Dandan's Side Gates

[Dandan]

Right, I have a problem. When I glued the gates up I did it with them stood upright and although they are lovely and square, I never checked for any twist. Turns out, one or both of the gates is very twisted indeed.
I put the second gate in place today to put the hinges on and where the gates meet in the middle they run out from each other top to bottom by probably 40mm or more. Poop.

Does anyone have any suggestions of how I might be able to get this twist out of the gates? Will forcing them flat (or even twisting the other way) and holding them in place for a while work? I'm struggling to see how to fix this one...

 

[Inspector]

Can you offset the gate hinges on both gates half the amount so they line up in the middle? 20mm on the top of one and 20mm on the bottom of the other with shims?

Or similar with a shim of 10mm between the gate and hinge at the top and a shim between the post and hinge on the bottom. Opposite for the other gate.

Pete

 

[Trevanion]

Are you sure it's the gates and not the frame itself? 20mm of twist in each gate is quite a lot with timbers that size, not unheard of but it's still quite a lot.

 

[Dandan]

Thanks for the suggestions, there could be some workable solutions in there.
It seems to me that if a gate was twisted that much it wouldn't even have stood up unaided once glued up and they stood fine in my workshop for a week. Maybe its a combo of things although I'm sure both gate posts are plumb vertical, I'll check everything this weekend, see if I can't figure it out...

 

[Dandan]

Good news, via various means I managed to work out the twist until I had something I was reasonably happy with, the important thing is the join between the gates looks even.
I think it was an unfortunate build up of issues that often will cancel each other out but in this case it was pure bad luck that every slight error was out the same way which culminated in a big mess.
Both gate posts were ever so slightly off vertical in opposite directions, so I shimmed two diagonally opposite hinges to shift things back the other way:



This did cause a slight mis-alignment of the gate tops with the post, but I can live with this:



I laid the left hand gate on it's back on four level blocks and while it did have a little twist in it, it was probably 10mm corner to corner which didn't account for the whole twist that I was seeing. I forced it to twist back a little the other way and then screwed the cladding panels on, I know this might have put a bit of tension in the gate but it seemed to help.

Finally when I fitted the LH gate hinges, I clamped some pieces of wood across the join between the gates to try and keep them planar to each other, after all that, this is how the gates lined up:



I can live with that. (The gate on the right is sitting slightly low in this pic, it's since been adjusted)

After the last minute near-disaster, i'm still pretty pleased with the final product:







Top tip, don't try to hang an 80kg+ gate on your own. There was some shouting, it seemed to help.

I fitted the lock and drop bolts but forgot to take any pictures. Drilling holes for the drop bolts resulted in a small crater in my (surprisingly thin and hollow underneath) driveway so it will be out with the SDS and a bit of new cement to set them in properly next week, but it's basically finished.

 

[devonwoody]

As they say, where there's a will there's a way. So nice work another big job done.

 

[Fitzroy]

Look great, well done.

 

[BigMonka]

They look amazing! Such a unique design and with really impressively cool joinery on something so big.

 

[thetyreman]

looks even better than I imagined, really blends in well and makes the house look a bit more special, superb =D>

 

[TFrench]

I was climbing with a mate tonight and he showed me a facebook post of one of his mates making some gates. He was pretty surprised when I recognised them! Small world.