Gate Repair: Sagging Gates, Hinges and Latches

The gate frame racks. A wooden gate without a working diagonal brace slowly parallelograms — the unsupported corner drops. The tell: the gate itself is no longer square, even though the posts are plumb. Fix: a correctly oriented brace (running from the bottom hinge corner up to the top latch corner) or a tensioned anti-sag cable, and the frame pulls back to square.

Hinges wear out or pull loose. Screws strip in aging wood, hinge pins wear oval, undersized hinges bend. Fix: larger hinges, longer fasteners into sound wood, or a repair block where the original wood is too far gone.

The latch misses. A latch that misses is a symptom of a sagging leaf or worn hinges more than a fault of its own — align the gate and the latch works again. When gates and posts move seasonally (wet-winter swell, summer shrink), an adjustable latch absorbs the drift.

The hinge post leans. The gate's whole weight hangs on one post, levering it toward the opening with every swing. Once the post tilts even slightly, the latch misses, the bottom corner drags, and the gap at the top goes wedge-shaped. Fix: reset or replace the hinge post — properly footed.

A gate is the part of the fence you touch every day, and the part guests see. It's also where a quick fix fails fastest — a hinge re-screwed into stripped wood pulls out again; a repair block or a longer fastener into sound wood is the fix. Repairing the actual cause (post, brace, or hardware) is not much more work.

The calls that come in from property managers, small commercial yards and multi-family buildings are mechanically the same four failures as above, scaled up: a leaf that has dropped, a driveway gate that drags on its arc, a rolling gate that has come off its track, a hinge post leaning under a weight a residential post never sees.

What the contractor takes on: the structure and the hardware. Frames and their diagonals, hinge posts and footings, hinges and bearings, rollers, track and guides, latches, keepers, drop rods and stops. Gates in steel frames as well as wood.

What is not included: the operator itself and everything electrical behind it — motors, control boards, loop detectors, photo eyes, keypads, intercoms and wiring. That is a different trade, and this page does not pretend otherwise. Scope here is gate hardware and structure; opener diagnostics referred out.

That split is more useful than it sounds, because the two get confused constantly and it is nearly always in the same direction. An automatic gate that stalls, reverses or trips its safety gets blamed on the operator, and the operator gets replaced — when the actual cause is a leaf that has dropped onto its arc, a roller seized with grit, or a post that has moved and put the gate out of square. The motor was working against a load it was never set up for.

So there is one thing worth checking before anyone quotes electrical work: with the operator disconnected, does the gate move freely by hand through its whole travel? If it binds, drops, grinds or has a heavy spot, that is a mechanical fault, and fixing it is the contractor's half of the job. If it swings or rolls sweetly by hand and still misbehaves under power, the fault is in the automation and belongs to somebody who does that for a living.

In this order: check that the hinge post is plumb, then the brace, then the hinges. Trimming the bottom of the leaf comes last — it hides the cause and leaves the gate out of square.

Gate repair by town: Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and Atherton, plus the other Peninsula towns on the service-area list.

Height, material and position are what the cities actually regulate, and re-hanging a gate in place leaves all three where they were.

Three photos: the gate closed (showing the gap), the hinge side, and the latch side. These photos help the contractor narrow down the likely cause.

Where the frame has racked past square, the bottom rail has gone soft, or the post is coming out anyway, a repair is putting new work on a failed frame. That case is written up separately: gate installation.