Gate Patterns when building A Wrought Iron Fence

Series Summary

People have been creating and building things for all of recorded history; from the great wall of china to the pyramids, building and constructing has been one of man's great joys. Whether building a canal to connect two oceans or just a fence in the backyard, the satisfaction and happiness that comes with creating something is common to all men.

In this free video series, our expert Terry Leafty will teach you how to build a wrought iron fence including information on gate patterns, fencing codes, how to choose a design, welding costs, and the use of hand and power tools. He will also teach you how to cut and tack metal together, clean your fence using a grinder, make a picket, vine and leaf, and how to use a throttle hammer and punch press. Tired of the dog running wild in the backyard? Build him a play pen or dog run with the information in this free video series; the uses of fences are endless.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Terry and I'm here to tell you today about building a wrought iron fence. What we have here is a particular customer, had a specific need in mind. They had a retaining wall. In the state that we're in, the code is thirty-four to thirty-eight inches. Here we've made it thirty because we have a six inch retaining wall that it's going to mount on. It will be place welded here on the bottom for mounting. This piece down here is just to keep our distance equal, so we can build our vines in here. This will be cut off, and there'll be clips welded on where this will be bolted into the wall, for the pillars on the deck. The picketts here, they're set up on a three blank pattern. You have three that are uniform then you have a blank, three uniform, three that are blank. You can do it four, five, or whatever. Most codes, the widest you can be, like for instance, in our state it's four inches, so I'm sure this was a three and a half, yeah, we went with three and a half on this one. The reason why we do that is for infants and children can get their heads between there. So most codes are already set in your state, whatever governs, whether it's city or county codes, or whatever. So, you can do anything inside it as long as you don't exceed the four inches. So here what we did, instead of just making a blank, a blank, then we added another pickett to give it some kind of style. A lot of people call this wrought iron. This part is more the wrought iron part, but to make it lighter and use less material, we use the hollow, square tubing, and you get the same effect. On this particular rail, they wanted a foliage pattern. Since the house was out in the country, they wanted some leaves to match the background. So what we did was just take a leaf off one of the trees, and you take a branch and you can form your metal to almost match that particular tree or foliage that they have, whether it be a grapevine, or an apple tree, or Bradford pear tree, or whatever it is. In this case, these were Bradford pear leaves, and they all started out flat metal. We cut them out individually, and then you just pound them out with a hammer."