Why go to all to all the effort, for a design it yourself section

There are a good few reasons why i decided to do the design it yourself section. I will explain those and hopefully the future of the whole section as you read down. Its perhaps long winded but there is quite a bit to explain. This purely casual comments on why i did it and in part what i hope to gain from it and what i have gained so far.

One of the problems with custom made iron work, is the time it takes to do. If you stick with a hand full of designs then you probably make your life a lot easier. Tools to make parts, speed up the process. if all the parts are the same in terms of size, then you can do it twice as quick. Which means its half the labour time, so half the labour cost. But made to measure means it isn’t the same. You just can’t make a batch of scrolls hang them on the wall. Then hope to use them in the future. Simply because the scrolls you are making to put in a gate today. Will be a different size to the ones for the gate tomorrow or the next day.

Its the same reason you cannot hold any stock. Its always a different size that’s needed to the one you have. Of course the more designs you introduce, the more stock you would need. Then if you are daft enough to offer a colour choice, you have just made the situation even worse. You really have no option but made to order.

One of the great things about doing this work is the variety. Ok you get ask to make 10 railing panels all the same, and when you get to the last one you might be bored with them having spent the whole week doing them, But next week its something different. So variety is kind of fun for me to do. It keeps it interesting.

I spent a lot of time and effort working out how i can keep variety into the work but try and get closer to those cheap and cheerful ones on the internet. Looking at methods of making it quicker to produce. One of the areas that a lot of time can be spent is in design. Easy to spend an hour plus on something simple. Do drawing. email to customer, revise drawing, email back. confirm price. All for a little garden gate that only take 3 hours to make. But its 4 hours labour because of drawing and customer contact time.

You realise that the internet retailers have a big advantage over you even at this point. They do limited designs and limited sizes and an online order system. Some even have a technical drawing for each size option and design. With limited size options and designs its never more than 20 drawings. Click on size option press buy, pay for and get automated email saying you gate will be ready or delivered on X day. Efficient but very cold method of doing business. That cold method has gained them an hour over me.

Maybe i should produce technical drawing for each size and design. You realise that’s just not possible. As far as size goes i do made to measure. But i guess you could do technical drawings. For a single gate you only need to cover from 2ft 6 inches wide to 4ft wide that would cover the majority. In 3 inch increments would be enough. 7 drawings. The problem is there are so many designs possible. Maybe just restrict it to 20 designs, that’s a good variation. 140 drawings covers garden gates. 15 – 20 minutes a drawing. 40 hours or so work. Trouble is 20 designs doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s possible.

Now you have always been able to buy pre made decorative bar, no doubt made in the far east. Sold in the UK by a few importers, a kind of hardware store for the steel fabrication industry. As they do lots of other things apart from decorative bar. Trouble with many of there decorative bars they are just never the right size. To long to short etc, so to use them limits the options. But i could make my own decorative bars and i always have done. Because of the size issues.

Maybe if i draw all the options up, for bars and throw them on a web page, let the customer make the choice of what bars they want in the gate or railing. Easy enough, lets the customer have the choice. They can work out there own design, then all i need to do is draw it up based on bar options. Seems a sensible idea. It did seem sensible until i got deeper into it.

The whole idea is based on 5 parts currently. A twisted bar, a basket, a ring weld in a bar, a pair of C scrolls and a pair of S scrolls. A bar might contain one of these parts or it might contain multiple parts to make a decorative bar. So simple enough or at least it seemed so. It was until i got to scrolls. You likely need to read the section scrolls to fully understand this. But they are a strange thing, because if you flip them around, effectively put them on upside down the bar looks different. Well S scrolls do.

Now i don’t care which way up i weld them, makes no difference to me but it makes a difference to the look of the bar. Some people will like them one way, others will like them mirror imaged. So almost any bar that contained an S scroll, then had to have its upside down twin drawn. I got to about 45 or so bars specifically designed for Juliet balconies or patio railings. Height has a big factor on what you can do. The longer the bar the more you can squeeze into it, if you want to.

It then occurred to me that the number of possible permutations in terms of design was well into the millions. You usually start in the middle choose a decorative bar. Just that alone gave 45 possible designs. Then start to fill out the balcony with more bars. Working from the centre maybe missing 2 or 3 bars. So keeping them plain , then add another decorative bar. You do it from the centre and do the same for the left of centre as you do the right. Creating a mirror image from that centre bar. So that bar to the side of the centre added another 45 possible choices for each choice in the centre.

That gave 2025 possible designs, if you did it again and added another decorative bar in. obviously depending on the size of the balcony assuming there was room it multiples it again by 45. Now that get you up to 91,000. Assume it was a good size one you might do it again. That got you up to over 4 million. Now there two popular ways to do a Juliet, one as i would call it a classic. Just full length bars. The other is to weld a second bar and create a gap 100mm under the top bar. This gap needs to be filled or at least it needs a couple of decorative pieces in it to provide support for the hand rail to stop it sagging.

Now there are a few possibilities on how you do that, its certainly more than 10 possible ways. So now you have all those designs you can repeat, But in 10 other possible designs. So you end up with over 40 million. Now i like choice but that’s crazy. But to be fair i would say 99% of them i would classify as junk designs. In other words they wouldn’t be my choice if it was my balcony. But it did make me think. To get on a web page it has to be a jpeg or ideally a PNG format to save space. So i have to draw it in a cad program then save and save a copy as PNG. Then upload to the webpage, i was estimating it took about 10 – 15 minutes.

Quicker than usually as i have these bars now drawn up that i can paste into a plain drawing. That was part of the plan, time save on drawing, which so far it does. But at 10 mins a drawing, if i was daft enough to attempt to get all the possibilities onto a web page. Or lets say i only did 10 million of them. Its 190 years of work, doing it 24hrs a day, 365 days a year. And we haven’t got around to the gates or the garden wall railings yet.

But being serious there is an issue here and its one the internet often fails with. its going back to the start where i said about technical drawings for each size. The longer a Juliet balcony or railing is the more bars it contains. So putting 5 twists in a small Juliet balcony with 11 upright bars in. Will most certainly not look the same as a Juliet balcony that is longer and has 21 upright bars. That nice pattern is now changed. But you just clicked and ordered one based on the drawing with 11 bars and yours has 21 bars. So what you actually getting.

It is where i think this system has some serious strengths. But it made me go back and draw basic Juliet balconies in plain form with no detail in, for each size. This way as a customer you know the bar count for a given size. If you have access to a printer you can print that plain image off. Then doodle over it a representation of the bars. Getting an idea of what it would look like before as for it to be drawn up to scale.

This had a bit an unforeseen side effect. Juliet balconies need to be large than the door by some 300mm. this is just to get a safe fixing, not fixing to close to the door frame cracking the bricks. I was always taught. you take the size and divide down the gaps. so every gap is even, The first gap, the middle gap etc all the same. Anything else was according to the guy that taught me a Hanging offence. So for one size balcony you might have different bar gaps to another. The important part is they are 100mm or less.

But that 300mm over size isn’t critical. It is, but if it was 350mm over size or 400mm over size that doesn’t matter. So if you set your bar gaps at 99mm work from the centre out. It ends where it ends as long as it ends up being at least 300mm bigger. Not sure the guy that taught me would agree with that. But so now quite by accident i have a time saving. I can make a spacing tool that sets the space for each bar at 99mm apart. This means i can reduce prices when made this way compared to what i used to before. With no loss of build quality, which is so often how things are made cheaper.

I did look at other ways of reducing cost. Juliet balconies have away used a convex rail for the top bar. because of the way they are built. With a projection off the wall to ensure it doesn’t foul on the door handle. It always means you have to do a nice mitre joint for the corners. This time consuming to do, or at least do so it looks nice. The convex rail is expensive. As of feb 2025 a 6mtr piece of 40mm x 8mm flat is about £20 + Vat a length. That same convex bar is about £56 + Vat. So on a 2mtr balcony its £15 difference. But when you use flat its far easier to grind to a nice finish. Labour and material savings

So if it is offered as a flat bar for the top rail, as an option. Yes as far as i am concerned it is a quality reduction. But its one that knocks off about £30 off the price. When you look around the internet most other cheap one use flat bar or hollow box. I refuse to use hollow box, as there is no way you can guarantee its internal condition. It could in theory rot from the inside. if not perfectly welded to make it air tight.

There has been a lot of work gone into the Juliet balconies design page. It is long and there is always an issue there. There is a lot to explain. Its arming someone with enough knowledge to understand the design process. The do this but don’t do that parts, and trying to briefly explain why, without going into a world of detail. If it ends up like a copy of “war and peace” its going to be overwhelming, and people will get board and wont take it up as an option. Which would then be a terrible waste of my time doing it.

Turning the page into a video is one option, that i will look into. But that is a lot of work. One other idea was audio commentary, but will need to think on that. On the whole so far it does seem to be working. I have got option now i can offer to make at least Juliet balconies cheaper than before and more competitive.

Now this was just me rambling putting some thought to paper. well electronic paper for the world to see. If you have read this then i appreciate it. I will no doubt update it with insights i have discovered on the next section.