Manual post drivers: weight, shoulders, and when to hire it done

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Research. We have not driven a fence line here yet. What follows is how manual drivers are specified, the arithmetic of what driving posts asks of a person, and where hiring the job out stops being extravagant. When posts have gone in the ground on this place, this page gets updated with the date.

A manual driver is the right buy for almost every small place — the question is how many posts you should put through one before you pay somebody else.

Weight class is a shoulder decision

Manual drivers run roughly 10 to 24 lb: a capped steel tube with handles. The advertised virtue is mass — heavier tube, fewer strokes. That is half the sum. You lift the whole thing every stroke.

A T-post in reasonable ground takes 15 to 25 strokes. A hundred posts at 20 strokes with an 18 lb driver is 36,000 lb lifted, most of it above chest height, across a weekend. The tool is not the limit.

• Under 14 lb — bounces on dry clay and doubles the stroke count. Garden stakes.
• 16 to 18 lb — the working range for most people and most ground.
• 20 lb and up — fewer strokes, but a two-person day or a tall person's tool.

If one person is driving the whole fence, size down. More strokes beats a driver you set down at post forty.

The reach problem nobody photographs

A 6½ ft T-post stands 78 in out of the ground before you start. Put a 32 in driver on top of it and the top of the driver is over 9 ft in the air.

So you start it off a tailgate, or off pallets on uneven ground, holding 18 lb overhead. That is where things go wrong, and it happens on the first post of every line. Fixes: shorter posts, or a pilot hole with a rock bar to take the first foot. Check the driver's length against the posts you own.

Ends, and handles

Closed end. Solid welded cap. Heavier at the business end, standard for T-posts. It also traps — drive a post whose top has mushroomed and the driver can wedge on it.

Open end. A through tube with a striking collar. It drives rebar, pipe and fence ground rods of any length, and sheds mud instead of packing it. It is also easier to knock sideways off a post.

Cheap drivers weld two straight bars flat to the tube, putting your hands in line with the post and a knuckle into steel on every crooked stroke. Look for handles standing off the tube, angled down, welded fully around rather than tacked at two spots.

What it will not do

Wood posts. Not at all. Wood goes in with an auger, a bar and a tamper, or a machine. That is the real fork in the road, not post count — which post belongs where sets your tooling before it sets your fence.

Rock. Ground around here finds chert or limestone shelf at eight inches with a foot and a half still to go. No driver gets through it. The post moves, or the brace does.

Dry summer clay. Drive a few days after rain has soaked in. The post that takes 18 strokes in April takes fifty in August and bends on the way. That timing is free.

When to hire the machine

Tractor-mounted and skid-steer drivers run into the thousands and want a real tractor under them — weight, hydraulic flow, and enough rear ballast that a heavy mast on the three-point does not lighten the front end. A subcompact is the wrong machine. In between sits renting a gas-powered handheld driver: percussion rather than lift, roughly 30 to 40 lb, by the day.

Rough crossover for a small place:

• Under about 100 posts — manual, spread over sessions.
• 100 to 300 posts — manual is still cheaper on paper. Price a rental day against two lost weekends first.
• Over roughly 300 posts in one push, or any wood line posts — get a per-post installed price from a fencing crew first. Compare it against your own days off work, not against zero.

Buy the manual driver either way. Nobody hires a machine to reset one post in February.

What we are buying

The driver is not the open question. This article lands on buying a manual one either way, and that holds here. What no page can supply is the ground: how many strokes a post takes on this place, and how far one goes down before it stops on rock. The post count is the other unknown, and it is what decides whether any part of the line is worth pricing against a rental day. Buying one adds the weight, the end type, the length, what it cost and the date. The length gets settled before the money, by measuring against the posts we are setting, because there is no fixing that at the store. The tag at the top stays Research until posts have gone in the ground here, and that update is the one carrying the depth we found, the count, and how long the first line actually took.

Before you buy

• Measure your posts against the driver's length. Nine feet in the air is a problem with no fix at the store.
• Buy ear protection in the same order. A steel tube on a steel post, forty times a post, is loud enough to matter.
• Add a rock bar. It makes pilot holes, finds rock before the post does, and levers out the ones you set in the wrong place.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee