Here’s my build thread for the construction of a privacy screen / railing, which totally killed my momentum on my engine swap. I thought I’d share why that happened.
The Dogpark Racing Porsche 944 race car took a back seat in the second half of the 2017 season while we had a landscaping contractor doing some major projects around the house.
We had a patio installed in the back yard, with retaining walls above and below it to give it a usable size. The driveway was also extended up the hill, both so I could store my race car/trailer there, and so that disabled visitors can reach the main level of the home without having to climb an entire flight of stairs.
As usual when I hire a contractor, I had to be involved in some form, and this time I made myself responsible for the design and build of whatever barrier would prevent people from falling off the edge of our porch and onto the newly extended driveway. It also serves as a privacy screen from the neighbors who are situated right across the driveway from the patio.
I wanted an interesting look and I drew up a few ideas, but the simplest design came out the winner.
Nice! And angled slats allow high winds to pass, unlike my fence tat flaps like a 100ft. sail.
What kind of wood is that?
Very nice and that's a really modern look.
How tedious was it to notch all those boards? I assume there was a jig and a router involved.
Thanks! It's standard cedar fencing 1x4 x 6' which has a rough side and a smooth side. Very lightweight and economical.
Before the retaining wall was even constructed, I knew I’d need some pretty beefy anchors so I bought some concrete j-bolts normally used to fasten sill plates to slabs.
The contractors were getting stuff done pretty quickly…
…and I hadn’t even bought the steel for the base plates of the fence posts. I hadn’t even settled on a design yet. So I used some scrap steel (same stuff I recently used for my 944’s oil cooler mount) to make some positioning blanks. Those 12” long j-bolts were probably a bit of overkill.
But the templates were great for positioning those bolts, and the stone guys set them in there with mortar. Not one of the bolts jiggled as I removed the alignment plates. I had asked the guys to place them six feet apart on center. They did that perfectly, but the wall didn’t really reach to the end of the walk. I fretted about that for a while, but it turns out we love the extra open space at the end. It allows for more freedom and it doesn't feel cramped.
Can you show some close ups of how you attached the wood??
Will do.
I may get the pictures a little out of order here, but the next thing I knew, the stone guys were pretty much finished setting the bolts in. They removed the temporary plate, drilled four holes in each stone exactly where the bolts came up, and set the stones. Then they put the temporary plate back down. Those guys were really accommodating of my requirements, and very good at what they did.
I ended up with eight post locations:
At this point I had my design pretty fleshed out in my mind. So I went to the local Metal Supermarkets establishment (mail-order steel makes no sense) and picked up several 6’ long 2”x2” 1/8” wall posts, and some 1/4” thick base plates already cut to size. I didn’t have to do any cutting which was awesome. I also bought 21 pieces of 2.5" x 1/8" flat bar steel, 6.5' long to give me some slack on the curves.
I stick-welded my first post and mounted it up. And I proceeded to take a lot of pictures of my handiwork. :-)
Dammit, showed this to my wife and she LOVED it. We have been fence shopping for about a year or two now....just have not pulled the trigger to replace the fence yet with better privacy. I cannot imagine how much that set you back. My property backs in to the river but is open on the rear. The sides of the yard are a PITA since one side of the yard is higher than the other. This fence format could be better to keep nosy neighbors lower end out but not the higher end but the angled slats could block their view in. Now that patio idea would be great at the rear of the property close to the river. It slopes down and making that retaining wall/patio area much more inviting to be out in the backyard.
In reply to CrookedRacer :
That came out nice! I love that there's a blue tarp over the chimney: life is indeed a project, and no matter how finished one area is, there's always something else needing to be done.
Thanks!
Yeah, that tarp was covering a leak in the flashing around the chimney that I've since fixed. It's one of the all-time most gratifying repairs I've ever made... to anything, really.
So then I welded all eight posts and mounted them perfectly vertically with a level. This was important because the assembly and re-assembly of the steel had to be repeatable. I made precise measurements of how far above the stone each post was located so that I could replicate the locations after powder coating.
I bought some 1/4”-20 x 1/2” black-oxide coated stainless steel screws to attach the cross members, each of which were custom cut for length. The bow of the steel determined where I’d be making my cut. I tried to make the top, middle, and bottom cross members have identical bows. Basically I eyeballed that aspect.
I believe the most tedious part of this whole project was hand-drilling and hand-tapping 126 1/4"-20 holes in the vertical posts.
Once all the horizontal members were mounted, I bought my wood and built - you literally already guessed it - a jig for the router table.
The path down to the top of the driveway had a slope to it… which meant that the horizontal pieces were level for the first three panels, slightly angled down for the next panel, and then a third slope angle for the last three panels.
My jig could be adjusted (seen here where the plywood departs the square edge of the router table) to make each slot in the cedar match the slope of the horizontal steel. The precise location of each notch in the boards was marked from one end using a strip of wood with markings and a stop screwed to one end of it (which let the strip hang on the edge of each cedar piece like the end of a tape measure).
This job wasn't quite as tedious... since that's my girlfriend doing the notching there... 
So we built a test panel on the unfinished steel - one that I knew we'd have to take down for finishing, but I needed to prove out the design.
That meant drilling holes in a regular spacing. The distances between posts varied from panel to panel, so I would use the locations of the holes in the first panel and extrapolate it to the shorter or longer distances with a protractor/straight edge. I drilled through all three horizontal pieces of the panel, stacked on top of each other and clamped to each other, with my old inherited drill press.
I selected painted-head stainless-steel sheet metal screws (they look like wood screws) because black oxide coated stainless ones were prohibitively expensive., The black heads looked so awesome. I was so happy with the decision to face them inward to where folks could see them up close.
Right away, I loved the way the sunlight filtered and bounced through the boards. This was going to be cool.
For the rest of the panels, I marked and removed the horizontal pieces, drilled the holes, and then finally took all the posts down for finishing.
Just before sending it off, I cut up two extra base plates into squares for post caps:
It spent a week at the powder-coaters, where I chose a bronze color that pretty closely matched the brown trim of the windows on the house.
While the steel was away, I did the best I could to prevent rust on the post anchors. They were described as “galvanized” but whatever cheap process they used wherever they were made was crap.
I bought extra galvanized nuts and lock washers to go with the anchors, and those were so much better. Night and day. So I had to do some cleaning, scraping, painting, caulking, and painting again. Why not?
This was all in an effort to minimize the rust stains that might eventually come about. So far, four months later, we’re still stain-free.
I also painted all the nuts and washers. When the posts came back, they looked awesome.
I put some grease on threads as I reassembled.
Putting it all together required a little persuasion in just one case.
Installing the cedar was actually pretty easy. I would just hang it on the top notch, and at first I'd use another piece to space it out, which was perfect for my first panel. After a while I got to just eyeballing where the notch lined up with the hole, and the hole locations were exact enough to make that system look just as good.
Most important was the clutch setting on my cordless drill, which would could easily spin off the screw head if it were set too high. On the other hand, certain pieces of wood were softer with wider grain, and the screw could spin in the wood. So it took a little adjustment and toying with it.
I'll have to go through my credit card summary for 2017 to get all the costs together. I kind of approached it with a "it will cost what it will cost" mentality, but I definitely shopped around for the most economical and sensible materials as I went along.
Initially I thought I wanted to build the thing with ipe (Brazilian walnut) but a co-worker assured me that would have weighed too much, cost too much, and even the steel would have needed to be way beefier to support it. Never underestimate how difficult ipe is to work with. I'm glad he suggested the cedar, which can even be found in stock at some home improvement places. I special ordered mine because the 6" wide pieces were all they had here at Home Depot at the time.
Very nice, I like this a lot. I have been toying with the idea of putting a fence but with high winds, I held off till I saw your slanted fence.
Paul B
In reply to Donebrokeit :
The fence itself seems to be completely solid even in high winds. However, if I were designing one from scratch again, I'd be sure to put curves in it just like the ones I had to contend with here.
There are two sections that are NOT curved. Those sections can be moved more easily - pushed in or out at the center. The movement doesn't seem to bother anything, but if you brushed your shoulder on it with any force, you might be alarmed that it would actually swing an inch or two in and out.
The curved sections don't have that problem because they've got the strength in the curve. Kind of like a trailer with "pre-camber" in the platform. I'm not quite sure it's the same mechanism for strength, but you get the idea.
A primer on pre-cambered beams.
Even the curved sections can sort of undulate in a wave-like motion when you push on them at a point about 1/4 of the way along the panel. When that occurs, it actually induces twist in the posts, actually transferring a bit of energy and motion to the next panel over, which is why I'm glad they're pretty beefy in the first place.
In practical use, I've seen absolutely no movement in the highest winds or when encountered by the drunkest party animals. I'm really happy with the way it looks and "performs".
Then again, E36 M3 happens...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFzu6CNtqec
This may be the nicest looking fence I have ever seen. Nice work!
This is a really cool setup, and it looks like it took a lot of work and attention to detail. Great job!
Thanks, guys! I'm just glad it's done so I can turn my full attention to the race car!
1988 Porsche 944 Track Toy Build
that looks incredible! Well done sir
looks fantastic. Great work!
Thanks for taking the time to explain - it looks amazing.
Dang. That’s a beautiful fence.
