Closing double gate at the veg patch

[mhrfm]

I’ve put up our gate for the veg patch. The bolt we have is too short and doesn’t keep the gate closed.
Any clever suggestions?

[Plot70]

If both halves of the gate are hinged you need a second bolt that goes into a socket in the ground.
If you want to keep it simple a hook and eye latch would do the job.

[Nicos]

^^^ agreed!

or just abandon locks altogether and wrap a rope around the top in a figure of 8?

[nickdub]

The farmers round here seem to favour either a length of rusty chain looped round the moving ends of both gates to link them together, often with an unusable padlock attached presumably to give the impression that the gates are locked, or if the gate is in frequent use a bit binder twine tied to one gate and looped over the other so it can be slipped on and off easily.

Posh places sometimes have those up and over thingies made from steel which is fixed to one gate's top bar so that it can pivot around a rod through the gate and when closed the open end of the steel closer drops down on top of the other gate to hold it in place. I suppose if you had a little metal working skill and could find a piece of suitable scrap steel you could make one in about an hour. A simple bolt through the closer and gate top bar to act as the pivot with a nut on the end to prevent it slipping out would be the easy bit, and as the closer can be any length it would not matter much how big the gap between gates is.

[Plot70]

The hook and eye latch in its simplest form is indeed just a loop of bailer twine.

[Snoop Puss]

Take out the existing bolt and use a longer tent peg?

[Stan79]

In the garden I bashed a length of scrap timber into the ground under where the gates meet in the middle until it was flush with the soil surface then fitted a vertical bolt to one gate, dropped the bolt down to the wood, marked it and drilled a hole for the bolt to slot into.

For the drive way we have a vertical bolt and a “throw over loop” as described above.

[ESBkevin]

Make a wooden closer.

Three planks of wood, the middle is quite narrow and the width of the gate styles plus a smidgeon and attached between the other two along one edge to form an inverted U shape.

Drill and screw a pivot on one gate at the top so that when the gates come together the contraption hinges down over the top of the nice rounded styles of both gates holding them in a straight line.

Does that make sense? Hard to describe without pics, and I don't have any pics here to show.

[nickdub]

Sounds like a wooden version of the throw over loop type closer I was trying to describe - no doubt google would turn up some photos and/or diagrams of the type of gate closers.

[Plot70]

There are two sets of gates opposite each other on a public road near me.
They both have the type of latch we are talking about.
One set is wooden and the other is metal however the latches are both metal.
Just make a wooden copy of one of them.
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.2692...7i13312!8i6656

[Nicos]

^^^^ I can't get your link to work....

[nickdub]

this is a simple example :- https://www.e-hardware.co.uk/156-s-s...SABEgLxdPD_BwE

[Plot70]

If google street view does not work then....

[Stan79]

Has the original poster been back?

[Nicos]

Has the original poster been back?

Yup -they've been online this morning.