Driveway gates - Part 7 - cladding

The western red cedar cladding was fitted next. This was premade tongue and groove cladding from a local commercial wood dealer. The only thing I had to do was fit the tongue into the groove I had milled in the stiles. It is crucial that a spacer of about 4mm is used when fitting each board to provide room for expansion/contraction. Each board was fitted with a series of stainless steel screws pilot drilled into the iroko.

Several coats of Sansin exterior weather seal was applied. This is a beautiful waterborne finish that build up a nice satin appearance with a deep colour after many coats. It can be applied with a foam brush or sprayed. I opted to use a foam brush.

Next all the hardware was fitted. 3 banded hinges, 3 shoot bolts, and a vertical drop bolt into each leaf. Fitting of the stays was left until final fitting on site.

The job was now completed. The old gates were sawn up and became firewood having served their purpose for the best part of 30 years

Driveway gates - part 6 - Drawbored and wedged M&T joints

I had used wedged mortise and tenon joints on a previous gate project. One of the problems I found with this technique is the wedges can have a tendency of pushing the joint apart unless you clamp the joints first of all. Once the glue has set there is no issue of course.
The width of these gates is slightly bigger than the capacity of my largest clamps. These clamps have the facility of joining two together.
First of all one of the clamp heads is removed totally from one of the clamps. The adjoining clamp requires its movable clamp head turning through 180 degrees. Then the two clamps are simply joined with a large nut and bolt.zz

The glue up using West Systems 105 and 205 epoxy.
Draw-bored and wedged tenons make for an immensely strong joint

Each one of the tenons has a 5 degree wedge removed from either side of its width. I made a template from 1/4" plywood with the correct angle.
I also used the same template to cut some 5 degree wedges from some 1/2" scrap iroko stock. There are a pair of wedges required for each mortise and tenon joint.

I decided to use the drawboring technique "recently rediscovered" by many woodworkers. If you don't know what this is then Marc Spagnuolo and Christopher Schwarz both describe the technique on their respective websites/blog.

Marc's is here www.thewoodwhisperer.com/videos/drawbored-mortise-tenon/
Chris's is here www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/joinery/drawboring-resurrected

I drilled a blind 10mm (3/8") hole 60mm (2. 3/8") from the face of each stile. After dry fitting the tenon into the mortise a bradpoint bit was used to transfer the centre of the hole to the tenon.
The tenon was disassembled and the centre point was then moved 1/16" closer to the shoulder. A 10mm hole was then drilled into the tenon.

A batch of 10mm x 40mm long dowels were sawn to length. Then a 15 degree bevel was sanded into one end of each using a disc sander.

Driveway gates - part 5 - Diagonal braces

The stiles and cross rails were dry assembled, squared and clamped up. The table saw mitre fence was set to 38 degrees and each one of the diagonals had one end cut to this angle.

Each one of the diagonals had to be marked to the length and angle that was subtended at the other end. They should have been all roughly the same but due to discrepancies in machining there are always slight differences.

The intersect with the mid rail  was marked onto the diagonal. This angle was transferred to the table saw mitre gauge using a sliding bevel. The cut was made by sneaking up to get a good match. Then the piece was dry fitted into place. The edges of the diagonal was transferred onto the mid rail. The diagonal between the mid rail and top rail was lined up with the pencil lines.

This same process was then used to cut its upper angle.

The decision had also been made early in the design to use floating tenons to anchor the ends of the diagonals to the crossmembers. This required cutting 10mm (3/8") slots into each piece using a router. If you have a Festool Domino XL then use that instead. I don't so used the router method.

My mortises were cut 25mm (1") deep and the slot length is 100mm (4"). I marked the start and end of each mortise onto the face of each diagonal and crossmember when they were dry fitted in place.

Balancing a heavy 1/2" router onto a 1" wide board is not easy so I ganged a piece of stock onto the side of each piece with clamps. This gives a wider bearing surface. I also used a shop made plexiglass base screwed onto the router to fill in the cutter void and increase its length.

Clamps at either end to create end stops.

The resulting mortises obviously have rounded ends. Loose tenons were made to be a hair shorter than 50mm (2") and each edge had a 1/4" routed radius to match the mortises.

The loose tenons were glued into each of the diagonals to aid assembly further on in the process.

Shop made loose tenons and the corresponding routed mortise in a diagonal brace

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Driveway gates - part 4 - The Rails

Each of the pairs of gates are different widths. The end detail of each tenon is the same and the same process used for each.

The rails are made from 4/4 stock and was milled to final dimension after a period of acclimation to the shop. The width of each rail is 145mm (5-3/4"). Each tenon is 12mm (1/2") thick and 90mm (3-1/2") wide. Each tenon is also made intentionally 5mm longer than required. This is so the length can be cut flush with the stile after glue up.
The tenons are not central but are 11mm from one face. The other side of the tenon is 2mm from the other face.

The shoulders of each of tenons were cut on the table saw after marking with a marking knife. This also severs the grain to minimise tear when sawing.

Waste stock from each tenon was cut off by hand with a rip saw. If the tenons had been shorter then a mortise jig could have been used on the table saw.

The tenon faces were then cut to final depth using a router mounted in a custom tenon router sled. I showed this design in an earlier post tmcwoodworks.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/garden-gate-project-part-3-top-and.html

Router Sled

The business end of the router sled

Each tenon face was then smoothed with a rabbeting block plane. This ensured that a nice sliding fit in each mortise was made.

Finishing off with a rabbeting block plane

The upper rail of each door has a triangular shaped board glued to the rail. This serves two purposes:

• Supports the cover rail that protects the end grain of each T&G upright board
• Provides an fixing point for a shoot bolt. The door can be locked from the outside by simply reaching over the top of the door. There will be padlocks lower down the inside face of each door that enable secure locking from the inside at night.

The mid rail is at a suitable position for future anchoring of automatic gate openers.