Automatic Gate Repair Plano › Custom Gates
Plano custom gates
Custom Gates Plano
We design, fabricate, and install custom gates — iron, steel, aluminum, and wood. Custom driveway gates built to the opening you have, and built to keep working once they are automatic.
- Free estimates
- Licensed and insured
- Designed, fabricated and installed in house
Plano · West Plano · Frisco · Allen · Murphy · Richardson
Get A Free Quote
Tell us about the opening and the look you want. The estimate is free.
Design first
A custom gate is a drawing and a machine, and the drawing usually comes first.
Most custom gate work is sold on how the gate will look, which is fair — it is the thing you will see every day. But a driveway gate is also a moving object that carries its own weight on two or three points and, if it is automatic, gets pushed several thousand times a year. We repair gates for a living. We spend our days looking at gates that were designed beautifully and built without much thought about year six, and that is the perspective we bring to designing a new one.
The design conversation and the mechanical one are the same conversation here. You get the gate you drew, and it is engineered for the opening it is going into.
Decision order
The order custom gate decisions should be made in
Custom gates go wrong in predictable ways, and it is almost always because these got decided out of order. Design settled before anyone looked at the slope. Material chosen before anyone added up the weight. Automation considered after the gate was already welded.
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1. Swing or slide, decided by the site
This gets settled before anything is drawn, because it changes the whole design. A swing gate needs level ground through its entire arc. A slide gate needs a clear run of fence line to retract into. A drive that rises toward the house usually rules out one of them, and a drawing made before anyone looked at the slope tends to have to be made again.
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2. Width, and what width does to the far corner
Every foot of width multiplies the load on the hinge post. A wide single leaf puts enormous load on two hinges and a post set in clay that moves with the season. Often the answer is a double gate rather than a single, not because it looks better, but because two shorter leaves carry their own weight far better than one long one.
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3. Material, weighed rather than admired
Iron, steel, aluminum, and wood behave differently once they are hanging. We build in all of them. The question we ask is not which one you like — it is what the finished leaf will weigh, because that number decides the hinges, the posts, the footings, and the operator that has to move it several thousand times a year.
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4. How solid the design is
A solid privacy panel and an open picket design can be the same gate on paper and completely different gates in the ground. Solid infill catches wind, and a North Texas gust pushing on a large flat surface is a real load on the hinges and the operator. This is a design decision with a mechanical bill attached.
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5. Automation, specified before anything is welded
If the gate will be automatic, the operator is part of the design, not an accessory bolted on afterward. Operators are rated by leaf weight, leaf length, and cycles per day. Designing the gate first and shopping for an operator second is how gates end up paired with a drive unit that was never rated to move them.
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6. Footings, hardware, and the parts nobody photographs
Posts, footing depth, and hinges are where a custom gate is actually won or lost. They are also the least interesting part of the quote and the easiest place to save money. We would rather spend it here than anywhere else on the project.
What we build
What we get asked to build
Custom driveway gates, pedestrian gates, and the awkward openings that do not have an off-the-shelf answer.
- Matching an existing fence
- The common request. The gate has to read as part of the fence line while being a fundamentally different object — a fence panel is static and a gate is a machine. Matching the look is straightforward; matching it in something that will still hang square in ten years is the actual work.
- Oversized and double gates
- Wide openings, long single leaves, and double gates that have to meet cleanly in the middle every time they close. The wider the opening, the more the design and the hardware have to be engineered rather than chosen.
- Gates for a sloped drive
- A drive that rises through the gate's arc is the classic reason a swing gate cannot be built as drawn. Depending on the grade the answer is a rising-clearance design, a different swing direction, or a slide gate instead. This is worth resolving before the design, not after.
- Wrought iron and ornamental work
- Custom iron gates in Plano are what most people picture first: pickets, scrollwork, panels, and finishes designed to the property rather than picked from a catalog. Bring a sketch, a photo, or a description — the design conversation starts wherever you are.
- Cedar and wood gates
- Wood is the heaviest common choice by a wide margin once it is wet, and it moves with the weather. Built with that in mind it is a beautiful gate. Built without, it is the one that sags first.
- Replacing a gate that failed
- Sometimes the honest answer to a repair call is that the gate itself was never built for the opening. When we design its replacement we already know exactly how the last one failed, which is the most useful information a gate designer can have.
Have an idea, a sketch, or just an opening and a problem? Call{phone}. Tell us the width, the slope, and whether it needs to be automatic — that is enough to start the design conversation. The estimate is free.
Scope
Custom gates and automatic gate installation are different projects
They overlap constantly, so it is worth being clear about which one you are asking for. If the gate already exists and you want it to open by itself, that is installation — the gate stays and the automation gets added around it. If the gate does not exist yet and you want it designed and built to your property rather than chosen from what is available, that is this page.
Plenty of projects are both. Custom automatic gates in Plano usually start this way — a gate designed and fabricated here, then automated as part of the same job. When that is what you are after, the operator gets specified during the design rather than after it, which is the whole advantage of having one company do both.
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Built to last
Built by the people who will be repairing it
The gates we get called back to soonest are rarely failing because of a bad part. They fail because a leaf was too long for its hinges, a post was set shallow in soil that moves, or a solid panel was hung on an operator sized for an open picket design. Every one of those is a decision made at the drawing stage.
We design gates knowing we are the ones who will be standing in front of them if something goes wrong. That tends to make the hardware choices look a little heavier than they strictly need to be, and it is the reason we would rather talk about weight and footings early than explain them later.
Trying to work out what a custom gate runs before you design one? We break down the published market ranges and what actually moves them incustom driveway gate cost.
Ready to design one? Call {phone}.
Same-day service
Gate down today?
We're usually out the same day. The estimate is free, and you'll know what it needs and what it costs before we start.
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