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Thank you!

Hey Peter! Thanks for the sub! That’s a good question. It made me really think. You’re right that the steel does have a higher tensile strength, but the main risk of failure for the steel under compression is it buckling or folding and the gate is not going to carry enough load to risk that. I did go back and review a bunch of shop drawings and specs for cantilever gates that we’ve done over the years, and pretty much all of them call for or have it drawn up as a compression brace. So, I know that’s not a great answer of “because that’s the way it’s been done.” But at least in our experience we’ve never had an issue with the compression braces on these. Now we do have some steel rods with tensioners that we use on other gates that act as a tension brace. So yeah for us we usually use a welded steel compression brace for slide/cantilever gates and a steel rod style tension brace on steel swing gates. Again, good question. I’m going to keep digging on that one. You’re also very correct on the wood frame! With wood you have to use it as a compression brace. That’s a mistake you see often with a wood brace installed as a tension brace, which usually leads to some type of failure in the gate frame over time. Thanks Peter!

Thanks for the well worded response Joe, and I agree in this application it's not going to matter, this may help you in the future, full disclaimer, I'm not an engineer but I'm old and have built a lot of things from many different materials and when I need to come up with an answer to a question that a trained and educated engineer can calculate exactly, I simply adjust the scale, take your braces for example, the size of steel you have used is not going to care in which direction they are placed, but if you adjust the scale and use 3/8 steel rod for the brace the selection becomes obvious, the rod will support the load under tension but will fail under compression, the connection will be it's failure point. The scale adjustment can work the other way as well, instead of needing to support the weight of timber fence palings, imaging a concrete truck parked on the top, of the end of the gate and picture where it will fail, thanks for the discussion Joe, Peter.

Thank you! We will work on the music for future videos!

thank you!

thank you!!