How to Build an Outdoor Gate, Continued

• On a wide plank, like the one they used for the top of the gate, it's not unusual for the saw blade to leave a small ridge on one end. Ron cut away this ridge using a chisel.
  

• Ron and Lisa temporarily fit the gate pieces together to make sure that the tenons fit correctly into the mortises.

• Next, they cut the top rail to form an arch, which would be cut from the wide piece Ron had glued together earlier.

• Ron made up a template out of a piece of scrap plywood. All they needed to do was lay the template down on the wood, take a pencil, and draw the arch right around the template.

• The top curved rail was designed to be three inches wide, so they needed to draw a second line that was parallel to the first. They could not reuse the same template because the second line had a slightly larger radius so they set a compass to three inches and plotted a series of points beneath the first line.

• Mike tapped in small nails on Lisa's pencil marks and then Ron introduced his " ol' bent stick trick."

• Ron took a thin, flexible strip of wood and clamped a part of it to each nail to form a smooth, even arc.

• The strip formed a template so that Mike could draw an arc exactly parallel to the first.

• To cut out the arch, they moved to the portable band saw. Ron told Mike and Lisa that it was okay to take their time with this process. If they started to drift off the line too much, they could back up and restart it.

• Next, Mike cut the ends of the gate sides to match the curve of the arched top.

• Lisa and Ron fit the top and sides together.

• Ron used a carpenter's pencil, and traced along the edge that he had just cut.

• This was the line Ron cut along to take to final ends of the gate off.

• The top arch of the gate was complete.

• After sanding the arch with an oscillating drum sander they were ready to begin gluing the gate together.

• In addition to gluing all of the joints, they reinforced them with wooden pegs.