CUSTOM WOOD GARDEN GATE 14

Garden Gate 14 is Base Price + 24%-45%/per gate
Go to Base Price Table
As Double Gates Only

The double Garden Gates 14 features what we’ll call an Arabesque profile to the center vertical stiles. Carrying a theme from a series of cabinets Charles designed and built in the early 1980’s. For no purpose, really. Just an eye-catching departure from the status quo of what one might expect in a garden gate.

Upper 2″ grids

*Shown with a WoodRX ‘Chestnut’

The upper grids of the wood gate 14 depart somewhat from our standard upper grids in that they are inserts within a perimeter frame. Similar to the driveway gates #15. This often requires fuss-budgeting with the hand plane to accomplish a tight fit.

Carlsbad, CA

A simpler version of the garden gate 14 without the upper grids.
Mounted to stucco walls (note the jambs).

Showing the Lockey #2210 mechanical dead bolt (no batteries). Prowell no longer offers this, although it can be purchased here: Lockey #2210. Although it’s a rather complicated prep, we’ll prep the boring for a small fee. The one advantage of the #2210 is that it’s mechanical. Requiring no batteries.

Rocky Mountain Hardware Latch GL-E414.

PROGRESS
How do I build a this gate?

Menlo Park, CA

Truing the underside of any radius is approached by one of three methods:

1. Create a 3/4″-thick template and duplicate the radius using a flush-bearing router bit.
2. Cut the arc on a bandsaw. Own a Compass Plane and have a son who spent two years at North Bennet Street School of Fine Woodworking in Boston, where they taught him everything his father missed, including the art of handling the adjustable sole of a Radius Plane. A tool not heretofore in Charles’ father’s or grandfather’s arsenal.
3. A spokeshave, relying slightly more so on the woodworker’s feel in truing the continuity of any concave radius.

The Cast Iron Circular Compass Plane–Circa 1879– was a fixture in the woodworking shops of the 19th century, and largely disappeared with the Industrial Revolution that introduced combustible engines and electrical power to the trade in the 1880’s, theretofore inaugurating a change toward machinery over hand tools.

That trend of course ultimately went too far. A 40-year spurt of growth and innovation and wealth spreading beyond the manufacturing realm and into the cultural sphere in one of America’s most poignant reminders of how the springboard of capitalism works. The cycle of commerce, built on the premise of growth, when growth itself leads inexorably to greed, which leads, repeatedly, to the corrections of crashing markets and periods of humility and regret.

It was on the heels of this granddaddy of corrections when The Craftsman Doctrine was born in 1913 as a humble, social reaction to the greed and excess of rampant economic growth. A step backward, embracing hand tools and honest designs, accompanied by a 10-point doctrine on the principles of integrity and lasting values.

So perhaps the solution is a combination of both the spokeshave and the compass plane.

An approach, for both Charles and Ben, that is far more engaging than the industrial whir of a flush-cutting bit on a noisy machine that requires, in turn, the noisy din of the dust collection.

The truth of pulling or pushing a spokeshave along an aforementioned irregular radius with a rhythm of physicality, a balance of touchy-feely linked more closely to poetry than commerce.

* To learn more on the Industrial Revolution and it’s endless manifestations, read Charles’ The Craftsman Doctrine, linked above.

Charles at the noisy, power-hungry drum sander. On the wall above are the doors to a Prowell cabinet design from the 1980’s that has nearly 20 years later served as the inspiration for double wood gates #14.

In a departure from the standard Prowell grids, the gate 14 grid is framed with a 3/4″ border.

Adeline, as a bookkeeper by trade, preferred the parameters of her known world to sync with the square and predictable city blocks of where she was raised in Dayton, Ohio.

Perhaps why Adeline, cursed by genetics, left Dayton for the curving unpredictability of the unknown world.

How did she know?