garden wall / fence

[Dandan]

Hi all,
I need to replace my front garden wall, and thought it would be a good excuse to practice some big chunky, screw free joinery.
I've got a rough idea of what I want, it's a japanese inspired style with a brick base and wooden 'fence' mounted into it. The picture is of a single section, you'll have to use your imagination to multiply it a few times to make up the full wall, and ignore the post caps, they are a work in progress.





The question I have is does anyone have any suggestions for what joints to use between the small uprights and the top horizontal bar? The large lower horizontal bar will be straight through the uprights and tusked on the outside (or should I do the inside too?), same with the small uprights which would be slightly tapered through the horizontal bar I imagine, with a tusk underneath. Any idea how to attach the top horizontal onto the small uprights?

 

[Dandan]

I should clarify the large uprights are timber, they look different colours to the brick base in the design program, but the jpeg seems to have used the same shade of grey!

 

[Harbo]

How are you joining the sections together?

Rod

 

[Dandan]

I think what I would do is not have the main horizontal bar as a through tenon between sections but still have the tusk almost as just a decorative feature because the uprights being encased in concrete would hold it all together. It would look like this:



With the section through the upright looking something like this:

 

[sammy.se]

Did you ever build this? Looks ace

 

[Dandan]

Thanks, the wall has been built, i'm just deciding how much of the timber section I want to make from hardwood, because at the end of the day it's a low wall that I will hardly even see from my garden, so I don't want to go spending silly amounts on it. The design has changed a little, i'll put up a thread when I actually start building it.

 

[Dandan]

It took a while but I finally made the first section of this wall:



The design went through a few iterations but this is what I ended up with. Hollow 220mm square posts made from mitred 50x225 softwood planks, cedar shingle post caps, softwood cross beam with a sapele curved bar held together with sapele pegs, dowels and wedged tenons.







The cross beam was not really supposed to colour match the curved beam quite so well, one is oiled and one is painted so it was pure bad luck, I was hoping for a bit more contrast!
The hole on the right hand post is for the next cross beam that makes a 90 degreee turn down the side of the garden

 

[AndyT]

That looks very classy! I'm sure you will have people asking who built it and how they can get one like it.

 

[Matt Cook]

Wow, this looks nice. how many days you took to finish this fence?