Custom Steel Patio Gate
This was a very very fun project… this client, Peoples Organic, is a lovely pair of people from the twin cities that opened a new restaurant location and needed a couple of gates for their patio. At first, they wanted a simple steel gate; something like you would see on just about any other restaurant patio. I asked if I could put togethere a design of something a little more exciting, and try to find a way to incorporate their logo into it. I received the green light, and this is what I came up with…
Peoples Organic is a wonderful modern restaurant with some of the best food I’ve ever had, and I wanted to keep up with their modern take on food by using a lot of geometric steel patterns, using the round profile of their logo to soften the hard angles. My clients were jazzed with the design and gave me the green light. Step one to get started? Cut and weld the frame.
Keeping a simple rectangle square is actually trickier than you might think…
When you’re trying to weld something that has 90 degree angles, your eye is able to pickup small mistakes, so the game is cut, check, clamp, check, tack, check, tack again, check, weld. It’s tedious but rewarding. With the surrounding frame square and level, I was able to relax just a little, and work on the interior geometric steel work.
All welded up and ready for its CNC cut logo sign.
Ok…so I said that I was able to relax a little on the interior geometric steel, and that was categorically false. What did I say about 90 degree angles of a box? It’s easy to notice small mistakes? Well that’s doubly so when you’re trying to perfectly coalesce 90 degree angles of two separate pieces! What was even more difficult, was where the chevrons overlap, there are no holes in the steel - I cut a portion of the thin chevron out, and welded its pieces to either side of the thick chevron, giving this great illusory effect of seamlessly passing through.
And finally…success! I made two sibling gates, and this is the larger of the two, set in its gateway as a dry fit. I could not be happier with how these patio gates came out, and making me even happier still, is how amazing it was to get to work for a local twin cities restaurant. All that’s left is a little sandblast, powdercoat, and final installation.
