The Time For Making Holes Is Past | The Equalizer Is IN | Fence Armor
Hey what's up guys? Shawn King with Mr. Fence Tools. This is probably one of the coolest tools we have really. We need to stop building fences like granddad and start building fence like our kids will need to in the future. This is Mr. Fence Tools. No it's not a rope, this guy is called the Equalizer and that's what it does it equalizes the spacing between posts no matter what the distance is, any random length it'll do all the math for you. This tool right here this tool takes the dumb out of it let me tell you. We've made some massive improvements to this tool so now it comes with an offset cable. Why do you want an offset cable? This is where your stake will go to set up your line, a fence, we're now challenging you to use this tool not just to locate your post space wise but also to set your post right so this is going to be what you would normally use a string line for. You're going to use this Equalizer so once you set it up don't take it back down, well you got to have the offset cable because your first hole in the ground, the first pole gets set at the end of this cable right there at the end of that cable that's the center of your first hole right there okay so if that's the case and I had this right here hooked to a stake when you dig the hole the stake's gonna fall in the hole right. That's where the first post goes so this offset cable that puts our stake almost two feet away so that takes care of that problem. Set this Equalizer up so that it's on the left to the right-hand side of all your posts so that you can set the post right to the indicators and dig holes right to the indicators. The center of the post goes right there where that tag is so you just set, you would dig your hole right to tag, check your hole make sure it's clean and ready to rock and roll, set your post in there and set it right to that tag all the way down. These tags will adjust depending on the length of the line of the fence to where they're all the same distance apart. Right that's pretty cool, well we've made the tool even better seriously I mean it was already pretty cool but now we've introduced the gate spacer cables we've had people ask what happens if I have a gate in the middle of my line? How do I handle that and in the past we'd have to go up to the gate and to the corner pole and use the Equalizer and start over, not no more. Wherever we're going to put the gate at after we've installed the Equalizer cable set up, we just take the gate cable, this one's four foot, we hook it inside the tag, hook it inside the other tag and it will limit those tags from stretching to exactly four feet apart like they're not going to go any further than that so those two tags set the four and everything else on the line has been blended automatically. If you want to move it to a different section grab two two of the other tags in the line and install this. If you want to add two gates in a line grab two tags in two different spots hook them together and you end up with two gate locations and the entire line blended together. If you want to have an eight foot double drive gate hook two of these together, skip a tag, hook it in and you're good to go. We've got five foot cables, three foot cables, six foot cables, it's really simplistic, man has to take the dumb out of it. Come with me let me show you how this thing works in the field, check it out. All right guys let's talk about how to use the Equalizer tool first off I'm gonna show you how to wind this thing up because that's why I often see the wrong way right so if you just go tag the tag when you get ready to store it it makes a lot easier later on to use this thing right so I'm just gonna put it in my hand tag the tag this is how we want to store it this is how you want to roll it up we use it almost every time on a wood fence because we want equal sections so if your white vinyl fence is not equally divisible by eight foot then what happens is guys will lay out eight foot, eight foot, eight foot, eight foot and then the last one will be I don't know three or four foot right that's how you see a lot of rookies do it and then someone that's more seasoned we'll say well we'll blend the last two or three sections in so it's eight foot, eight foot, eight foot, eight foot and then like six, six, six or something and so they're getting closer right. Okay well you can take it a certain set further if you’ve been building fence long enough you're like no I want them all to be equal because I want it to look symmetrical. Going through there I got to cut the two by four anyways I might as well just cut them all equal it's the same amount of material so then the person thinks they're really smart they're going to take in the footage they're going to measure with a tape measure and find out okay so I got to go 81 feet and 5 inches and then I’m going to get a calculator and they're going to be smart enough to figure out they're going to take that times 12 to get inches then they're going to divide it by the number of sections if it's 81 feet that's 11 sections because 80 feet would be 10 sections and then I get a measurement of like 92.685 inches and then what they're gonna do is they're gonna take a tape measure and they're gonna get another partner and say hey help me mark this out or you hold that in for me and they're gonna lay that on the ground, they're gonna measure 92 and whatever six, five inches they're gonna paint a paint mark and they're gonna pick it up and they're gonna do it again and they're gonna do it again and they're gonna get to the end and hopefully we get to the end that 92.65 whatever is where the post supposed to stop and sometimes it works out that way especially if you're really good with math but there's a two-person process and they're doing this, it takes minutes all the way down through we're trying to save pennies, pennies make babies, babies grow to be dollars, you're going to hear that all day long. Yes I know we're saving pennies right so that's going to happen however what happens more often than not is the tolerance of them holding that tape measure over and over and over and a two inch thick pink mark pretty soon they see either grow or shrink and now they get to the end it's like 87 inches and I'm like that's close enough and and they're right it's pretty close you're right but you went through all that effort and time to do the math and do everything and you still didn't get it right. Let me give you for instance the homeowner Mrs. Jones says I want the fence to start right here and there's another grey flag down that I want to end right there I don't know what that dimension is right now, I don't know what it is all right and I really don't care right at this moment I don't care um but if I did want to do it mathematically, I’d get a tape measure out and measure that but we're not going to do that today I'm going to use my offset cable which comes with the equalizer there's a reason for this I’ll show it to you later why we're using this offset cable and I hooked it over my first stake. Okay that puts my Equalizer cable right where the flag is and then I'm gonna walk on down the line and I’m gonna go to the next flag at the other end. Okay guys so I’ve walked to the end of the fence line now to make this cable work, I'm going to pull it towards myself. I'm just going to keep pulling, these tags represent where the posts are going to go. I'm pulling, I'm pulling, I'm pulling, all right I take the tag like I can't get the next tag to come to me there's no way I'll rip the cable so it is maxed out and I put the black cable where the fence is going to be located. Every one of those tags is right now, is equally spaced, perfectly within this eight quarter inch, I didn't measure nothing, no thinking. Okay you should do this in 30 seconds right comparatively the other way would take you five minutes or three minutes and two guys so what if I wanted to do that right now. It's a straight line I would do three wraps three times pull this cable back over top of itself, I’m done. Okay if I go and mid stake the middle of this this is going to become my string line. Okay we're not using string lines to build fence it's already here we're not going to paint the ground, I don't need to paint it, I'm going to dig my hole right there, dig my hole right there, make my next hole right there. I'm gonna set my post right to the tag no string line no tape no paint. 500 times faster and guaranteed to be 100% accurate. All right, so then I get people who ask cool that's real cool Shawn those are all equally spaced but what if Mrs. Homer wants a gate in the middle of that? No problem, if we add a gate that means we're adding a section or a post right? If we allocate we're adding a post right okay so I come back here and I say okay we're gonna put a gate that line I gotta add a post into the line, how do I add a post? Well I add a tag so I back off to a tag like that I added a tag in the line right, tie it off. A lot of people think you have to use the cable twice like pull the cable to the gate and then start again that takes too much time if I just add a section now watch what I'll do, come on down here, I gotta show you guys the other part of the tool. We're gonna put the gate at right here, looks good all right, so it's a four foot wide gate she wants, awesome hang on a second, four foot wide gate, boom done. All those are equal all those are equal, there's your gate. You want a five foot gate, we got a five foot cable, you want six foot get six foot, one eight foot gate, double drive, no problem. We put that in there too, we have cables made up to come with it that are three, four, five and six foot long. You can put the gate anywhere it needs to be and know it's instantly equally spaced on either side. Now that is a cool tool, any questions on that tool? Maybe more so we're so we're talking about uh wood fence today right so wood fence we're gonna go down through here and yeah there'll be a rip picket where the gate is there always is uh with vinyl if you were to use this tool for vinyl it will absolutely work for vinyl yes absolutely all right but it means you're going to cut every section. Probably the best way to go right? It's not the norm in the industry, normally what we'll do is we'll go full sections, put a remainder at both ends or we'll do a remainder the last 34 sections so you go with a steel marking cable we have, they're all exactly eight foot on centers ,you don't cut no pickets then use this tool for the last 30 or 40 feet of that line that blends it in for you. So right so two trains of thought you could use this tool to make it all equal or in a longer line of fence you could use this tool at the end to blend it right, does it make sense? Let's show you guys how to do this, gonna be a missed, our kind of mistake it's going to locate our post holes and it's our string line we're not going to use a string right so. But if you notice it's low to the ground because the weight of the cord is here right so we just come somewhere in the middle here the cool part is can I have that please is I know where my holes are going to be so I don't want to put a stake where I'm going to be digging right so if I come right here between these two tags just about halfway I can drive this stake in here between my tags, it's not going to affect me augering my holes, wire tie this, this is key. This is one way of doing it, you go around it like this back to itself now because typically if you have a string line you guys would wrap it around that right. If I wrapped it around this I would be changing, now is it that critical, is it going to make that big of a difference if I wrap this once, probably not but I guarantee you this dimension right here is less than that one. Hold me on that tag, that's seven foot for the next stag so that's seven foot four by me wrapping that by me wrapping that I caused this section to be smaller okay so to keep everything perfect and now we've we're equally spaced. Cool you're doing it this way, you probably should keep three of these on a truck because you lay out this line and you lay out that line, you know out the next line in longer lines so three sides in the backyard as soon as I do this can I not have somebody augering. Let's say it took me one minute, let's just say it's one minute, could we not have someone augering right there right now, right now while I'm doing the other line and the other line. And then by the time I get the other two sides laid out that auger person will be past this stake as soon as he gets past his stake he can keep augering but guess what I can start setting because what's happening here doesn't change that and what's happening over here where he's augering because he could do this, push it out of the way auger the hole and I'm still sitting back here right so we're not waiting on somebody, we're not saying clear, the lawn clear the lawn get out of my way the team is continuing to work forward. Cool.