Home Improvement

Haus said:

OK, what you need here to do your wood frame idea but with more long term stability will be a couple tensioner kits...

Put them where the green lines are :
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I've done this to realign wooden gates where the frame starts to sage with gravity. It's like a boob job for your wife once her nipples get to her belly button, pulls em right back into place.

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Finally got around to redoing my fence since I'm off for two weeks between jobs. Moderately happy. We'll see how it holds up. I still need to get some latches for it. May go stainless instead of that black painted look.

I kept the hinges on the back because when I removed the original gate almost all the bolts broke at the head and I was a little timid to go through the process of removing the side attached to the 6x6s and then work around all of the snapped off bolts.

Kept those but did not reuse the 4x4s on the gate, instead just used cedar 2x4s. Believe there's enough scrap to do a center rail if I need to in order to secure the pickets, right now they're just screwed top and bottom with #8 1-5/8" stainless screws. The tension systems on Amazon look good but they're for 90 degree corners so that the bracket slips right over. My corners are 95 and 85 degrees. I was off by about 0.3 degrees after glue up. Half lap joints on the frame, Titebond III, the cross piece is glued and pocket holes against the supporting face, didn't do any fancy joinery there.

Also picked through about 300 cedar pickets at HD and jesus christ. Next time I'm just buying my own cedar boards and making them from stock. Like 99% of them were completely shit with knots, cracks, half the side eaten away. Not a single damn one is edge jointed so using the scrap 3/8" piece for separation was useless. Had to fiddle and fudge but tried to keep my corrections to the inside bottoms so that at least the tops looked fine. You can barely see the fence from the road anyhow.




I swung on the end of it and rode it while it opened, by the way. I feel like that's something you do as an official end of project test for fun.

*edit: Didn't mean to quote that post by Haus, meant to quote my original with the before picture.... uh, that's too much work to fix.

Here you go Lanx

Look at all the gadgets!

I’m so retarded.

Was playing fetch and running with the dog in the backyard and was like “Oh let me put the latch on the gate real quick!” Never did it after finishing just had logs propped up against it and we barely open it, as stated before.

Pop, pop, screw, screw. Viola latch! Wind blows and the damn thing just swings open. At that point realized that I’m dumb and since it is a double gate the little bolt latch I liked wasn’t going to work how I wanted.

Back to hardware store!

lurker said:

Get a cane bolt for one side.

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Yeah, I considered that but was trying to avoid it. The previous owner put that slab of concrete right in the middle where they meet. It probably wouldn't take chipping / drilling down too much for a recess to sit the bolt. I just honestly didn't like that solution so was trying to be more complicated about it..

I'm not sure what that's going to do? Let it gently roll off that 10" drop and continue to swing open? Is it a locking caster?

I like what you're saying though. My initial idea was to just take something like that and replace the caster with a rubber foot that was spring loaded so that when it was closed it could compress on top of that concrete stump and maybe also provide some relief instead of using the tension system mentioned earlier. Then when opened extend to the ground and keep it open for the minute or two it needed to sit. There was one at Home Depot today that I almost picked up just to give it a shot or see about modifying. It wasn't locking though.

Thanks for the sarcastic post with nothing but the picture and some question marks though.

BrutulTM said:

No sarcasm intended. If you had wheels on it, you wouldn't need the concrete was my thought. Put the wheels on both gates and then get rid of the concrete which is probably going to take out your muffler some time while you're trying to use the gate.

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It's fine. I was in a shitty mood because had a third round of spine injection today and can barely move my right arm or breathe without my neck and back hurting. It was me reading too much in to your post and projecting.

I'll give an overly long response to make up for my injustice.

I'm sure the concrete is causing more issues and for the life of me not sure why the previous owners put it in. Even when we bought the house a little over a year ago there was nothing fixed to the stump and it didn't appear to be serving any purpose. Looking at the pictures of the old gate they had a hook at the bottom and a latch in the middle that went nowhere. The "functioning" latch was on the outside.

I'd prefer not to have the latch on the outside for aesthetic reasons and the 0.1% of extra safety that it would provide. Not that anyone would care about jumping over a 6' gate if they were really committed. So I'm not fooling myself there.

The gate swings in towards the back.



Removing that concrete, to me, was more trouble / bothersome than making the gate. Wood is familiar to me concrete isn't. Really not much more than just doing what you're familiar with and not framing the scope around the unfamiliar concrete. About the time the gate was up it occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be too difficult to just destroy that stump and be done with it. I could still do that and just replace the pickets actually.

Currently we only ever use it to move the lawn mower from the front to the back, in the future though it may be used to store a small RV behind the fence. There's about 12' of width there. But not in any danger of bumping in to anything crucial. We'd have to get that whole section redone and paved to move something in and out. The other side lines up somewhat nicely with going straight up our driveway.

Daidraco Yeah, I think my though process was to go back with what was there and two smaller gates seemed easier than one 12' gate. If / when I need to replace it again (probably when it is all totally redone to support the extended parking area) I'd look for something different. This was my first gate build and I figure at the worst I'm out $200 in wood and a day of fun building.

Goatface You know though, this is an idea that sparks joy. It is opened once a week in summer and probably zero times in winter. A drop bar would be kind of cool and medieval. I have left over cedar. Maybe I'll just do that.

I'll apologize to y'all for being a dick, but not to my wife. I'm grumpy as hell.

My actual first thought was "Don't have some bailing wire sitting around somewhere?"

Erronius said:

My actual first thought was "Don't have some bailing wire sitting around somewhere?"

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No, probably not a bad thing to have around. Tiger wood, Zebra wood, Cherry, Walnut, assorted casters, drawer slides, a whole shelf of epoxies, wood glues, rope, paracord, marking string, clamps, threaded rods, tow straps, recovery straps, tie downs.

No baling wire.

BrutulTM said:

10-20 good whacks with a sledge hammer will turn that thing into gravel. Good way to take out frustration too.

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Be sure to wear your safety squints