Garden Gate Part 17 - Completion

This is the final part of the build. The gate is done.

Fitting the hardware was easy as drilling pilot holes for the stainless steel fasteners was easy enough to do. This is oak and as you may know it eats mild steel for breakfast. You find that mild steel leaves black marks on oak over a period of time outside with the tannins in the oak reacting with the iron in the steel. Stainless steel on the other hand has no such issues.
The hinges were first to be fitted, the hinge brackets were then positioned with enough clearance on one of them to enable expansion/contraction of the wood and metal.

I use a Vix bit to centre drill each of the the hinge fastening holes.

VIx bit used to centre drill the holes
in the hinge bracket

Positioning one end of the strap hinge.

The same measurement was used to position
the other end of the strap hinge.

The upper hinge is shown here but the photographs are upside down for clarity. THe same process was used on the lower hinge.

Adding the self closing spring.

Now comes onto the actual gate fitting itself. Here is a picture of what is being replaced. I think it must be 25 to 30 years old and is made from softwood. It has been painted many, many times and was way past it's sell by date. Not a good advertisement for a woodworkers house I'm sure you will agree.

Old faithful before going to the dump for burial.

After a lot of work with a wrecking bar to remove the old posts. I drilled the holes for the new posts and inserted the 10mm (3/8") anchor bolts. Then the door was hung. The striker post was machined on the jointer slightly on the back side as it just needed another 1/8" taking off. I recoated the exposed wood with finish and hung the striker post. Then the self closing latch was fitted, the spring tensioned and the job was done.

The path and the road both slope. It is an optical illusion.
The gate is level

And here it is in all its glory

This has been a fun project but time consuming. I started it way back in August working on it a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, odd days at weekends and here we are at the end of November with the finished product.

I should like to thank my wife Elly for being really supportive on this project and hope people enjoy it when they walk through it.