Gluing up the three pieces to make the stile blanks are
next. The process is the same as with
the rails except these assemblies are about two and a half times longer and I
can only do one at a time so with curing time it takes me four days to glue all
of them up.
Once glued up all the stiles get the same cleanup and
trimming as the rails so no need to go through that again. Here’s the set of the four stiles plus the
six rails needed with their edges trimmed down close to the final width. Just in case a problem shows up I am going to
let these blanks set for a few days before moving on to the next step.
Next is to edge glue two pieces together for each of the
three boards needed for the lower door panels shown highlighted in the
drawing. After cutting the parts
oversize they get glued up. Shown in the
right photo are three panels glued along with the remaining three cut and ready
to be glued.
The upper section upper section of the gate is mostly
open but has three latillas in each gate section shown highlighted in the
drawing. I wanted to use cedar rather
than pine for rot resistance but have been unable to locate anything other than
pine ones. It would be easy to glue up
three or four layers of the cedar (top right photo) and turn them down on the
lathe to a straight cylinder (bottom right photo) or a decorative turning like
a stair baluster. However, neither of
those fit in with the desired southwestern design. 
As an alternate I will do some testing to see if I can
create the hand peeled/hewn look starting with the cylinder using different
methods. Below are different tools to try. Some may work and some or
all may not work. Starting at the top
left corner working clockwise is my power plane, angle grinder with carbide
teeth and a coarse grit sanding disk that can also mount on the grinder, a
pneumatic die grinder with carbide burr, three wood rasps a hand plane and
pneumatic impact chisel.
To replicate the hand peeled/hewn look on a turned
cylinder I needed a faceted layout to work from and chose six faces. To do the layout a compass is set to the
cylinder’s radius and with the point positioned on the edge an arc is drawn through the center. The point where that
arc intersects the cylinder’s perimeter is my center point for the next
arc. After that the intersecting points
along the edge are connected with a straight line. Result is the layout in the top photo. The bottom photo shows the cylinder set back
in the lathe and has straight lines drawn on the face to act as my guide.
My first tool was the pneumatic impact chisel and it
didn’t work at all because the blade is free to rotate and I couldn’t control
the angle of the cut. The power plane
and hand plane gave me a flat smooth surface that looked too flat, precise
and not organic enough. The pneumatic
die grinder with carbide burr gave me the ability to create a more organic
surface but the result was too rough as in the top photo below. Same result with the hand rasps. The angle grinder with carbide teeth gave me
the needed organic look but left a surface with its teeth marks and the surface
was not smooth enough. Changing the
carbide cutter to a coarse grit sanding disk helped but still left unacceptable
sanding arcs (bottom photo) in the finished surface.
With a successful test the leftovers from making the
stiles and rails get cut down to make the six four-layer latilla blanks
needed. Here are three blanks glued up
along with the three waiting for the first group’s glue to cure before they get
glued together. 
Once the second set of blanks get glued the glue runs are cleaned off, trimmed like the stiles and rails then set aside until needed
later. At this point I think that all of
the laminating needed for the project is done.
There has been a lot of time spent to go from the rough sawn cedar fence
boards to smooth, straight, flat and with parallel edges then gluing all the
pieces together. As a matter of fact, it
has taken three plus quarts of waterproof Type III glue to get to this point.
Because I stopped surfacing the rough sawn planks when a
smooth surface was achieved the thickness varied from .55” to .48” thick. Mixing and matching them gave me stile and
rail glue-ups all about four hundredths of an inch over the nominal target of 1
½” thick. My next step is to run these
pieces through the thickness sander to get them all to a consistent
thickness. The thickness sander is the
tool to do that but I noticed while making the File Handles & Case project the sander did not
give parallel surfaces. The problem was
the edge nearest the motor was slightly thinner than the outboard edge. This isn’t a problem as my old thickness
sander had to be adjusted too. Process
is to take a couple of spacers the same thickness (I used two 3/8” drill bits)
and adjust things until the bed and drum were parallel. The photos show the bits set in place for
adjustment. When they both just touch
the drum the bed and drum are parallel. 
When making the adjustment a problem showed up in that
there was not enough adjustment range to bring the drum and bed parallel. The solution was to add a shim (red arrow) to
get the drum and bed almost parallel then fine tune with the machine’s built-in
adjustment. In the end I got the
difference down to two hundredths of an inch.
Next Up – Cutting Pieces to Length, Sanding to Thickness & Making Mortises
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