But. If you are building a garden gate, it must have a sill. Trust me on this--it may swing freely now, but just wait while the grass grows and the dirt shifts.
At some point you will be exasperated enough to take the gate off and reseat it above a real sill.
If you originally drilled through a pine knot, that screw will be glued in forever or until the post decays in a landfill, whichever comes first.
If the screw is well and truly glued in, it will turn out to be made of something the bit can't get a bite on. Other screws will just take a minute to drill out; this one looks to take hours. The bit size doesn't seem to matter.
However, an angle grinder will make quick work of the screw head, and any of the shaft sticking above the wood--and about 1/8" of the wood too. And it'll tear up the hinge plate, but since there's room for 5 screws there's enough redundancy that you can ignore that.
(I don't like that angle grinder. It has a switch on/off, not a spring-loaded "Ouch! and it stops" switch.)
Oh yes--since the posts are no longer perfectly parallel, you need to use a planer to narrow down the top of the gate a bit.
5 comments:
What is this "level" you are referring to?
Most of building gates, is getting the posts solid. A level is useful to do that and get them straight. For solid posts dig a narrow hole, put a bunch of gravel at the bottom, drop the post in and fill with concrete. A wheel barrow is all you need, well that and cement and gravel.
Posts done like that stay straight. ;)
No they don't--especially not on the edge of a hill. The earth is dynamic, as a crack in our garage floor can testify. Time and rain and the things that move within the dirt slowly change it. Perhaps if I had set both posts in a huge single casting of concrete instead of two holes filled with concrete they'd not have their relative displacements now.
You guys must have really good posts and gates.
The gate looks better than the panels that the rest of the garden fence is made of. After making that fence, I figured better ways of making the panels that are easier and cost less and seem to be just as strong (which is to say, not terribly strong). The panels ride on rods via screw-eyes, so when I need to clean up the fence line I untie a panel and lift it off and have at the area with weed-whacker or shovel or small artillery as the case requires. I'm not keen on dumping weed killer along the fence line of a garden we eat out of.
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