Friday, August 20, 2010

Gate hinges


I've been building a working corral and loading chute, and as part of that project I purchased some used gates off craigslist.  They're heavy steel gates with interesting hinges.  Here's  a couple of them.  This particular hinge was designed to mount on the corner of a square post. 
On the gate side there's a pipe of just the right diameter to fit inside the hinge.  On that pipe there's a little piece of the larger pipe (where my finger is in the photo above) to act as a stop. 
Here's a version of this hinge on the gate, but for mounting on the flat face of a beam.  these gates are at least 45 years old.  they're made from heavy steel pipe.  A 16' gate (most of them were 16') weighs about 250lbs. 
I liked these hinges so much that I decided to make 8 or 10 of them to replace the standard gate hinges.  here I'm using a big pipe cutter to cut the tub into the right size. 
I'll then either weld flat plates to these small pipe segments, or angle-iron for corner mounting.  takes maybe 5 minutes per hinge to cut the pipe, clamp and weld it, and then drill the mounting holes.  I'm going to add grease fittings to these so that I can grease the hinges as needed.  Since the old hinges lasted most of 50 years already, I think that these will outlive me. 

1 comment:

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