A Gateway to Another World

Or perhaps just a gateway to my back yard. Which I suppose could be another world, depending on your definitions. But wherever it leads, every gate needs hinges to hold it up, and the hinges on my gate are... hingey, I guess.

The wood that they're screwed into, however, has dried out considerably though, and the screws are no longer doing a good job of gripping those parched wood fibers, leading to them becoming quite loose.

This does not bode well for the gate remaining a gate, and not a pile of planks scattered across the sidewalk. I did try to shore things up a few months ago with some construction adhesive, but the results were somewhat mixed, as evidenced by the screw I was trying to remove just spinning in place rather than backing itself out. It did end up requiring a little creativity to complete that screw extraction.

Why would I remove a screw, you ask? Well naturally to give me somewhere to drill a hole.

And that hole then becomes the new home for a carriage bolt.

Is it a bit long? Yes, but we'll get to that shortly. This length did pose a bit of a challenge in the meantime, though, as I do not own a deep 9/16 inch socket. Thankfully, like any civilized person, I do own a deep 14mm socket, which did the job just fine.

This carriage bolt would be a bit lonely just hanging out here on its own, so I gave it a friend to keep it company.

They're like two peas in a pod.

And at this point it should also be fairly obvious why one of them was looking quite a bit longer than necessary. I just picked up one size, ensuring that it would have sufficient length for what I'd be needing, with the plan to trim them down to size once in place.

Which was a fairly simple task.

These carriage bolts should do a much better job of keeping the hinge in place, given that they're going all the way through the wood and clamping it from either side, rather than just trying to grip against the wood fibers.

Yup, that's not going anywhere. To make doubly-sure, I also gave the nuts a little dab of Loctite 290 to keep the vibrations of the gate opening and closing from shaking them loose.

With the carriage bolts taking the majority of the forces, the remaining screws shouldn't have much trouble staying in place now. $6 well spent, I'd say.