A gate is a hundred heats.
Swage forges gates, railings and balustrades in solid steel, one bar at a time. What follows is the case for spending several times the price of a catalogue gate, and where that money goes.
A catalogue gate is six hundred pounds, delivered flat.
That is a real price for a real product and it will hold a driveway shut for a decade. The rest of this page is about what the difference buys, so that nobody spends the difference by accident.
Three of the hundred.
Every bar in a gate goes through some version of these. A catalogue gate is pressed from sheet and welded at the corners, so it goes through none of them.
Reading the fire
Steel says its temperature by colour, and then by this. Sparks in the fire mean it has begun to burn.
1,250 CDrawing down
The bar is made longer and thinner by being hit. Nothing is cut off, and it is the same steel throughout.
40 blows a heatUnder the hammer
The power hammer does what three strikers with sledges used to. The smith still decides where the bar lies.
3 heats a scrollWhat the difference actually is.
The rest of the reasons not to.
Why is it several times the price?
Because it is several times the hours. A catalogue gate is pressed, welded and powder coated by machines in an afternoon. A forged pair is eleven days at the anvil for one person, and the steel alone is about four hundred pounds of that.
Will it rust?
Eventually, everything does. It leaves here hot dip galvanised and then painted, which is about twenty five years before anything needs doing. Bare forged work with a wax finish looks better and wants attention every other year, and we will tell you which you are choosing.
Can you copy the gate down the road?
Not exactly, and you would not want it. Wrought work is drawn to the opening it goes in, and an opening two hundred millimetres wider changes every division in the panel. We will take the feeling of it and draw something that fits your gap.
What if I do not like the drawing?
Then we redraw it, twice, at no charge. Nothing is cut until you have signed a full size drawing, and the drawing fee comes off the job if you go ahead. If you walk away at that point you have paid two hundred pounds for a drawing and we have both saved a lot.
Send the opening and a photograph.
The width between the piers, the fall across the gap and a picture of the house is enough for a real number within a week. We take about nine jobs a year.