Cemetery Fence — Moltenhead Welding

Cemetery Fence

client purchased three piles of steel fence pieces and hired me to build a fence to sit on the side of his property adjoining Mt Moriah Cemetery on the western border of Philadelphia.

Fence pieces weighed 180 lbs and were covered in rust and paint. The client had landscaping and cement laying experience so I would work by myself for the metalworking parts of the job and we worked together when I needed help positioning fences for grinding + welding, figuring out landscaping problems, laying cement, etc. One thing I appreciate about this client is he shared his landscaping + concrete skillset with me, and I’d now be able to accomplish these tasks with an assistant.

Each fence piece had two C-Channels holding a row of pickets.

To prep them, I used flapdisks on all surfaces except inside c-channels where a flapdisk wouldn’t fit.

I used a wire wheel inside c-channels.

The posts we got were 10 feet long so I cut them to 9 feet — 3 feet underground then 6 feet high. We anchored them in concrete 3 feet down to prevent frost heave from pushing the fence around over the years.

We used a string line and plumb to make sure fence ran exactly straight forward and straight up, that it remained exactly 6 feet high, and to make sure the floors of the holes were no less than 9 feet underneath the top of the fence pickets.

The holes were the first serious obstacle.

When we dug the first one, we hit what we thought was cobblestone about a foot down.

It turned out there was an underground schist wall that ran down the client’s property, directly under where the fence would be built.

The wall went deeper than the 3 feet that we had to dig to avoid frost heave, and the client’s 2-stroke honda auger might as well have been a dollar store corkscrew against it.

We manually dug 8-10 holes, then rented a jackhammer for the rest, until the wall eventually ended.

The auger dug the last 3 holes in 15-20 minutes each.

Stay tuned for more fence building pics in spring + summer 2024.

After I had the first third of the fence pieces prepped, the next step was figuring out how to connect them. For posts, I used S-Beams (I-Beams with tapered flanges) from Fazzio metals in South Jersey, and fabricated brackets with angle iron to attach the fence pieces to the webs of the S-Beams.

Silverado

Chopper