About the service
Commissioning a garden gate that still swings true in thirty years starts with a tape measure, not a catalog page. I run a small forge devoted to custom hand-forged decorative wrought-iron garden gates — every scroll, collar, leaf, and basket twist hammered out individually on the anvil, never stamped from a die or bought as pre-bent stock and tacked together. The process begins on site: opening width, post spacing, ground slope, and swing clearance are measured and sketched by hand before a single bar goes into the coal.
From that sketch I draw the scroll layout full-size in chalk on the forge floor, so every volute on the gate matches its mirror twin instead of drifting the way machine-bent coils do. Frame bars are forged square-cornered and tenoned, not just butt-welded, so the joint carries load through the metal rather than through a bead of weld alone. Ornamental collars are fire-welded around scroll junctions the traditional way, which is what keeps a gate rigid after a decade of slamming shut in the wind rather than developing a wobble at every crossing point.
Hinge and post-mount engineering gets the same attention as the ornament: pintle hinges are sized to the gate's actual weight, sleeved with a grease reservoir, and set with enough drop clearance that the leaf won't drag as the post settles over a season. My latch portfolio runs from a simple forged thumb-latch to a interlocking ring gravity latch that only opens from one side — I bring photos of finished examples to the first site visit so a client can point at the mechanism they actually want rather than describe it in the abstract.
Finish work is not an afterthought: every gate is wire-brushed, hot-blued or fire-scaled where appropriate, then coated with a zinc-rich primer and two coats of exterior enamel, or hot-dip galvanized first for coastal or high-humidity sites. Typical turnaround for a two-leaf ornamental gate is two to three weeks from approved sketch to on-site hanging, including a final adjustment visit once the posts have had a week to settle. I quote a fixed price after the site measurement, so there is no ambiguity about scope once the anvil work begins.
From that sketch I draw the scroll layout full-size in chalk on the forge floor, so every volute on the gate matches its mirror twin instead of drifting the way machine-bent coils do. Frame bars are forged square-cornered and tenoned, not just butt-welded, so the joint carries load through the metal rather than through a bead of weld alone. Ornamental collars are fire-welded around scroll junctions the traditional way, which is what keeps a gate rigid after a decade of slamming shut in the wind rather than developing a wobble at every crossing point.
Hinge and post-mount engineering gets the same attention as the ornament: pintle hinges are sized to the gate's actual weight, sleeved with a grease reservoir, and set with enough drop clearance that the leaf won't drag as the post settles over a season. My latch portfolio runs from a simple forged thumb-latch to a interlocking ring gravity latch that only opens from one side — I bring photos of finished examples to the first site visit so a client can point at the mechanism they actually want rather than describe it in the abstract.
Finish work is not an afterthought: every gate is wire-brushed, hot-blued or fire-scaled where appropriate, then coated with a zinc-rich primer and two coats of exterior enamel, or hot-dip galvanized first for coastal or high-humidity sites. Typical turnaround for a two-leaf ornamental gate is two to three weeks from approved sketch to on-site hanging, including a final adjustment visit once the posts have had a week to settle. I quote a fixed price after the site measurement, so there is no ambiguity about scope once the anvil work begins.
