Fun with gates

[Bird]

<font color=blue>a little town</font color=blue>

When I moved to Plano in '56 and drove through Wylie very regularly, going to Lake Lavon, Wylie really was a little town, but all the construction going on out there now is unbelievable! Of course Plano was a little town then, too, and look what's happened to all that farm land.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

I thought I'd share some of the funner gates I've had the pleasure of making.

This gate latch started out as a piece of scrap sitting in a pile by the chop saw. It caught my eye and I'll be doggoned if it didn't look just like the hood of a Peterbuilt. It went downhill from there.

To open the gate you tilt the bed back. To close it you bring it back down to rest. Inside the bed is some eyes for holding a padlock.

It's heavy and Tonka was so impressed with it they haven't said a word about using their tires and wheels!

 

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closed

 

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This is a section of fence. I do believe I'm the only guy to have built a fence in a fence. Now that's a goal worth striving for!

If you look you will see brands in the top section of the fence. There are seven of them repeated. They're all from my imagination using the initials of family members. Except of course for that one with international no symbol with an L in it. That I got from a christmas thingy.

 

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Here's a detail from the gate at the same home. They turned me loose, not a good thing to do. They are such a strong family unit that the only image that worked for me was this.

 

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This is a gate I did at my uncle's place in Camp Verde Arizona. We did it right there off the truck. I'd brought along some surplus five eighths bar stock just for grins. They wanted a walk gate and let me go with it. Again, not a good thing to do.

What was fun was the pieces were just so long so the gate was short. As we stood there kicking rocks with the neighbors one of them suggested putting a hat on it. Now I've heard of throwing a hat at it if you didn't like something but, a gate?

So I asked the idea man just how he proposed me making a hat for it. He told me that a hat was just a lazy eight with a staple on top if I wanted to draw it out.

 

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This is the first gate where I used the drawing with steel technique. The ink is quarter by inch and a half bent with a home made bender.

It's where I noticed that things are really made of the same componets rearranged and used over and over. The glitz for me is always finding that componet to repeat.

 

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This is a gate that I occasionally see copied around here. And it's a copy too! The original one was for the local high school. I'd told them I'd build them a gate for five hundred dollars. When it came time to do the gate I was near broke and the opening was twenty six feet.

So I went through my scrap pile and the design and dimensions were the results of the sizes of the materials in the scrap pile.

Sometimes lucky is the best thing to be.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

This gate was done with a very talented and eccentric artist. She was nuttier than a fruitcake and ten times as sweet. So the gate was all my labor and some of my creativity leaned on by her wanting something and me not always being able to find it.

The lamps are a good example. She'd purchased some really high dollar ones and I'd installed them. Within two hours of my leaving after the installation she was on the phone wanting me to come back and take them down cause she was terrified someone would break the glass and ruin them. Then she wanted me to make something that could take abuse. The globes are Home Depot's cheapest. The stems and leaves were hand made by me.

If you look closely at the gate post you will see John Deere disc separators put to a use they were never designed for but then why should they be exempt from abuse?

 

[wroughtn_harv]

This is what you do when there's a tree dead in the middle of the new fence line.