Split Rail Fences For (and By) Dummies

This is what the fence looks like

The internet was a wild and woolly place during the recession of 2008-09, filled with people who were desperate for whatever cash they could generate at pay-per-click sites and the like. You could generate a tidy income at eHow.com in those days  for pounding out a dozen or so 300-word posts allegedly about how to do something that you looked up on the internet, just because some poor sucker typed the question into a search engine. Ideally, the person writing the how-to would know... well, how to do it. The problem at eHow? Too often the writers didn't know what they were talking about. That's when you ended up with rubbish like Rebecca Boardman wrote to explain "How to Install a Split Rail Fence,"¹ now at HomeSteady.com.

Boardman used an image of what is more properly known as a stacked rail fence on her post, but that's not what her instructions would build. In fact, the instructions Rebecca pounded out wouldn't build much of anything. She appears to have started out with some general guidelines for installing a fence and then sailed off into cloud-cuckoo land for the "split rail" part. According to Becky, you need the following to install a split rail fence: "Trees, Axe, Wedge, Helmet, Gloves."
Why do you need trees? Well, Boardman's introduction tells you that,

"Split rail fencing can be a practical choice if you live in a wooded area where you will be doing some construction. Since you will be felling trees anyway, this is a great method of recycling the downed timbers and making an attractive and useful fence."

It seems likely that Boardman has never seen the stacks of posts and rails at her local hardware, since very few people live in wooded areas these days. Be that as it may, Rebecca's steps (there are six, eHow said) include,

"Set your corner posts... Make sure your corner posts are level and in a straight line to each other."

We're at a loss as to how posts on two corners of a polygon can't be "in a straight line to each other," but that's just being pedantic. Or accurate: take your pick. Becky says to "set [a] guidewire... six inches from the ground," though  we suspect she actually meant six feet — but that would be for a privacy fence (which is probably where her general instructions came from). Then there's some boilerplate about cutting rails and setting posts, followed by this curious idea of what "split rail" means:

"Using your axe and your wedge, split these posts from the top to the bottom, forming a split that is wider at the top than at the bottom... Place your rails into your posts. This is done by hammering the rails down into the split posts."

Yes, our Dumbass of the Day actually did tell people to split the posts and pound rails into the gap. We thought long and hard about where she might come up with that cockamamie idea. We first thought that maybe Boardman had confused splitting the logs into rails with installing the rails, but what may be more likely is that she saw a picture (like the one at the left) of a split rail fence with double posts and decided she knew "how to" do that. Well, we think she didn't...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_4844264_install-split-rail-fence.html

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