Garden Gate


Dewald Swanepoel

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Thanks folks. I should also have warned that this will probably not be a quick build. Not only do I have two toddlers in the house that is putting a huge demand on my time but also do I have a lot to learn and I'll be taking it slow.

7 minutes ago, Chet K. said:

Looking good Dewald.  Are you going to do the brick work also.

No, I've had that done about a year ago. It's actually not exposed brick but plastered. I'll get some pics of the scene of the crime when it's daylight again.

6 minutes ago, Twistedcowboy said:

Looks interesting. Is that a Makita planer? If so, how do you like it? I'm about to get one myself. I'm eager to see your progress.

No, it's a very old Ryobi planer that I discovered in an old tools crate of my late dad's. I'm actually half expecting it to cease up or snap a driving belt or something any moment. But for the moment it's working beautifully. After replacing the blades, I'm amazed with the clean jointing I'm getting. Much cleaner quality than the thicknesser planer.

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Thanks folks. I should also have warned that this will probably not be a quick build. Not only do I have two toddlers in the house that is putting a huge demand on my time but also do I have a lot to learn and I'll be taking it slow.

Looking good Dewald.  Are you going to do the brick work also.

No, I've had that done about a year ago. It's actually not exposed brick but plastered. I'll get some pics of the scene of the crime when it's daylight again.

Looks interesting. Is that a Makita planer? If so, how do you like it? I'm about to get one myself. I'm eager to see your progress.

No, it's a very old Ryobi planer that I discovered in an old tools crate of my late dad's. I'm actually half expecting it to cease up or snap a driving belt or something any moment. But for the moment it's working beautifully. After replacing the blades, I'm amazed with the clean jointing I'm getting. Much cleaner quality than the thicknesser planer.

I can relate about the time issue. I have been working on a bedframe for almost a year. Time and money constraints. Working full time (10-12 hours a day) limits my shop time.

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Very cool project Dewald! I will be following along.

Have you double checked your boards with a straightedge? Im not too sure that taping them to a level would have helped flatten them. Did you shim the low spots or just lay the piece on the level? Even so, im not sure it would be wide enoung to properly support the areas that need the support. Just double check to be sure. Starting with straight, square stock is essential.

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3 hours ago, shaneymack said:

Very cool project Dewald! I will be following along.

Have you double checked your boards with a straightedge? Im not too sure that taping them to a level would have helped flatten them. Did you shim the low spots or just lay the piece on the level? Even so, im not sure it would be wide enoung to properly support the areas that need the support. Just double check to be sure. Starting with straight, square stock is essential.

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Yes, I did check them afterwards for straightness and they looked pretty good. I didn't shim them no, but there wasn't really all that much to shim. These just had a twist in them, not much of a bow.

I did notice, with one of the boards that had a more pronounced twist, the level didn't support it too well. As the board made contact with the rollers, the level would rock to the left or right and the upper surface of the board would simply follow the level of the rollers. That board I planed down roughly by hand and then tried again, which worked.

But yes, ideally I guess, I should have made some or other sled that is wider than the boards themselves but I didn't have any suitable wood for that.

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Very cool project Dewald! I will be following along.

Have you double checked your boards with a straightedge? Im not too sure that taping them to a level would have helped flatten them. Did you shim the low spots or just lay the piece on the level? Even so, im not sure it would be wide enoung to properly support the areas that need the support. Just double check to be sure. Starting with straight, square stock is essential.

Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk

Yes, I did check them afterwards for straightness and they looked pretty good. I didn't shim them no, but there wasn't really all that much to shim. These just had a twist in them, not much of a bow.

I did notice, with one of the boards that had a more pronounced twist, the level didn't support it too well. As the board made contact with the rollers, the level would rock to the left or right and the upper surface of the board would simply follow the level of the rollers. That board I planed down roughly by hand and then tried again, which worked.

But yes, ideally I guess, I should have made some or other sled that is wider than the boards themselves but I didn't have any suitable wood for that.

Cmon man! African mahogany would make a beautiful planer sled

Glad to hear your boards are nice and straight. Good luck on the build!

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This is slow going, but I'm making some progress. I've completed the four biggest mortise and tenons joints now, but I'm sure nobody wants to read about it... so pictures.

Marking off mortises. I used to always just use a pencil and often found that, despite my best efforts to make sure that my stock is true and square on all faces, my lines just don't match up neatly. After watching some Paul Sellers videos I noticed that he likes to use a marking knife so I thought I'd see how things go using a Stanley knife and it actually did help. The transferring of lines around corners is a fair bit more accurate and I'll definitely be using this technique in future a lot more.
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With the marking gauge still set for the mortise sides, I marked the tenons as well, though they'd only be cut much later
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I've never really had great success with drilling out mortise holes and cleaning it up with a chisel so I thought I'd revert back to the old school way again and do it only by chisel. The advantage of this is that the chisel determines the width of the hole and, if you do it right, you don't even have to pair off a single fibre of wood from the long faces of the mortise hole when you're done.

I also want to revisit some basic woodworking skills as I haven't really done any serious woodworking for some 20 years now. (Oh, and throughout the course of this journal you might notice that there are a number of essential woodworking tools that I still don't have. A proper mallet is one of them - so my apologies for the sacrilege of chiseling out a mortise hole with a clawhammer)
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I was quite happy with my mortises (I did 3 of them this way) but I was really running out of patience. Those are 20mm wide mortises that has to go all the way through 100mm of stock. It took me about 2 hours per mortise in a country that's gripped in a drought and a heat wave. Not fun.

So I did the remaining three the "new school" way. This definitely saved a lot of time but I still think my results using only the chisel is neater.
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So often times I'm frustrated that I don't have the right tool for the job (I really need a table saw, a jointer and a band saw) but occasionally I have just the right tool for the job - as was the case when I wanted to cut the tenons. The Japanese ryoba saw is a thing of wonder. Not only does it slice through the hard wood like a hot knife through butter but the accuracy that I could get and the straight cuts impressed me. I did clamp some scrap pieces of wood to the edge of my stock to guide the saw blade.
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On the broader plank (the yellow one in my original colour coded image) things were a bit more challenging. The problem is that the board is 175mm wide and the ryoba blade is only 250mm long so that gives very little travel distance on each cut. With the longer cut I found that the blade actually did bend (I think to follow the grain) and I got wavy cuts, so I used guiding pieces of wood on both sides of the tenon and on both sides of the blade, seperated by the kerf thickness.

This definitely helped to keep the cuts straight but I still had a problem that the limited travel distance meant the waste wasn't ejected and so the cut got really difficult after a while. I found that knocking a wedge into the cut to force open the cut a little helped but it was still a tough job and not something I hope to have to do again.
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Cutting the tenon shoulders was a straight forward mitre saw job, again using some scrap wood to guide the blade nicely alongside the cut line.
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Cleaning up the tenon cheeks and fine tuning them to fit in the mortises. The router table seemed like a good idea, and it worked, but I realised after a while that taking the tool to the wood would be easier than taking the wood to the tool. I forgot to take pics but I ended up cleaning up most of the tenon cheeks with the plunge router hand held.
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And a dry fit. It is solid, like rubber mallet solid. I couldn't be happier.
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Well, I could be happier. I could've measured properly  when cutting the mortises, but I'll explain about that in a separate post. Hopefully someone can offer their thoughts on that.

Next step would be to cut the curve out of the top element. I don't think I've got any chance of getting that done without a band saw so I'll have to see if I can call in a favour with some other local carpenter. I just don't see how a jigsaw will make a decent cut through 70mm of a fairly hard wood.

 

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I also still need to cut the tenons for the bottom piece but I first have to make an important decision. You know how they always say, "measure twice, cut once"? Well, uhm, I'm going to have to ashamedly confess something here. And maybe someone could offer advice.

Let me post the colour coded pic again for reference:
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This design has gone through various iterations and the above is my final design. The most recent change involved:

  • changing the purple board to be only half the thickness of the gate so that the light green boards will fit over it as opposed to butting up against it
  • moving the dark blue board down by its width so that the light green boards (which have already been cut to length) will fit over the purple board

So then I went and measured the mortises in the red board for the dark blue board's tenons off of the wrong design and cut them such that the blue board sits higher (its original position). This means my light green boards are all 100mm too short now. This is easily rectified by reverting to the previous design which requires only cutting a new purple board that is full thickness. The other option is to buy more wood so that I can cut new light green boards that are 100mm longer.

The reason for the newer design was twofold; First it meant that the bright green boards could join with the purple board in half lap joints as opposed to more mortise and tenons. This is just me being lazy. But more importantly, it means that the gate can be assembled in two stages, first the frame plus the bright green boards and then the light blue board and the light green boards which can then simply slide over the purple board into their grooves.

If the purple board is full thickness it means that the entire gate (except for the light blue board) has to be assembled in one go. That's a lot of gluing and clamping to do all at once.

Here I would appreciate some advice. Should I rather go for the two stage assembly or would assembling the gate in one stage not be as big a problem as I'm concerned about?

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Safety first. You don't want to mess around with these hand planes...
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Actually, today's work involved a lot of use of the plunge router and my dust extraction sucks... erm... actually, I wish it did. First order of business was to cut the tenons for the bottom element (the purple board). Oh, I've decided to stick with my design and just get some extra wood for the light green boards. The purple board, being thinner than the rest of the frame requires a thinner tenon as well. Seeing as the other elements will be sitting over this board I decided to do away with a tenon shoulder on the front to maximise the thickness of the tenon I could cut. Fairly simple job with the plunge router and a fence clamped to the board. The board on the right is just another board of the same thickness to support the router base.
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I'm actually very happy with how these mortise and tenons turned out. Two of my neater M&T's so far.
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And that concludes the frame. I must say, each of these six M&T's fit nice and snug but when all six are dry fitted at once, the frame doesn't move a millimeter. I'm beginning to wonder if I really need to add wedges to these tenons or whether I should glue them up as is. TerryMcK, you know a thing or two about these. Do you think I will still gain something by adding wedges to the tenons?
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Next, I turned the gate on its face and laid out and marked the positions of the vertical beams.
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Then I disassembled the whole thing so I could cut the cross lap joints on the centre board (dark blue). Clamped fences on either side of the lap joint and routered away. These were rather deep cuts (25mm) and African Mahogany is fairly hard, so I had to do several passes for each cut.
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Positioning the fences and clamping them down turned out to be a little tricky. I had to measure them very accurately and when one is clamped down the space in which to use the vernier calipers to measure the other one was somewhat awkward. I figured out that by making one test cut and then marking off the distance between cut line and fence directly on the base of the square (directly under my index finger on the picture) was a great way to position all fences exactly the right distance from the line.
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And before long all the laps were cut. (Did I mention that I am dust-collectionally challenged?)
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I've decided not to cut the laps in the vertical boards yet as I'd like to first cut the mortise and tenons where they join in the top board. Those are going to be rather interesting as the tenons meet the mortise on a curved face and I'm still unsure exactly how I'm going to go about. But I'm stalled for the time being as I need a band saw to cut the curve on the top board. As it happens I've found a second hand band saw which I'll be collecting on Saturday so I'll be back in action before too long.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sometimes you have to interrupt your work to first make a jig to help you with some or other task. Well, in this instance my "jig" was really a table for a new piece of equipment I got, an Emcostar combination tablesaw - bandsaw - lathe - beltsander - disksander.

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After that it's finally back to business. I was really worried about the next cut I had to made, the big curved cut from the top board. I just didn't see it happening with a jigsaw so I had started making plans to pay someone to cut it for me. So this bandsaw acquisition couldn't come at a better time. I printed the template and stuck it to the board and got cutting.

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And honestly, I couldn't be happier with the result. My first ever bandsaw cut but I think I'm going to like this tool.

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The pic above is a bit small but you might make out that I made sure first to mark the locations of the mortises on the side (both sides actually) so that I could transfer these onto the curved surface after the cut.

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Then getting stared on these funny mortises.

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Seeing as I'll have to cut the tenon shoulders to match this curve exactly, I had to finish off this surface before I could continue. I cut a block of wood with the same radius as the concave part, wrapped it with sanding paper and got cracking to get rid of all those kerf marks and to get this surface smooth.

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And I'm loving the end result. I can't wait for the entire gate to be assembled and sanded down like this because the wood is beautiful.

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Next comes the tricky task of cutting the tenons. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to cut those curved shoulders neatly. I'll probably have to make some or other jig/template and cut it with the plunge router. Any suggestions or advice welcome.

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While you are tracing the profile...without moving the top rail...mark on the mdf the left and right edge for each slat. Then you can bring the mdf to the table saw and rip the exact width of each slat so when you overlay that template on the actual stock the edges of your template line up perfectly with the actual stock. Now you know your curve is in the right location for your tennon cheek You can waste some of the actual stock out on the bandsaw before using the bearing guided bit. You can use the same template for both sides. Just use the top of the template as the bottom when flipping it over.

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