Gate Post Caps

Eureka! We’ve crossed another incremental threshold today with Tony’s industry and creativity. The privacy fence enclosure behind the carriage barn is now gated with a pair of gate posts caps subtly offsetting the entrance.

This final accomplishment follows on the heels of hardware installation and gate hanging. Here’s a quick recap.

I offer you a sneak peek at the gate hardware,  installation of which began today. (Source: Gate Hardware)

And after the period hardware was installed, the gate was hung and tuned.

Glen and Tony have almost finished the carriage barn enclosure fence now that the gate is hung. And, rest assured, there’s plenty more to this than meets the eye. (Source: Gate Hung)

That inside-out view offers an unimpaired view of the handsome fence design, and a glimpse of Tony’s creative screw installation. He told me that he drew inspiration from the carriage barn doors on the east entrance. (Although the design does appeal to my eye, I harbor a little concern that the vertical alignment of screws on each picket might accelerate cracking. Hopefully not, but time will tell. For now, I’m staying optimistic!) 

Comparing the top image in this post with the inside-out gate view above, Tony’s most recent progress stands out.

Gate post caps, 2-tiered pyramidal rectangles loosely inspired by the fence post caps in front of Rosslyn, now flank the gated service entrance to the west side of the carriage barn.

I’d only spec’ed simple 4-way pitched caps to be milled out of our stump-to-timber cedar. I’d proposed milling the sloped block of wood by passing it through the tablesaw on edge (against a sacrificial fence) with blade raised and pitched. Four times in succession, rotating after each pass, would created a pyramidal cap.

But I overlooked one thing.

When Tony got to work on this project, he realized that there was a discrepancy between the size of the block, and the maximum height that the blade could be raised. This discrepancy made it impossible to accomplish the task as I had described it.

So he came up with an alternative, reimagining the design, not only to take advantage of the resources at hand, but also a design precedent dictated by the historic fence that parallels the street.

By stacking two different sized blocks and calculating the necessary offsets to combine both blocks into a stepped pyramidal cap, Tony made the short term objective achievable AND produced a cohesive design solution that’s even better integrated into the whole than I’d originally conceived.

So tonight I offer a proud shout-out to Tony Foster for reimagining the original gate post cap design, troubleshooting a creative solution to a fabrication hiccup, and creative a more cohesive and better architecturally integrated workaround than originally envisioned. Bravo! An innovation well worth celebrating, Tony. Thank you.