So we’ve had this project we’ve always wanted to do for about five years now but never had enough time to do being busy with robotics and the like. That project is a guard gate for our house. We have looked into getting one proffesionally installed but it would have costs thousands and with all of our robotics experience we thought why couldn’t we just build it ourselves. So with all the free time we have no we decided to do just that.
First things first find a gate. We went to home depot and were able to find a black small metal gate with hinges that would fit on our street in-between our two pillars. The gate was only about three feet tall but it was really only there to serve as a sturdy metal backing for the outside of the gate. Mounting it to the pillars was a big headache since they were about three feet wide and consisted only of cinder blocks. In order to get deep enough to out a screw on the inside of the pillar we had to use a small jackhammer to make a hole big enough for us to reach our arm into. Then we screwed the hinges in from the inside to make it look nice… (We still need to fill those holes)
With the metal gate fully mourned we could do the fun and easy part, the aestethics. We let my mom choose out a gate style and we settled on something like this.
To start making the gate we bought some 8ft floor boards that interlock together and screwed them into some 2x6s we mounted to the metal gate with pipe clamps. The floor board went together really easily and we were able to cover the entire metal gate in under an hour giving us a really tall gate. At this point it was just square and looked pretty menicing so we decided just to leave it open overnight with some cinder blocks.
The next step was to work on the shape of the gate so we got a bunch of measurements and I got to work on Onshape and cadded up the entire gate to it’s accurate size. This would allow us to make a fully custom gate and then laser cut all the trimming panels to make it look nice and hide any cutting mistakes we make with the jigsaw. I was able to get the design cadded up in about an hour then we headed to Techgarage to cut the arch trim pieces out.
With the pieces cut we glued them to the top of the gate and then market off on the floor boards where we needed to cut to get the shape we wanted. Then my dad cut out the shape with a jigsaw and we screwed the trim panels to the top of the gate to cover up the cut marks. Here is the final product of the work so far.
We still have a lot more work like adding trimming panels on the sides and bottom, painting the entire gate, then adding some metal knockers and pegs to make it look nice. Then the hard part is really automating it and setting up a system or keypad for opening the door from the outside. This project should move pretty quick since we don’t just want a useless gate at the entrance to our house but I’ll make sure to keep posting and let you guys know the status especially of the system we are using for gate opening which I’m excited to see. Might even have some AI integration with the gate so stay tuned!
Devin Willis 