RogerS
Established Member
LOML asked me to make her a new garden gate. Not your run-of-the-mill gate but one something like this which was her inspiration and taken from a magazine article.
The changes would be to convert the two gates to just one gate and change the dimensions to match a very wide Georgian style front door. Her initial onsite estimates were 1300mm tall x 1400mm wide. She also wanted the gate to have 'substance' and so we decided that it would be about 55mm thick which seemed a reasonable 'fit'.
On the face of it, fairly straightforward or so it should have been, but I'm still learning! I'd like to share my thoughts and errors and, as ever, any suggestions very, very welcome as it's very much a work in progress.
First decision was type of wood - soft or hard. I had originally intended to make it from some old elm floorboards taken out of our house but being so wide just did not have enough wood. Oak was a possibility. But then LOML sad that she wanted it painted and I couldn't do that to oak!
Meranti was a possibility as I know it takes paint very well but my local timber merchants couldn't track down any 75 x 75mm Meranti. So I decided to use softwood and give LOML an annual paint brush.
My first thought was to make up a 1:1 template from some thick polystyrene insulation foam. I spent ages thinking about how to get the curves right...graphics packages, maths graphing programs, even a very old Flexicurve strip...but in the end the Mark One eyeball and a felt tip pen produced this.
Notice that I drew two curves..on the two halves...not intentional but it helped LOML decide which shape she preferred (the left one). The brown sticky tape was simply because the gate was so damn wide I needed to add on a bit of foam.
The advantage of being 1:1 soon became apparent because when viewed in situ, the gate was a monster and it was very, very easy to trim the height down to something better. Had I NOT made this simple template and gone full tilt at the final gate then the end-results would have not been what the client wanted.
How to make it?
75 x 75mm was the thickest wood that I could easily obtain. When building stuff this size you start to see the benefits of resawing but (a) not having easy access to thick stuff to resaw and (b) only having a tiddly bandsaw that wasn't really practical. I really, really wish I had bought a larger bandsaw.
So 75 x 75 meant gluing up which is what the blue lines are on the above picture. I planed and thicknessed the lengths down but just in case I needed to run the glued pieces through the thicknesser again I decided to glue it up in two separate stages. Three glued pieces of 75x75 could just about go through my thicknesser.
I used biscuits for strength and this is where seven P's (mistake 1) come in because when you cut the top arch out, you open up the biscuit joints so
Seeing that beautiful grain pattern makes me think it's a shame to paint it!
To get the correct shape and ensure it was symmetrical I traced the original curve from the foam to this template below which is used by granite worktop companies and it is very, very stable. Flipping it over allowed me to ensure the two halves were symmetrical.
Th above picture was mistake two...I used the wrong curve on the foam for the first attempt
Cutting the curves on my bandsaw required a lot of preparation to support the top arch assembly of 3 off 55 x 69 x 1400mm. Mistake 3 was not planning far enough ahead to have sufficient room to swing the arch about the place as it went through the bandsaw and mistake 4 was being lazy and not changing the blade to a smaller size. It all got very, very hairy especially when the bandsaw was still running and I couldn't get to the off switch in midcut and had run out of room to manouevre
The end result was pretty poor in the first instance which was why I went and bought some spokeshaves (and am now trainee spokeshave Grade 1) to improve things.
BASIC CONSTRUCTION
To get the basic construction I took a look at our kitchen door. Here the stiles go all the way to the top of the door but my thoughts were that if I did this that the endgrain would be exposed to the elements and so would rot even if painted. Diag B below.
An alternative would be to make the stiles end below the arch as in Diag A. but this would allow the endgrain to be visible when the gate was opened. I toyed with Diag C for a while but could not come up with any sensible form of joint (other than the mitre which I thought would be much weaker than a tenon and mortice). Not being able to piicture how I could combine both tenon/mortice and mitre, I opted for Diag A.
The stiles in the kitchen door are rebated to take tongue and groove. Originally I planned to use the 'Rat to do this but at 1200mm or so long, my gate stiles needed fixing to the mortice rail. Now factor in the Xtreme Xtension and the router plate mounted on two raising plates in compensation, I found the whole thing rather unstable. Also, as I tracked the mortice rail along the 'Rat, the cut line went out by a couple of mm over the length of the stile. Not good. Of course, I now realise that I could hand feed the stile through the Rat but I feel more comfortable doing the rebate on the router table.
I then realised my next mistake. Since I need to run a rebate also around the arch, I intend to use a cutter with a bearing guide. But of course by this time I'd cut the top arch out of the raw material like so
which gives me little support for my router.
What I should have done was just make one cut so
Which would have given me much needed support for the router base. Fortunately, as you can see, I kept the offcut and so should be able to get some support to dig me out of the hole.
This same mistake also came back to haunt me as I had no easy means of clamping up the second part of the arch. Fortunately the offcut again saved my day like so..
So here are the two parts of the arch all glued up and ready for final bandsawing.
and the final arch is now ready to be rebated
...to be continued
The changes would be to convert the two gates to just one gate and change the dimensions to match a very wide Georgian style front door. Her initial onsite estimates were 1300mm tall x 1400mm wide. She also wanted the gate to have 'substance' and so we decided that it would be about 55mm thick which seemed a reasonable 'fit'.
On the face of it, fairly straightforward or so it should have been, but I'm still learning! I'd like to share my thoughts and errors and, as ever, any suggestions very, very welcome as it's very much a work in progress.
First decision was type of wood - soft or hard. I had originally intended to make it from some old elm floorboards taken out of our house but being so wide just did not have enough wood. Oak was a possibility. But then LOML sad that she wanted it painted and I couldn't do that to oak!
Meranti was a possibility as I know it takes paint very well but my local timber merchants couldn't track down any 75 x 75mm Meranti. So I decided to use softwood and give LOML an annual paint brush.
My first thought was to make up a 1:1 template from some thick polystyrene insulation foam. I spent ages thinking about how to get the curves right...graphics packages, maths graphing programs, even a very old Flexicurve strip...but in the end the Mark One eyeball and a felt tip pen produced this.
Notice that I drew two curves..on the two halves...not intentional but it helped LOML decide which shape she preferred (the left one). The brown sticky tape was simply because the gate was so damn wide I needed to add on a bit of foam.
The advantage of being 1:1 soon became apparent because when viewed in situ, the gate was a monster and it was very, very easy to trim the height down to something better. Had I NOT made this simple template and gone full tilt at the final gate then the end-results would have not been what the client wanted.
How to make it?
75 x 75mm was the thickest wood that I could easily obtain. When building stuff this size you start to see the benefits of resawing but (a) not having easy access to thick stuff to resaw and (b) only having a tiddly bandsaw that wasn't really practical. I really, really wish I had bought a larger bandsaw.
So 75 x 75 meant gluing up which is what the blue lines are on the above picture. I planed and thicknessed the lengths down but just in case I needed to run the glued pieces through the thicknesser again I decided to glue it up in two separate stages. Three glued pieces of 75x75 could just about go through my thicknesser.
I used biscuits for strength and this is where seven P's (mistake 1) come in because when you cut the top arch out, you open up the biscuit joints so
Seeing that beautiful grain pattern makes me think it's a shame to paint it!
To get the correct shape and ensure it was symmetrical I traced the original curve from the foam to this template below which is used by granite worktop companies and it is very, very stable. Flipping it over allowed me to ensure the two halves were symmetrical.
Th above picture was mistake two...I used the wrong curve on the foam for the first attempt
Cutting the curves on my bandsaw required a lot of preparation to support the top arch assembly of 3 off 55 x 69 x 1400mm. Mistake 3 was not planning far enough ahead to have sufficient room to swing the arch about the place as it went through the bandsaw and mistake 4 was being lazy and not changing the blade to a smaller size. It all got very, very hairy especially when the bandsaw was still running and I couldn't get to the off switch in midcut and had run out of room to manouevre
The end result was pretty poor in the first instance which was why I went and bought some spokeshaves (and am now trainee spokeshave Grade 1) to improve things.
BASIC CONSTRUCTION
To get the basic construction I took a look at our kitchen door. Here the stiles go all the way to the top of the door but my thoughts were that if I did this that the endgrain would be exposed to the elements and so would rot even if painted. Diag B below.
An alternative would be to make the stiles end below the arch as in Diag A. but this would allow the endgrain to be visible when the gate was opened. I toyed with Diag C for a while but could not come up with any sensible form of joint (other than the mitre which I thought would be much weaker than a tenon and mortice). Not being able to piicture how I could combine both tenon/mortice and mitre, I opted for Diag A.
The stiles in the kitchen door are rebated to take tongue and groove. Originally I planned to use the 'Rat to do this but at 1200mm or so long, my gate stiles needed fixing to the mortice rail. Now factor in the Xtreme Xtension and the router plate mounted on two raising plates in compensation, I found the whole thing rather unstable. Also, as I tracked the mortice rail along the 'Rat, the cut line went out by a couple of mm over the length of the stile. Not good. Of course, I now realise that I could hand feed the stile through the Rat but I feel more comfortable doing the rebate on the router table.
I then realised my next mistake. Since I need to run a rebate also around the arch, I intend to use a cutter with a bearing guide. But of course by this time I'd cut the top arch out of the raw material like so
which gives me little support for my router.
What I should have done was just make one cut so
Which would have given me much needed support for the router base. Fortunately, as you can see, I kept the offcut and so should be able to get some support to dig me out of the hole.
This same mistake also came back to haunt me as I had no easy means of clamping up the second part of the arch. Fortunately the offcut again saved my day like so..
So here are the two parts of the arch all glued up and ready for final bandsawing.
and the final arch is now ready to be rebated
...to be continued
