How to Build a Garden Gate | Easy Step by Step Guide

a super strong and simple to make gate with a difference in this video you're going to learn how to make one you're going to learn the complete process start to finish including how to make a super strong half flap joint I'll show you how to brace a gate properly because bracing is the all important part to give a gated strength and I'll show you how to clad it in something a little bit different as well and the best bit is that any of you will be able to build a gate like this by the end of this video so my gate needs to fit between the edge of the house and this brick wall here so I'll fix a talized free two to each side one for the hinge one for the latch we'll fix that to each wall and that will give me a frame to work with now once I've decided the height that I want the frame to be I measure that Mark on a piece of Timber and cut the piece of Timber to length now I'm going to fix this in place I've got my 3 by2 clamped in place I've made sure it's nice and Plum the wall not so much now I just drill some six mm holes along the length of my pieces of Timber I'm using these the wallt anchors they're great because you don't need a plug or a washer because they've got a flanged head on them and you can just drive them home and once they're in they're super strong so we've got a bit of a frame now we've got a bit of Timber there that our gate can hinge on and a piece here that our gate can close against so now I'll show you how I build a gate to fit this opening and the first thing I'm going to do is take a measurement of the opening so that I know what size to make the gate so the opening is 940 mm but I'm going to make my gate 920 mm so that I've got a 10 m Gap either side of the gate and I want my gate to be 100 m shorter than the frame I'm going to be using these three B twos they're talized you don't need to go mad on Timber size it's more important how you brace and construct the gate than having massive Timbers I'll show you a little bit more about bracing very shortly but what we'll do now is start cutting some of these Timbers to length so that we can construct this gate now because we're going to be using half flap joints we can cut our Timbers to the actual size that we need so that's 1,800 for the height now we'll mark that for the two Styles the styles of the the tall pieces of Timber for the sides of the door and we know the width of the door needs to be 920 and we'll need three bits of Timber at 920 you'll see why shortly now we're going to cut our bits of Timber to length if you've got a mitur brilliant use it if not use your circular saw or whatever you've got you can you got two at 1,800 and three at 920 now to join our pieces of Timber together we're going to use half laap joints we use these because they're very strong and they're very easy to make they're much better than if we were to just screw through the side of the timber for example because over time you're going to get movement and movement is going to weaken the gate so take a measurement of the width of the Timber now in this case it's 71 mm and I'll mark 71 mm on my piece of Timber and if we overlap the two pieces of Timber flush them on the end we can double check that and sure enough that's the width of our Timber and we need to remove some of this material now if we look at the depth of our Timber it's 45 mm half of 45 is 22.5 and we now know we need to remove 22.5 mm of the material where each piece of Timber overlaps hence the name the half laap joint to start with we'll do that for all the corners now there's a few ways of doing it I'm going to keep this simple and use the same tool we'll just use the mitur to trench cut and remove that material for each piece of Timber I'm using the depth adjustment to set the sword to cut 22 mm I've clamped another piece of timber here to pack this piece of Timber out a bit so that my saw blade will fall right in the middle of that piece of Timber now this Saw's got a shadow line rather than a laser not sure if you can see it there but now I can make a series of trench cuts across this piece of Timber the trick to this is to keep all of those cuts nice and close together and then we can use a hammer to remove the material you can see I hit the majority of that away with the hammer and now I can use a nice sharp chisel to remove the rest of that material now whilst there's many ways to do a half lap joint this is by far the simplest so repeat that for the rest of the Timbers so I'm just dummying the gate up now just adjoining my style with my cross members here but there's one more cross member you'll notice that we cut that third one which also needs a half laap joint now I like to use a half laap joint for my crossmember because quite simply it's stronger and when I show you how we do the braces in a little while you're going to see why we need all the strength we can get on the cross member we can now assemble the gate now I'll start with my crossmember here in the middle should be a nice tight snug fit to assemble your half laap joint you're going to want some exterior gray glue this Gorilla Glue is interior and exterior so that's fine and you'll want some screws for this size Timber 40 mm is perfect you want to put plenty of glue on the joint I like to do that on both sides Pop That Joint together and then I'll just dummy up the other two by dummying those up it just gives me a little bit of assurance that everything's somewhat square and I can start by fixing this joint in place don't go too near the edge cuz you don't want to split it and that will will be an absolutely solid half flap joint repeat that for all four corners and now I just take off any excess glue so the frame's not quite finished yet we've still got to do our brace but we do need to check to see how Square it is so that we can adjust it if necessary and if I bring you around here you can see it's already very good so not much adjustment to do so I think what we'll do now is get some braces cut and the braces are often the bit that people get very conf confused with so I want to show you how to properly cross brace a gate so that it doesn't sag on the floor or bind on the frame a few weeks down the line now the most important part of any gate structure is the bracing it's not the sizes of the Timber that give it its strength but the braces and their position that stop it from sagging and dragging along the floor so here is our gate and here are the hinges for the gate you can see the center brace there now gravity dict Ates that our gate will sag along this edge here so to correctly brace a gate we need a brace here and a brace here as this side of the gate tries to drop the load will be transferred onto these pieces of timber here if we did it the wrong way and put our braces here like this as the latch side of the gate drops the distance between this point and this point would become greater and this brace that we put in would do absolutely nothing because this Gap would become bigger so to keep it really simple the lowest point of the brace should always be on the hinge side of the gate I've put a center line across my piece of Timber that I'm using for my cross brace and then I'll position that into the corners where I can Mark to make my cuts now if your gate is somewhat Square it should be a 45° [Applause] cut now you want this to be a nice snug fit and then just fix the brace in place with some screws so the cross braces are in this is the hinge side this is the latch side top and bottom now we could put loads of weight on that top corner but it would never sag because of the compression on our cross bracers now although this is talized Timber so it shouldn't rot I just want to put a little bit of stain on the side of the gate that's going to be clad because of course once it's clad we can't stain it there we go nice touch of light oak we can finish staining the later but for now let's get it clad now with my cladding I'm going against the grain get it against the grain I'm not a massive fan of your usual FEA Edge boards this is a FEA Edge Board probably the most common board for fencing and Gates that you see across the country but I want something a little bit nicer so I bought these deck boards and I'm going to create my cladding with these so I measure and cut all of my deckboards 100 mm longer than my gate structure now I want the boards to fly past the frame of the gate 50 mil at the top and 50 mil at the bottom I've made a little Mark for 50 mil and all I'm going to do is line that up with the top of the gate now our clad and boards are cut to length we can fit them to our gate so I'm going to start on the latch side get my first board nice and flush if I don't do that as I work across the boards they're going to start to lean over and they won't be Plum when we stand the gate up now it really is as simple as just screwing those cladding boards to the frame of the gate and make sure that you also screw diagonally across the gate so that you're catching the brace behind that's fully clad and it's really starting to come together now before I hang this thing I'm going to stain both sides of it it's a light oak color and it looks really effective but you can go with whatever color you want the most important thing though is that you get plenty of stain into any cut ends so that we Retreat those pieces of Timber guys if you're enjoying this video Hit subscribe cuz you don't want to miss future videos and hit like because that helps this video reach and help more people like you on YouTube now I've lifted the gate in place and you can see that What I've Done by creating that 50 mil Gap at the top and 50 mil Gap at the bottom what we've got is a perfect finish at the top so our post hair finishes in line with the cladding you can see that on both sides I've sat the gate on two off cuts of cladding just find yourself something to get that perfect Gap at the top and at the the bottom so that it looks spoton and then all you want to do is clamp the gate in place you can see I've popped a couple of 10 mil spaces at the top and at the bottom and that allows the gate to now sit in its final position so that we can fix the hinges we got two heavy duty T hinges these are 500 mil ones don't buy cheap ones get a good quality heavyduty one I'll link all this type of stuff in the description so you know where to find it now we'll fit one of these to the top of the gate and one of these at the bottom 50 mil gold screws and that's it and now we can take our clamps off and the gate shouldn't go anywhere all right so we're going with the typical ring gate latch now this is a gate mate again it's a good high quality one if you buy the cheap stuff one good gust of wind gate slams bends your latch so make sure you get a good one it's not sponsored they're just the ones I normally use they come with instructions they're really easy to fit I start by marking 40 mm with a Square onto my gate frame and then marking the center point of the latch and by doing this we'll know exactly where we need to drill a hole through for our spindle now you need to pass either an or bit or a spade bit through the gate this one's 16 mm now pop the spindle into one side of the handle pass it through the gate and we can just screw the handle in place on both sides once you've centered the bar screw that in its final position you can then place the retainer Over the Bar and we're going to screw that in place as well and now find the level of your bar and then all we got to do is screw the latch to the frame you can see I've also fitted a gate spring and a cabin hook so that the gate doesn't keep slamming cuz that would be really annoying and with the wind coming down a side alley like this that often means that Gates slam so if your Gates on a side alley fit a cabin hook and a gate spring that just stops that wind from taking the gate and you can see our gate open s and closes perfectly now as an optional step to finish this off you could fit a door stop for the gate to close into however I'm not going to do that because I like the Finish how it is it's flush it looks perfect so I'm going to go with it like this and I'm not too worried about the little Gap at the side of the gate there but if you want complete privacy go with a door stop and that completes our garden gate it looks brilliant it's strong and any of you can make it at home so give it a go if you've enjoyed this video hit one of these cuz you're ban to like them as well and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: The DIY Guy

Views: 140,121

Keywords: how to build a gate, how to build a garden gate, how to build a side gate, how to replace a gate, how to make a gate, how to make a wooden gate, how to make a garden gate, how to make a side gate, how to install a gate, how to fit a gate, how to hang a gate, diy, diy guy, outdoor diy, make a wooden gate, build a wooden gate, how to fit a gate latch, how to fit gate hinges, how to make a half lap joint, half lap joint, how to brace a gate, how to stop a gate sagging

Id: 1axwWsk5f4Q

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024