I loved your idea. I made some like this this spring. Not being super handy, I used two, 2 x 4s as side rails and conduit for bending bars.
The conduit I attached to the 2 x 4s with conduit U-holders. The side rails moved/skewed a little, but it was helpful. Thanks for sharing this idea!
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I love this cattle panel roller! Might be a solution while I build out deer fence around the whole yard.
Did you ever confirm if the roller bars are set at 8 inches apart? how large a diameter does that make the final tree fence?
The exact distance between the rollers isn’t critical; anything in the neighborhood of 8-12 inches should probably be fine (for a roller diameter around 3").
The key dimension is the displacement of the middle roller, which is spaced horizontally halfway between the other two, and must be adjustable vertically to control the diameter of the rolled cage. A fixed dimension probably wouldn’t ever work, even if just because of variation in the quality of the metal used in the panels.
I accomplished this by having some downward-pointing long threaded bolts mounted using T nuts on the underside of swinging wood bars 1.5" square. The bars were fixed down with lag bolts to the upper edge of the frame, such that the bar would swing out of the way for the roller axle to drop into a slot in the side frame, swing into position to fix/finetune the middle roller position, then swing out of the way again for the next panel. We would stomp down on the middle roller so the bar would swing into position, rather than adjusting the screw each time. Two strong people could probably just reach in and grab the end of the panel and force it over the third roller.
Good luck!
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Do you have any pics to show how you display the panels for trellis? Thanks
I bend my cattle panel into 4’ sided squares. A circle would look nicer and be easier to mow around.
Cool.
It’s pretty basic - we just drive metal fence posts into the ground vertically along the row, and wire the 4’ high cattle panel to the posts (so each panel extends along 16 linear feet of row). Then the peas or whatever just grow up either side of the mesh.
What with trying to limit trips to the grocery this summer, I’m contemplating a scheme where we plant warm-loving seedlings (e.g. melons) on either side of a cattle panel, then lean some old double-pane sliding glass doors we have lying around against either side of the panel, making a sort of tube-tent type arrangement. If we ever do it I’ll post a picture.
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