The baby (and dog) gate turned out well. The flat pieces were all 1/2″ ash. Pivots are 3/8″ dowels. These may need to be sanded or the holes reamed a bit due to the variation in the dowel diameters. Make sure to round off the ends to make assembly easy.
The spindles were all pre-finished prior to glue-up . This is very important. You cannot get good coverage once assembled but more importantly, if you have any glue squeeze out form the dowels you could end up with a frozen / inoperable gate.
Stain is Minwax Provincial which is what we used when we built the house. As well as 2 coats of garnet shellac to moderately match the aging and provide a modest degree of protection. The 2 coats of garnet shellac help the color match tremendously but the old wood is still more yellow. Oak and Ash yellow considerably in the first 2-10 years of sunlight exposure. So new pieces stained the same and placed next to old ones will look sickly pale in comparison. The shellac makes up most of the difference. Don’t go for an exact match as the wood will darken, you just don’t want it to be seen as initially being completely out of place.
The gate pieces were fastened on to the stairs with # 6x 1.5″ screws. So when it is removed years from now the holes will be small and easy to fill and match.
The left side rests on a couple of rests that are fastened to the stair baluster . They are unobtrusive when open and almost completely hidden when closed off.
When parked to the side the gate rests on a small block that raises it up parallel to the hand rail and holds it open. We expect that cats, kids, and dogs will try to shut it on the unsuspecting and this will likely foil their evil plans.
Overall, it is a successful project. Teal is happy and as a reward today is Meatball Day ( she gets Swedish and I get Italian).
I am waiting for the replacement stepper motor controller for the CNC router. Some of the parts for the over-voltage / counter -EMF protection have started to show up. That will be for another post.