New Garden Gates
To one side of our house is a courtyard area, it is thought that the original owner had kept cars, so it was surrounded by some heavy-duty fences that blocked the view of the garden. The other week we dug that up and remove the concrete with an SDS drill.
We are hoping to get a dog so having a fence on the other side of the garden would be useful to block exit to the driveway. It is a straight section so I cut of the additional tube to form a second gate post.
This allowed me to test the idea and measure up. My wife spotted that the posts need to be the the other way around so that the gate hangs the right way up with the wood facing outward.
The tubes for the new post were too small so I contacted my local steel supplier to see if they had some 80mm x 80mm x 3mm tubing. They did but only in 7m lengths. So I ordered some offcuts from Ebay instead. Whilst I was waiting for those to be shipped I decided to drill the mounting holes in the base plate. I started with a 5mm drill and worked up to 11mm as I was using 10mm bolts. Unfortunately, my 11mm drill didn’t fit into the chuck of the hand-drill so I had to improvise. The base of the pillar drill was twisted around and the drill setup on the floor. The post was then packed so it was the right height for the drill. This worked surprisingly well and the 2 holes were quickly drilled.
I cut off the shorter tubes with a grinder and used a flap disk to clean up the posts. A stick welder was used to weld up the tubes as I thought that would be quicker than TIG. I’ve only used that a couple of times before so it took me a few goes to get it right. I started off with some tack welds that just fell apart once you removed the welding slag. I then went to the other extreme and blew a hole in one of the tubes. I finally had it looking right but when I ground it back there was a nasty looking crack. So I ground out a vee in the metal and welded it one more time.
So a lot of false starts and an excess of grinding but I’m confident that these will now support the gate and survive the local storms. There are still some end caps to weld on and some tabs to bolt it to the wall. As these are smaller, I may revert to TIG to fix those in place. I’m waiting for the delivery, so it will be next weekend before those get done.
Posted in: Welding
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
[…] the addition of the two tubes to the gate post I need to weld on some end caps and some tabs to fix the post to the wall. As the stick welding had […]
[…] jig. I knew I’d need some kind of clamp to fasten to the work so I used an offcut from the gates project and sliced it in half to make 2 L shaped brackets. Using the milling machine I cut a slot in this. […]