Making a Fence Gate with $50 in Parts and some Top Rail

hey today's project we're going to be making a custom sized fence gate using about 50 in parts which i got from lowe's plus some scrap material i have around the house to make a gate to get into my chicken run if you've been watching the project chicken series you'll realize it's a very weird sized gate and there is nothing standard that you're going to be able to buy to fit this so hopefully this video will help you uh if you have a similar situation or if you just want to make a gate on the cheap and you already got the uh some fence rail and uh chain link and so forth to just throw it together yourself all right i'll show you what parts we got here and then we're going to go on we're going to start measuring things and uh cutting pipe and getting this thing done all right here's what about 50 bucks gets you from lowe's my total bill was 54 and change these two parts here we're about six bucks and are not part of this build just putting them there to show you the uh the costs and i will post an image of the receipt so you can see what the item codes are and so forth these are the major component here these are fence gate clamps these are about 288 a piece they do come with the bolts so that's going to be our main thing i got six because i'm going to be doing a cross rail on the fence this is where your money is these are seven or eight bucks a piece and they do not come with the bolts i had to go scrounge bolts afterwards so figure another buck and a quarter or so for the bolts per per unit at lowe's because it's close these are about four bucks a piece again at a buck or so for the bolts so combined for the fence stuff alone we're looking at about 50 bucks and i will be supplying my own scrap fence rail and wrapping it with chicken wire etc alright let's get on with this all right if you haven't already been watching the project chicken series which is probably most of you this is what i need to put a gate over as you can see it's a weird shape it's too wide for a standard door to fit and uh so that's why i've decided to use these fence parts to uh get it done all right this is basically what your hinge assembly looks like the big part is going to go on that metal pole the small part will go on the door and i'm bringing them out here so i can get this measured up so we can uh determine how big of a door i need to make it all right now i have a point to measure from obviously obviously that's not where the hinge will be located but i needed a space in the middle so i could measure the uh the door width those only had one size of the uh the male portion of the hinge apparently this one's a bit big for this pipe but crank it down enough it does make a nice solid connection there so no worries there and i'm kind of toying with the idea of having the the gate forward instead of going this way because i'm going to have a gap sorry because i'm going to have a gap between here and the fence and i don't know if i want to have that gap coming forward or not so i'm going to just put in the other position and see what i think okay i think i like that better because this door is never going to go in because it would hit the fence so that's as far as we'll go inward which is far enough and as far as it's outward it will now open all the way and not just halfway so i believe i am going to mount it that way so i'm going to take my measurement for the gate size from here that also makes a much tighter space between the fence in the the main support pole than if i were to make that go straight outwards this way so i think i'm going to do it that way all right so my measurements say i need a 40 inch outside to outside for this fence so let's uh grab some fence rail start doing some math and cutting things up all right i grabbed one of the uh 20 foot long pieces of top rail that i have here is scrap when we tore down part of a chain link fence we had a lot of this vintage top rail here which has already been used in other projects but i've got two and a half pieces of this left and uh one piece plus that little bit of a half piece should easily make this door all right go into it all right now i quickly realized there's no way i'm getting a 20 foot piece of pipe into my vise because uh my garage is 20 by 20. so improvising with a uh regular clamp here got it set up and let's cut this off but i went uh six foot five because i figured the extra range could hurt i can always make things smaller it's a lot easier than making them bigger so so [Music] apparently 16 feet of pipe weighs more than my table [Music] so all right [Music] there's our first six foot five piece it doesn't have to be pretty and uh i'm gonna cut off another one yeah the table should be more balanced for this one so don't worry about flipping over [Music] all right that should have our two uprights and we'll figure out what we're gonna do for the uh for the middles you know what i meant all right so we need 40 inches total for outside diameter i put our clamp on here so we could uh find out where that other pipe is actually going to end is going to end at about the two inch mark inside that clamp so 40 minus 4 should be 36 so that's what we're going to cut the other p three pieces of pipe plants all right the pipe is now short enough i can actually use my vise and i put on a new blade so i should actually cut through without having to go underneath it this time let's get this a second 36 incher down now i mentioned before i'm non-professional all right that's two 36 inch pieces of light need to make one more need to grab some more scrap all right finally another piece out there 36. oh all right that should be all the pipe i need to cut now we can start putting crap together alrighty so while we're off camera i located center on the pipe six foot five pipe so three two and a half is our center marked the pipe put the first cross beam in place measured the width that is very close to boarding close enough that it ain't going to matter here and now i'm cranking down the center piece and being attacked by mosquitoes these are carriage bolts so one end locks right in there by itself so you only need to hold one end and there's actually there's a hole in these clamps so i can actually see my pencil line through that hole and that's actually very convenient you can see your central arm through that hole [Music] all right again this one washed down [Music] all right we now have a large h [Music] see this is the middle of our gate these are the first two of our cross braces and then we're just going to repeat the steps at each end my table is not 40 inches across so we're kind of getting a bit hokey with it here the bracket should pretty much do most of the measuring work for us okay [Music] [Applause] i'm not even using marks because do i plan on having to square this up a little bit afterwards so i'm just kind of putting that on loose there i'm going to break out that clamp again those youtube videos where you see the guys with the 16 foot tables all that stuff depending on how much of that i just edited out now i've got a clamp holding this onto my table which is too small to properly support this and now we're going to put on the top end or bottom plate i don't know which way it gets carried out there you know capping the end of this just get rid of any ugliness because my cuts are not perfect but you won't see it because it'll be behind i know the center is good and then we're going to square everything off of the center and kick technical and something we need so we're just going finger tight right now [Applause] all right so we now have essentially our door frame now i think i remember somebody saying somehow that measure the diagonals and they're equal then your square or something like that so i could do that or i could just uh kick it into place an eyeball guess which one [Applause] so yeah all right put this thing up against the wall and see if it looks square all right that looks pretty square to me um i'm gonna haul it into place and uh see how it fits on the fence and then we're gonna wrap this freaker with chicken wire all right i got the uh two hinges on and then in the position i want you notice i have both hinges pointing up normally if you are in this you know trying to make a fence secure you would put one hinge up and one hinge down however i actually want the convenience of being able to just lift this door off should i have to i don't think a raccoon or a fox is going to be able to lift the door off and if a human wants to get in here there are much easier ways to do so so i'm not worried about human security just animal security so i do have both my hinges point up and now i'm gonna dry fit this thing all right exciting if i want it bolts in or out one part i believe that's gonna work so i'm gonna put a piece of wood underneath this and tighten it into place do so so all right it's a gate all right so our door frame works um the post that is hitting up again say i'm gonna have to beat that into level but as far as the functional door frame we're there and this is the hardest part of the project can you see that part that is sucking up solid so once i put whatever type of latching mechanism here is that'll be fine so now i'm going to wrap this thing with chicken wire yeah we got the gate laid out on the chicken wire here now i'm just going to cut the the length and uh we're going to wrap this thing like a really ugly christmas present using my uh jake lip pliers all right so um just getting the bottom part folded over here and i am on my knees and on concrete so we'll see how long they hold up yeah it's gonna use my j-clip pliers here i'll give you a close-up of these pliers i did it in another video but i'll give you a close-up of what these look like and what they do but essentially i'm going to stitch this fencing together all along the bottom then fold it over on the sides and then fold it down and then we will have chicken wire covering our fence here now i know you don't want to watch me for 20 minutes putting this thing together here so i'm just going to show you what these j-clip pliers look like so basically your j-clip looks like this i'm hoping the camera will actually focus on it you drop it into the pliers like that and then when you squeeze it it makes a nice tight little ring that holds your wires together but all right i'm going to flip the camera off and get working on this all right just uh showing you the process here basically started on the bottom uh folded the chicken wire over a couple of j-clips in there moved to the hinge side folded that over jay clipped it around moved up the top folded that over j clipping it and now we have one side left to do and then this will be just about done i got the chicken wire all j clipped together on the door basically it's just like an ugly gift wrapping job again i'm trying to show you video of chicken wire i don't know why i think you're actually going to see that but uh let's check that's back together i did notice one of my hinges was a bit off line so i beat that back in the shape of the 4x4 and we're going to hang this door before it starts raining on us all right it is automatic opening right now but i can deal with that and i'll make a little latch here connect these two together and that's actually going to be fairly trolling reasonably predator proof um this is where the gate is closing very small gap [Music] and you can see the chicken fence it is pretty solid tight like it is i'll probably put a little brace in there all right so i just wanted to show it closing from this side here so the outside is the clean side all the bolts face inward because you don't want to be stabby all the folds on the door itself face inward and uh i said she's self-opening for now but she'll do the trick and i'm gonna get some rope or something to latch that up and call it a day all righty so if you did find this video helpful any of the concepts in it help you figure out one of your own problems then uh please subscribe um would appreciate that i also do have amazon links in most of my video is videos if you buy anything through that link says an amazon associate i make a very small commission but hey even 15 bucks a month helps out around this house so i appreciate that as well there's the chicken coop progress it is coming along and um this was a big bit so maybe next weekend we'll get some freaking chickens later

Channel: Two Acre Homestead

Views: 11,088

Keywords: DIY, Fence, chain, link, dog, gate, hinge, bracket, chicken, wire, fencing, entry, latch, homestead, prepping, prep, farm, garden

Id: Ky_bnwcTs7I

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022