At Model club last night (5-8-15) I asked the question what was the best way to model line fencing in 'N' gauge, the reply that I was given was basically that it would so small that I needn't bother, mainly because no-one would miss it.

I thought ...."Challenge Accepted"

With an afternoon off work I decided to set to and think about how I could build a lineside country fence within scale and most of all quite cheaply, I know you can buy fencing, but it works out very expensive when you want to do a whole layout, so there had to be an alternative.

Matchsticks were out of scale, massively. Further digging in the shed led me to a box of wire I've had hanging around for a while, in there was all sizes.

I dug out some twin and earth, it looked just right 1.2mm, after stripping off the sheath it was a bit twisted and bent.

I drilled a 1mm hole through piece of wood and drew the wire through it, that helped to straighten it out, further straightening was done by rolling the wire between some softwood and the bench, that just about ironed out all the kinks in it. I cut it into 15mm lengths to give me a six foot post and some extra to put into the baseboard, the actual wire cam from some stranded wire, two strands twisted together looked about right.

I made up a small jig to hold the posts and set about soldering the wire to them, my first effort looked OK, my soldering isn't the best, but a file here and there, then a coat of paint would hide a lot of the sins.

I was quite pleased with the "trial run" so I decided to make a bigger jig and see how that went.

I still need some practice with the soldering iron, getting totally different thickness copper wire to soldering temp is proving a problem, but I'm bound to improve with practice !

The pins are there to hold the horizontal wires against the posts, one less thing to try and hold while I am soldering, I also discovered that having a clean iron tip is an aid to better soldering, only I was a bit too vigorous with the wire brush, so the tip is quite stubby now.

Not a bad afternoon all things considered, I've got plenty of wire, and I can improve the jig a bit too.