Other Activities

I haven't been able to get into the air on my paraglider lately. The winds have been from the East (Santa Ana winds) which brings wonderful sunny weather but is not conducive to good flying. We've also had our share of rain in the last week too. I decided to work on a long-overdue project. Seen here,
is a gate on the side of my yard that was built before we bought the house, 4 years ago. It was obviously built as a temporary gate and it was logged in my brain as "the first thing I'm going to do after escrow closes." Well, after almost 5 years, new floors, a remodeled kitchen, and various other projects, I finally turned to this project.

I wanted to build something a little different & started sketching on some paper. What I came up with looked surprisingly like the finished project ;-)




The gate is built-up design with 1/2" CDX plywood sandwiching 1X ceder and redwood stock. I coated the gate with many layers of a polyurethane spar coating. At this point all I need to do is figure out how to properly protect the edges of the gate from water and I'm going to use a darker finish on the ply outer layer to "pop" the design a bit more from the internal exposed planks.

The last two photos show the result of mixing a little oil based stain (dark mahogany) with my spar polyurethane to 'Pop' the frame a bit.

The problem now is that my wife & neighbors think the gate is too nice to hide over on the side of the house. I may install the gate on the other side of the house or even use the gate in a front courtyard that I've been playing around with in my head.

Tim