Building A Gate That Makes Your Neighbours Jealous

hey what's up everyone welcome back to how another episode so today we're going to be showing you how we replace this sorry excuse of a gate to this gate let's fit for even the queen so the gate itself is situated between part of my workshop and obviously the edge of the property and if you can't already tell it's not really doing anything and it just looks garbage so to kick things off obviously we gotta remove this existing gate which really isn't a difficult task once that's done i can scrape back a bunch of the outer chips to kind of expose the ground to which the posts that support the new gate are going into and then i can find out the positions of those new posts and start digging some hulls so fortunately this post here in the existing fence is dead in line with the front of the shop so that's my line for the post but the distance between the two posts is governed by a couple of things so the one thing is that i want to make sure that the arch on the top of the gate clears the eaves of the workshop so i get to set that distance up enough so obviously it misses and then secondly it's got to be wide enough so i can fit my craftsman beast straight through it into the backyard [Music] so now that we have the position of the two new posts set it's now time for the painful task of digging the holes so i've got a couple of tips when digging post those like these two when they're really deep and kind of narrow so for me i like to use my five-year-old and this one in particular has those really long skinny arms which are great for going in deep holes and getting out all the loose material so you don't have to break your back puff your arms get them get the rocks at the bottom the ones at the bottom okay got them and secondly again using your five-year-old is to make a mark at the height of your hole for instance i want mine to be at 26 inches deep so i can make a mark on him and then i can use them to check the depth of the hole [Music] we gotta go a little deeper thank you that way i'm not getting my tape measure covered in grit and dirt and it stays nice and clean so now that the two holes are fully dug out i sealed the underside of the post to where they actually sit in the ground just to kind of help preserve them over the years to come i'll support a couple of inches of gravel in the bottom of the holes to help drain away any of the water so next i'm going to add a couple of braces to hold the post nice and plumb and in position while i fill the rest of the hole up with concrete [Music] [Music] and then meanwhile while the concrete cures when we head over into the studio and make a start on the gate and the panels the two parts of the gate and the two side panels are made the exact same way which is why i got a bunch of this rough sawn cedar so i get the two by twelves for the top curved rail two by fours for the two side rails and the bottom rail and this v joint tongue and groove for the inside panels of both the gate and the side panels so for now to get things rolling i'm going to put aside the tongue and groove material and start marking out and breaking down the rest of the material for the frame of the gate and the side panels [Music] so now that all my components are roughly cut to length they're still a little bit too thick and a little bit too wide and because it's rough sawn it's not very flat so we're going to take it over to the boneyard and put them through the jointer to get them nice and flat [Music] and then put them through the planer to bring them down to one and a half inches in thickness [Music] once that's done i can bring them over to the studio and then put them through the table saw to bring them all down to two and a half inches in width and now with all my material for the rails all milled up to the thickness that i want i can now start cutting to the length and the shape so to begin with i'm going to start cutting the bottom rails to length on my table saw i'm also going to put a nice 90 degree cut on the bottoms of the side rails but i'm going to leave them long for now until i've cut all the curved pieces so the gate and panels themselves are fairly simple until we get to the curve section and that's when it gets a little bit more complicated fortunately for me as i designed the gate and drew it out on my computer i was able to send it over to my cnc and get a couple of templates cut out the perfect size of those curved sections and i'm aware not everyone is able to go and cut out a couple of jigs on their cnc so if you at home wanted to recreate this gate that i'm making i'm going to have available to download on my website rad dadbuilds.com a life-size printout of all the jigs that i'm going to be using in this video so that way you can download it go print it out and then stick it on a piece of plywood or a piece of mdf and then cut it out and then you'll have a template of your own exactly like these ones so now that i have the templates for the curved section one for the gate and one for the panel i'm going to screw them down to a two by twelve and now that the jigs are attached to the template i'm going to cut away the 2 by 12 about 1 8 of an inch away from the edge of the template once that was done i then put a flushing bit into my router table and then proceeded to remove the remaining material [Applause] so that turned out perfectly my top rails are cut and i'm super happy with them it's a it's a bit of a process but it works great so now i can start to puzzle together the gate and the panels and kind of figure out the heights that i want my top rails to be once they're all figured out i can make a couple of marks to add some dominoes in each of the corners to kind of help hold the gate frames together as well as help with alignment when i finally come to glue them together [Music] [Music] so now that these are all pretty much dry assembled and they look perfect really obviously the tops of the side rails are a little bit too long so i'm going to mark out and cut them just over size so that once the whole thing is glued together i can clean it up with my sander so in order for my inside panel to fit nice and snug inside the gate i gotta cut a dado on the inside of all the rails like this one so this dado is five eighths of an inch thick which is the same thickness as my tng so i set up a 5 8 of an inch dado bit into my router table and set the height at half an inch i then proceeded to remove that channel on the inside of all of my rails so now that all my dados are cut and all of the inside of the rails i made sure on the verticals to not cut through the joinery so i started it a little bit later and i pulled it out before it got through to the very end else you have a bit of a gap at the top and bottom of the gate which isn't ideal so now i can cut the tng to about four feet in high and lay it all down flat on my bench because now i'm going to do a little bit of a cheat so i just put together a small section of the tongue and groove just a little bit wider than the inside of my frame and then instead of trying to figure out the measurements for that curve what i'm going to do is i'm just going to sit the frame on top and then kind of adjust it till it sits nice and parallel to the tongue and groove and then once i'm happy with how it's set in i'm going to then mark the inside of the frame so obviously if i just cut this out now when i go to put it together it's just going to fall all the way through so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a mark 3 8 of an inch away from that line so that's going to sit nice and snug inside the groove of the frame but it's not going to be so tight so if it expands and contracts it's not going to bust the frame apart which would suck so once i made the marks at 3 8 of an inch and then cut it to size and now that my inside panels are all cut i can then make sure they fit nice and snug inside of all the frames and then take them all apart give everything a good sand and then glue and clamp all the frames together and let them dry for a couple of hours [Music] [Music] and then meanwhile while they're drying we can make a start on that upper arch so the arch itself is kind of big and it's a little bit too big for me to make a template out on my small cnc so i'm gonna have to do that the old-fashioned way so i've gone ahead and printed one of the paper templates of the arch which will be available at radbuilds.com and suck it down to a sheet of plywood i then carefully cut the plywood just a little bit away from the line of the template and then cleaned it and sanded it up to the line with my sander [Applause] so now i got a perfect template of this arch cut out i can now transfer this template onto some actual wood so next i go ahead and cut and assemble some two by twelves in and behind the template making sure that all areas are covered i then made a mark of the template on the two by twelves and a couple more marks where i can and cannot add some dominoes obviously i don't wanna see any kind of dominoes or joinery where i'm going to be cutting out so placement is really important so once i've marked out where i'm going to be putting my dominoes and where not for my dominoes i can start cutting those in and then i can glue and clamp this whole arch together now with this dry and out of the clamps i can now cut out my shape of my template just about an eighth of an inch away from my line and then once that's cut out i can then screw down the template to the actual cutout then remove the remaining material with the flushing bit in my router [Music] so obviously i made two arches in total one for either side of the posts [Music] so now when most of the parts of this project are all made up apart from those little pieces that sit above the two arches which we're going to get to in a little bit i'm going to give everything a really really good set and then going to smooth over any of the sharp edges i'm also going to round over the points on the top of the gate and the panel [Music] and then i'm going to give all the components including the post outside a good seal with an oil-based primer and then meanwhile while all that primer is quickly drying i can go ahead and cut some one and a half inch by one inch length on my table saw out of some of the scrap material that i have left over i then cut them down into nine inch sections and then primed each piece [Music] and once these are primed and painted they are going to be screwed down to the top of the arch to give it a bit of a decorative look so now that the gate and the panels and the arches and all the little pieces are all primed up next i want to go and fill any of the knots the dents the holes the cracks consistencies stuff like that before we go ahead and paint i also want to make sure that everything is going to fit in between the posts that i've set before i paint so i'm going to give the whole thing a bit of a dry run i'm going to temporarily attach the hinges to the gate and attach the gate to the actual posts out there i'm also going to toenail in the side panels from the back and then attach the arches to the post as well so now that i know that the whole thing kind of fits together and it's all going to work before i move any further ahead on this project i want to make sure that all surfaces have at least one coat of paint so before i permanently fix anything together i'm going to strip it all back down give all the primer a good sand and then give everything its first coat of paint so for me the painting stage of any project is always my least favorite mostly because it takes so much patience and a lot of time and that's two things i don't have a lot of so for me ultimately i end up putting two coats of paint on all of the surfaces on all individual components and i'm happy how it's looking so now i can officially say i'm gonna go outside and install everything permanently [Music] fix and repair any of the screw holes that i made [Music] put on these solar power lights that i bought and install the most badass handles you will ever witness in your life [Music]

Channel: Rad Dad Builds

Views: 124,010

Keywords: gate, garden gate, build a gate, yard, yard makeover, garden makeover, fence, how to build a fence

Id: Q2vmjsLSMJw

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022