Design your own.

Designing your own wrought iron style Gate, Railing or Juliet balcony is easier than you think. Following the information in this section of the website will make that task much easier. Allowing you to come up with you own individual gate, railing or Juliet balcony.

Now i am trying teach 30 plus years of experience in a few web pages, its quite tall task so this is very much a work in progress. Hopefully over time it will become more refined and easier to understand. I will try to add videos over time as this is a great medium to explain things easier. This is the result of 100s of hours work, designing and drawing along with countless hours spent researching. So if you find something that just doesn’t make sense or isn’t very clear, drop me an email and let me know. I will try to refine it, making it clearer.

The Aim of these pages.

You might wonder why i have gone to all this effort. What do I gain out of it? Well they say time is money and that is very true. To often i can spend several hours working with customers on designs. I usually don’t count that time into the cost of a project. It can take up a lot of my time, sometimes becoming stupid. where you spend 2 hours in correspondents with a customer sending design drawings and revising them. Just to make a railing that takes 2 hours to make. Work 4 hrs get paid for 2.

So if these pages teach some of the aspects of design, i am hoping to work less hours and get paid for more that I work. Also as a customer you know what can be achieved. you know what you like and what you dislike. With luck you can come up with the perfect design for your own requirements. And of course there is the hope that i can put a price list with it all. So you know what a design costs.

Gates, Railings and Juliet balconies

Most wrought iron work is kind of the same. It contains upright bars or spindles. A Juliet balcony or patio railing really are the same thing in terms of design. But they only differ from a garden wall railing by being shorter and not having a decorative top, like railing heads. And gates only differ because they are a fully enclosed frame, having a hanging and closing stile. So they have a lot in common but there are some subtle differences. The difference is usually the frame.

As something get longer, or wider in the case of a gate, it will contain more upright bars. More upright bars give more opportunity to create designs as it is those upright bars we turn from being a plain round or square bar into a decorative bar. The taller those upright bars are the more decoration can be placed on or in them. As all decorations occupy a given amount of those upright bars.

Parts

A lot of the design work is based on using parts or components to help create decorative bars. Some parts are designed to be fitted into the upright bar, become part of the bar. Cut out a section of the bar and welded in. Some parts are design to fit in to the gap between upright bars. Some parts can do both. Its the placing of these parts within or on a bar that gives you a bar design. It is then the placing of those bar within the wrought iron panel that gives you your design. By doing that you can create you own individual personal design.

Just to explain those parts that fit into the gap between bars, are 100mm wide. So all upright bars need to be spaced at 100mm gaps for this to work. It is effective because it gives access to a lot of cheap mass produced parts. Impossible to make by hand at the price these can be bought for. So it becomes a cost effective way to add detail, whilst keeping the cost down.

I am not here to hide anything all these parts are bought from a company called FHBrundle . I have included that as a link, so that you can see for yourself. No doubt i will refer to it again. But just to say there are other companies out there that do similar things. This is just the one i use most for parts. (if you are using this info page thinking on making your own, they also sell steel)

This is a list of common used pre-made parts, the majority are design to fit a 100mm gap. Some are designed to fit as part of a bar. Don’t worry i have a lot of examples how to best use the parts

Scrolls

Just for reference I refer to the larger part of the scroll as the head and the smaller part as the tail.

Three S scrolls with large head and smaller tail. Two double headed.

Notice the scrolls are all 100mm wide, so fit in a gap of 100mm. but more important they have a height. Whilst i am stating the obvious here. The scroll at 300mm tall wont fit into a height gap of less that 300mm. It could be used on a 400mm tall bar. leaving 50mm of bar clear at the top and bottom. But you have the option as the bar is longer than the scroll of “sliding” it up or down the bar and welding where you want.

Collars and baskets

These are designed to be position on an individual bar, adding detail to an otherwise plain bar. They can be positioned almost any where on a bar and multiple units can be used on one bar.

Collars

Designed for passing over 12mm square bar and welding in position, Hence why the square hole, these differ slightly for those designed for round bar.

Designed for passing over 12mm round bar.

Baskets

These are suitable for square bar only. welded into a bar, can be welded almost any position in a bar and multiple units can be welded into the same bar.

Rings and infill

Rings and infill are designed to fit between 2 upright bars, the most common being the plain circle, but there are other options beyond the plain circle.

Although designed to fill gaps, some of these parts can be used as an interrupt in a bar, in a similar way a basket is used. This can make for some interesting designs.

Whilst is easy to price an item, it is a little more difficult to price it welded within a gate or railing. A circle welded to bring the gap between 2 bars is quick and relatively easy to do. But a circle welded as an interrupt in a bar is a much slower process. Eventually i am sure we will get a price list for all the options.

There are lots of others available but these are common ones used.

What now?

Now it really is a case of reading onwards but from here we need to be more specific and start looking at what you really want to design. I am preparing pages