull it, the drum will act as a fulcrum and pull the post UP while you pull away. You'll probably end up crunching the drum after a couple of posts, but they're cheap and it's easier than digging all day.

Leverage is your friend, especially when your old!

Scott

If the posts are broken off at the ground, dig around the footing so you can get a slip chain around the concrete a foot or so down. Attach the chain to a loader or whatever you have. Apply slow pressure until the chain grabs. then apply more and more until it comes out. You may have to bounce it some and you may have to move back and forth some depending on your soil. Keep other people back in case the chain slips. You will never get a broken post out of a footing.

It can take a tremendous amount of pressure to remove a footing from the ground.

The jackhammer is a option also, but you must remember if you do it yourself. NEVER try to split the wood incased in concrete. You will bury the bit, and you can not ever get it out untill the concrete is removed around it. Jackhamering a post out is not a simple project as you will learn real soon.

A sugestion of lifting is not practical 99% of the time as the post will snap at cement level and no way to wrap a chain on it. Best to break the cement around it IF it is only 4inches deep. Wrap a chain on it with a slip hook and pull it out with a loader. If it is cemented from the bottom of the post, you are screwed unless you can wrap a chain around the cement pier that is cast around your post. We do this often by digging post holes around the pier with a gas powered post hole digger to losten the compacted soil. Once in a while a backhoe can dig a tooth into the pier and wedge it out by curling the bucket. Seldom does any backhoe have the actual lift power.

Often we have decided to put in 1 1/2" solid shafting to replace the posts. Sound expensive, and I don't blame you for thinking I'm crazy for stating it. It is still cheaper than trying to dig them out and then doing so half way through the project after you give up. A jackhammer compresser with a blasting drill that is oversized works real fast. Then just fill in with a cement / sand mix to tighten in the posts. Be sure to predrill your posts in a drill press first to anchor your fencing. Often we use a cement curb a foot high with pig panels--make sure you alow for the curb. Predrill a hole for a rebar as well as the curb will crack at the post. The curb lets you corner the manure and keeps the pig panel out of the manure.

If you decide to pull the posts and they are incased in concrete to the bottom of the post with a rebar in the pier, you may want to think of grain croping instead of raising hogs.

In our area there are many hog operations giving way to the corperate farms. Many have the free standing T walls vented and non vented for little or nothing for price. Many are just buried or hauled away.

So far you've gotten two answers in favor of taking the footings out of the ground, and one for taking the posts out of the concrete. When I read your question, I got the impression you were asking for suggestions for an easy way to deal with what you've got. Are the broken posts broken off to the top of the concrete or do you have enough sound wood left to add stirrups to bolt in new posts?

I have to tell you, this is exactly the kind of project that would inspire me to think up some unconventional way to deal with it, spend five times the money and ten times the time it would take do do it conventionally, and eventually have it not work anyway. But that's just me.

All the best, Stan

Got a tractor with a stout 3pt.. try to snatch them straight up..

soundguy

soundguy

Still.. Makes -0- difference.. a straight up pull on a friction pile is gonna be easier than yanking it out with a side load on it.. that's just plain physics...

soundguy