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Gates and gates made of corrugated board belong to the budget category: their manufacture does not take much time and materials. True, if you choose a model of ordinary swing gates without artistic additions. There are also options with forging elements, here the complexity of the work is greater, the costs are much higher. Even an amateur welder can make simple swing gates from corrugated board with their own hands: there are few seams, they are simple.
Sash designs
Even in such a simple design as a gate leaf or a gate, it can be done in different ways, and there are many options. First of all, the location of the jumpers differs:
- obliquely;
- horizontally;
- crosswise.
Each method is tested and works, providing a sufficient degree of rigidity. Here you choose what seems to you more correct or reliable.
There is a difference in the design of the gates themselves – with or without a stationary frame (top bar). With a frame, the gate is more stable, but then there are height restrictions: tall cars – trucks or special equipment – will not be able to drive into the yard. With proper reinforcement of racks (pillars) and normally made wings (with reinforcement in the corners), gates without a frame will also be reliable.
When installing a gate with a frame, the metal consumption is greater – by the length of the jumper, but at the same time, you can not additionally strengthen the pillars: the load on them is less.
To make it more convenient to fasten the profiled sheet, a thin-walled metal profile 1 cm wide is welded along the outer (sometimes inner, as in the figure above) perimeter of the wings. This must be taken into account when determining the dimensions of the blanks for the doors.
To make the structure as rigid as possible, so that it does not “walk” and does not make noise in the wind, reinforcement is made in the corners. And again there are two ways. The first is to weld the corners cut from sheet metal.
The second is to put short corner braces from the same pipe that welded the frame of the wings.
There is a difference during assembly: from the joints, the pipes are connected at an angle of 45 ° or just end-to-end. More professional – at 45 °, easier – end-to-end. Some assembly methods do not provide for the possibility of connecting at an angle at all (if both wings are assembled as one-piece, and only when they are hung on poles, they are sawn into two parts).
Another subtlety, which depends on the amount of snow in winter. As you can see in the photo, the lower bar of the wings is raised to different heights from the ground – somewhere a few centimeters, somewhere 20 cm and higher. It depends on the height of the snow cover in winter: if it snows, and the gate is from the ground itself, you will not open it. To prevent any living creatures from climbing into this gap in the summer, after the snow melts, the bar is screwed onto the screws, and in late autumn it is removed again.
Swing gates can be automated. Then you can control them from the remote control and you don’t need to go out into the snow and rain.
Materials
For pillars, they usually take a profile welded pipe 80 * 80 mm, with a wall thickness of 3 mm. They are dug in below the freezing depth of the soil, set strictly vertically and poured with concrete mortar. Work on the installation of the gate begins after the concrete has gained about 50% strength. If the temperature outside is not lower than + 20 ° C, it will take 5-6 days, if it is colder – up to two weeks.
For sashes, a profile pipe of different sections is used: depending on the strength of the winds and the span of the gate: there is an option of 60 * 40 mm, there is 40 * 20 mm. Choose according to your own conditions. On the jumpers they take either the same pipe or a slightly smaller section, up to 20 * 20 mm. All these pipes can be taken with 2 mm wall thickness, 3 mm can be used. Thicker ones are more expensive (they sell for kilograms) – they are heavier, but 3 mm metal is easier to weld, which is important for beginners in welding.
Read more about welding thin metal here.
The material for the gate is taken the same as for the fence from the profiled sheet, it is fastened to the same self-tapping screws. Before starting work, the metal must be prepared: remove all rust (with a grinder with a metal brush), prime with Anti-Rust and paint. After drying, you can start working.
Photo report on the manufacture and installation of the gate
This is one of the options for how you can make a gate from corrugated board with your own hands. The technology is not the best, but not the worst: everything has been functioning without problems for the past six years.
Hinges are welded to the installed poles 80-80 mm, the counterparts are welded at the required distance on the vertical parts of the racks from the pipe 40 * 40 mm – on the right and left. We hang the racks on the hinges on the pole, put a layer of the required thickness between them and the poles and fix it with a clamp.
We measure the required height and cut off the excess, from above to the racks, not to the poles, we weld the cross member from the same pipe 40 * 40 mm. The quality of welding at this stage is unimportant. We are still grabbing the details, not caring about the thoroughness of the seam – then we will bring it to the norm. The main thing is that everything is smooth and kept together. Therefore, we grab points in several places.
In the same way, we grab the pipe along the bottom.
We find the middle of the cross beams. Set aside 3 mm from the middle in both directions. We make clear marks. We measure the distance between the upper and lower beams, cut off two segments, weld them according to the marks (there should be a gap of 6 mm between the two vertical pipes).
We measure the distance between the two posts of one half of the gate. They should be the same, but it is better to measure separately. Cut the pipes to the desired length and tack them at the desired height. If you need more crossbars, install them too.
On the marked center with a grinder at the top and bottom, we make through cuts, dividing the gate into two halves. So very simply we got a gate that will open and close without any problems.
The frame of the gate leaves is ready. We remove it, lay it on a flat horizontal surface and weld the seams well. Here, the quality of welding is already important, we monitor the fullness of the bath, we try not to burn holes. We clean the finished seams, primer, paint.
We proceed to the assembly of the support for fastening the profile sheet. To reduce the windage, it was cut into two parts, so that the sheet is not solid, but cut. For this we use a profiled pipe 20 * 20 mm. We cut it into segments of the desired length, so that it can be fixed along the inner perimeter.
We expose them in the same plane with the outer part – the sheet will be screwed from the inside. We fix it on self-tapping screws, having previously drilled holes of the required diameter.
We paint the finished frame – inside with light gray paint, outside – red-brown, to match the color of the corrugated board. We leave to dry.
We proceed to the installation of the profiled sheet on the gate. It is cut a little smaller than the main frame – there should be an indent around the perimeter by 2-3 mm. They are laid on prepared supports and fastened from the inside along the perimeter to self-tapping screws.
You can take special ones, with hats and gaskets, but they put them on ordinary ones.
We can say that the gate is ready.
It remains to install constipation. You can, of course, embed a lock and a handle, but the quality of inexpensive ones is very low, and taking expensive ones is currently an unaffordable luxury. Therefore, bolts were welded from the remains of pipes and fittings. They definitely work under any conditions.
One (upper) is mounted on self-tapping screws with a counterpart on the sashes, the two lower ones are attached to the uprights. Small holes were drilled in the ground in the right places, in which sections of round pipes were concreted, the diameter of which was larger than the diameter of the rod. The gate is made according to the same method, only a lock is embedded in it.
With this manufacturing technology, the gate leaves are guaranteed to open and close. If there were some distortions when installing the pillars, they are taken into account. With a step-by-step presentation, the whole process does not look complicated, and indeed it is. If you weld all parts separately, the geometry must be perfect, and you also have to make sure that the pipe does not lead during welding. See several different technologies for making gates from corrugated board in the next section, which contains video tutorials.
From the profiled sheet, you can make sliding gates and equip them with automation.
How to make a gate from corrugated board: video tutorials
If the work is new, then even after the photo report, questions may remain. Some of them can clarify video tutorials on the topic. To begin with, repeating the technology described above: we assemble the frame directly on the installed pillars.
The same technology, in the photo sequence.
The second video is about how to properly weld the frame when connecting pipes at an angle of 45 °. The approach is professional.
Those who have not experienced welding gates or doors before may have questions about how to weld hinges. It’s not as simple as it seems. Watch the next video tutorial.
For a more accurate explanation of what movements to make during welding of the gate hinges, where to direct the electrode and other nuances, see the following video.