When I was a kid, my dad would get a $50 timber permit every year and we would take off in two farm trucks to the Snowy Range (Wyoming). This was always one of my favorite chores since we spent about half of our time there fishing for brookies, and the rest cutting trees for posts. It took a lot of posts to keep up the fences on a 24,000+ acre ranch. On the way home, a week or more later, we would drop all the tree sections at a friend of Dad's in Wheatland who had a post maker, sort of a giant pencil sharpener type of contraption, for a small fee. When we went to pick them up, eventually, he would have them all spaced with dunage, and when we got them to the ranch we also stacked them spaced with dunage as well, they need to be completely dry for the next step--months later--often we would be cutting the next years before the previous years were all processed. At the ranch we had a trough made of two barrels welded end to end -- not half circle barrel halves, more like 2/3rd barrels so the opening on the side was somewhat smaller than the widest part in the middle. We had some home-made tongs that grabbed a post well too. There was a chemical, IIRC it was called "Tanna" that had copper napthanate and CCA in it. You mixed this stuff one gallon to 20 gallons of diesel. Wear good gloves, glasses, and keep some water around, because while the mixture doesn't seem too bad, if you get some of the tanna on you straight it burns like hell. We also added some used motor oil to the mix when we had some to get rid of. One of my other chores when I went out to feed the horses, rabbits, chickens, bottle calves, gather the eggs, etc. etc. was to every other day take the posts (about ten or so)that had been in the trough for two days out, stack them on dunage, put some more in the trough, make sure there was enough treatment to cover them, and weight them down with some big rocks or block so they didn't float. I think CCA was some of the stuff that the EPA cracked down on, but the copper napthanate is still easy to come by. I don't know if there is such a thing as the concentrated stuff to mix with diesel anymore, but I'm sure that even if you did use tar, copper napthate, and or motor oil, diesel would be good to thin the mix and help it penetrate better as well as be an inexpensive way to get more preservative. Also setting those posts in dry Quickcrete and wetting them in or just waiting for the weather to do it for you would also be a deterrent to bugs and help keep the preservative where you put them and sets them really tight to boot. Even if too costly for a big ranch, it wouldn't take that much for a few dozen posts.

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