This beautiful old gate looks fantastic now but did look a bit sorry for itself before I got to work on it. I’m not sure exactly how old the original gate is but it’s been stood here for at least 50 and some repairs had been carried out on it before but unfortunately these hadn’t lasted.
First job was to lift the entire gate off it’s hinges and get all of the rot stripped out of it and see just how bad the damage was. At this point a friend of mine who’s a painter happened to call round to the workshop and was adamant that this was not repairable and would need to be replaced. Whilst that would have been an option it would have been a real shame to loose all the original timber, not to mention the expense.
After the messy job of stripping the gate down outside it was time to get it into the workshop and get on with the repairs. Once all the rot was removed and paint sanded down all of the areas to be repaired were prepped with Repair Care Dry Fix Uni to stabilise the remaining wood and provide a good substrate for the resin to bond to.
Because the repairs were quite big I used Repair Care Dry Flex 16 this to allow me more time to work with it and because it’s better suited to bigger repairs. Some areas had I had to build in stages and all the shaping was done free hand.
As well as the gate the frame was also in poor condition and I could start to repair this whilst the gate was still in the workshop curing. You will see from the photos the frame had been previously repaired with new timber and the splicing line that had failed allowing water in and rot to develop.
One of the qualities of the Repair Care Resin is that once cured it flexes with the wood and creates a really durable long lasting repair that won’t crack or let water in like the previous repair.
After sanding the repair down all that was left to do was replace the door jam with a new piece of timber. For this I used hardwood for a long lasting repair. It’s always the part of a frame that takes the most stress.
The gate was decorated using the three part Dulux Weathershield system, this was the high gloss finish in Gardinia. When my friend the decorator came back to have a look he was blown away by the repairs that I’d done.
This repairs to the gate and frame took 14 hours spead over 5 days to complete.
Sash Man 