Most of your fence is in good repair, but one of the boards is not. You have renailed it many times, and now it's so far gone that it must be replaced. Your first thought is to go to the local lumber yard, pick up a replacement board, cut it to fit and nail it in place. The problem is you might have to spend all weekend trying to color it to match the rest of your fence.

The secret to repairing a fence is to use old boards from an obscure section of the fence to make the repair, and then to put the new boards in place of those used to make the repair.

The trick is to get the old fence board off without damaging it. Your first thought might be to pull the nails. If you are good at it and extremely careful, you might not do much damage.

You could try punching the nails through the board into the rail. Although this reduces the chance of hammer marks and cracked wood, there is a drawback. Most fence boards are nailed on to the fence frame with galvanized box nails. Galvanized nails have a rough surface and are hard to pull, and box nails have big heads. When the big head is punched through the board it leaves a big hole. Nailing the old board at another location means using a new hole and leaving the old holes exposed.

Use our method and no one will ever know that the board was reused. This is not suggested to tear down a barn, but it is a good technique to use when replacing a half dozen fence boards.

All you'll need is an electric drill and a three-sixteenths-inch metal bit. Use a sharp punch to countersink a starter mark in the head of the nail to be removed. Once this has been done, the work is about over. Use the electric drill to drill through the nail head. Since the bit is larger than the diameter of an eight-penny nail, the head will pop off the nail shaft as soon as the bit traverses the thickness of the head.

Fence boards are usually held in place with four nails, so the process will have to be performed that many times on each board. The nice thing about this method is that nails which have sunken below the surface are as easy to remove as those that are readily accessible.

Once the heads have been removed from all of the nails that hold the fence board in place, remove the board by prying it away from the frame with a flat pry bar a little at the top, then a bit at the bottom, gently, until the board can be pulled completely off the frame by hand.

The remaining nail shafts then can be removed, clipped or driven into the frame, and the old nail holes in the old boards can be reused.