Featured Projects: A Stair-Stepped Fence with Metal Posts and Oz-Brackets

Our featured customer project this month comes from Russ in North Carolina who used Large Oz-Brackets to build this beautiful wood fence on sloping ground.  You'll notice that Russ chose to stair-step the fence panels, meaning that each successive panel is a little higher than the next.  The result is that the fence follows the angle of the ground, but the top of each panel is perfectly level.

Looking at photo above would lead one to believe that the entire fence is constructed of wood, but that isn't true.  Russ actually used 2 3/8" metal posts to anchor the fence in the ground.  Metal posts have a much longer life in the ground than wood because their not susceptible to rot or insect damage.  To accomplish the natural look of all wood, Russ built a wood facade around the metal posts using OZ-Brackets and wood boards.  From the neighbor side of the fence, its nearly impossible to tell that he didn't use wood posts.

To the left is a closeup of one of the wood facade columns that Russ built around the metal post.  He used 5/4 x 8 boards to give the columns more depth.

You can also see the large OZ-Brackets on the top and bottom rails.  The large brackets have extra long tabs and enough wood screws to fasten the sides of the facade walls and also the horizontal rails.  When the fence is finished, the brackets are covered by the wood boards, so nobody knows they are there.


















Below is a picture of the fence halfway through construction.  You can clearly see that while the top of the fence is perfectly level, the bottom of the fence follows the slope of the terrain.  Building the fence this way ensures that there are no large gaps at the bottom of the fence that animals can crawl under.

Kudos to Russ for a job well done, and many thanks to him for sharing the photos with us and our readers.

If you are a customer of Signet Fence that has a great fence or railing project that you'd like to share on our blog, drop us a line at info (at) signetfence.com.