Building a new gate.

Our old side gate sucked. It is the primary entrance for us and it had some pretty clunky chains as a lock mechanism. It was also primarily held together by chicken wire which would often times scratch you when you tried to unlock its clunky chains. It also had a bolt that Belle could not reach [BE:  it had a bolt?!] so we quickly got rid of and relied solely on the chains to keep it shut. Needless to say it was time to go.

PaGyver built some awesome redwood fences and gates for his house in La Crescenta. He used 2" thick redwood throughout and it came out awesome. His was stained a very rich red that I really liked and wanted to mimic. I could not find the exact stain but I think my version came out pretty good although it is a touch darker. I got some Behr outdoor redwood stain but it looked really bad, almost like painting red over the wood. It did not accent the grain and in general looked crappy. I will not be purchasing any of their stain in the future, even though I am a fan of their paint quality. In the end I found that I had some "red mahogany" generic stain over from the fish pond project, so I used that instead.

We also had a deadbolt left over from changing out our locks so using 2" planks rather than "standard" gate material let me use that deadbolt and get rid of the chains! Hooray! It also let us only need a single key to enter our home... /amazing. Now for the details of the build:

Materials:
8x 2"x6"x6' Redwood planks
2x 2"x4" x6' Redwood boards
1x 2"x4"x8' Redwood board for a diagonal didn't seem like it needed it so this can be skipped/
2x 4"x4"x8' Redwood beams (not yet installed)

I had measured the gate to be just over 4' so I figured using 8x 2by6's would put me pretty close and I could adjust the gaps between the boards to get the exact length (turned out to be 49 1/4) which gave me a half inch gap between planks.

I then cut the 2x4s to size and put a screw in each of the two outer boards (kind of built a frame). When everything lined up I added a couple more screws so it would not move. I then did a quick sanity check of putting every board in its place and made sure the 1/2" gap was correct. It was so I worked my way from outside in, lining up the gap and screwing the board in. The center gap was slightly less than .5 but still fine.

Belle and I had decided earlier that we wanted a simple curved top to the gate. I had picked an arbitrary top height of 6' (conveniently the length of the boards) and figured that a bend from 5' high to 6' back to 5' would look good. We knew the length of the gate was 4' so I set to google to figure out the formula for the radius. Turns out that it was not a chord/radius problem like I initially thought but really just a similar triangle math quiz. The answer can be found here but in retrospect it is very clearly a radius of 2.5'. So I measured 2.5 feet down from the top center of the gate and sank a screw into a scrap piece of wood (the screw floated between the center 2 boards). Then I tied some twine around the screw and the other end around a pencil. Holding the twine tight I traced the arc for the top of the gate, some quick jigsawing later and it was cut.

Smoothed the cuts a bit with a file, but my jigsaw work was better than normal so no need for extensive filing. I then rounded the entire front side except for the bottom edge with a router. This was actually the first time using my Ryobi router in free hand and it worked amazingly. It is not a plunge style but that did not matter here, I have been very impressed with the Ryobi line in general even though it is supposedly lower end. Router work done I sanded the top smooth and got to staining. Getting between the boards was tough at first but I really did not want to take the thing apart and stain the boards individually. I did end up taking off the 2x4s to stain the backside, but found that using the flat pencils made it very easy to get the rag inside the gaps. So I kept one 2x4 on at all times and re-lined up the holes. Stain applied it was ready to mount it.

Hanging a door is tricky, hanging a 100lb monstrosity of a gate is even trickier. I recruited Belle for some leveling help but the thing was too heavy for her to hold so I had to line it up while she screwed the massive bolts into the existing 4x4's (I will replace these later as it was getting late). We sat the gate on a small shim of wood to make lining it up easier and got it hung after 30 minutes of wrestling it. The hinges were spring loaded so the door would close a little too far leaving a nice Klee Kai sized escape route. That was quickly fixed with a left over copper bar screwed on as a stop.

I then installed the deadbolt which had some of the best instructions. Kwikset you guys rock. The instructions come with a hole template that you fold around the door and it lines up the hole saw hole and the 1" latch hole. PaGyver left some spade bits so I actually did have all the tools I needed for the install. Everything there went pretty smooth, locked it up and called it a night. Sunday I did some light finish work to it (added hole plugs and installed the handle).

Fun project, came out pretty good but not as epic as Dads. I really like the castle look from the outside, and most importantly only 1 chain lock left. That one will require welding, fun times.