There used to be an old wooden gate at the boundary of the property, where the access track enters at the West end of the site, but that fell apart several years ago and ended up on the bonfire. While there doesn’t really need to be a gate there, having one provides a ‘spare’ for the matching gate at the entrance from the lane (which is more at risk of accident damage) – and helps stop the sheep running into the wildflower meadow when they’re being moved between the fields either side of the track.
This gate will spend most of its life held open so needs some sort of ‘latch’ to hold it in place. There are few options – ranging from traditional forged steel models to more modern designs – but I settled on the Gate Hold-Back Catch Hot-Dip Galvanised – ABL from Locinox which was £23 inc VAT from local steelwork supplier FH Brundle. This provides 50mm of vertical adjustment and is 500mm tall so there’s plenty of length in the ground to anchor it in place. (Other variants are made from aluminium so are slightly more fragile and also slightly more expensive – though they do offer more adjustment options and can be configured to latch either ‘over’ or ‘under’ a gate or door.)
The galvanised steel bolts visible at the left of the photo above were my addition; the unit came with three large holes but adding bolts and nuts provides a much better ‘key’ into the concrete footing to maintain the vertical alignment. (There’s a third bolt-and-nut not visible in the photo.)
The gate sits quite low to the ground so only about 100mm of the latch is left protruding when it’s installed.
The bottom bar of the galvanised steel gate is a 44mm diameter round tube, which isn’t ideal for ‘catching’ on the latch hook, so I decided to add a 3D-printed rectangular block to clamp around the tube. This took a couple of attempts to get right but worked out pretty nicely using some silver-grey PLA filament I happened to have available.
One refinement I’d add if printing this again (and PLA isn’t expected to last more than a few years when exposed to the weather) is to radius the corner of the block at the back of the gate, to help the latch bar ‘rise up’ when latching it – right now it needs a bit of ‘help’ to lift.
