"> How would you go about forming these slots? What sort of tool?
Buy the finished poles at the Home Depot or Lowes. I believe they call it a split rail fence and sell the posts and the fence boards, too.
But, as many woodworking enthusiasts, my knowledge of fencing in livestock is somewhat limited. Thus, I would suggest you might Google "livestock fencing installers" to get an idea of what works before "tooling up."
Yes, I've seen this a million times. If it were me, I'd either use Swingmans idea, which seems the cheapest and easiest to install, or I'd buy posts with mortises already in them, something like this:
Between me and the golf course I regularly go there is an old homestead that has horses. The front "yard" is about 50 acres that boarders the road that takes me to the golf course. Occasionally there are several horses grazing in the front yard. There is NO fence. About a foot or less off the ground there is a wire, one wire with white ribbons tied to it. It does not appear to be those buried sonic things that keep dogs in, because one, it ain't buried, and two, I've seen horses grazing right along side the fence. The road is very busy with a 45 mph speed limit and the average speed is at least 50mph. The horses could just step over the "fence" A two year old baby could step over the fence. I've never seen anything like this and always wonder WTF? Apparently these folks know what they are doing, but it always makes me nervous when I drive past and a horse is near the "fence". It makes me crazy to see this and not know what the trick is.
All I know about horses is what I used to see on the Saturday morning cowboy shows when I was a kid, and that they are far harder to ride than it looks...
Perhaps you need to plane and sand them instead so they are really smooth and unsuitable for satisfying the horses' needs :-)
Or sand paper and some hot pepper :-)
Mart> >> They also love to scratch their asses on the fence and I've seen plenty
I can't do that with my lathe !! Jerry
Your kidding right? a good Dresage horse wouldn't find it a challenge at all, and short of using a hot wire on the fence wouldn't discourage many a horse from eating their way through them.
Lee
how about start with half-posts - use a dado or table saw or other fast cutting saw to make the slots, then glue the posts together with a waterproof glue. That will be much faster than any other means and will give you nice square edged slots
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