Welding, steel gates and fences in Acton, CA

That puts the focus on the driveway gate. It has to be sized to the weight of a long ranch leaf and built to hang true on a drive that climbs, a long way from the house.

Acton has its own rulebook, and for a fence it is the most particular of the cities we cover. The Acton Community Standards District, LA County Code Chapter 22.302, sits on top of the county's ordinary fence heights and changes what a perimeter fence is allowed to be made of.

Under 22.302.060.G, only split rail, open wood, wire, or wrought iron style, or a similar open type of perimeter fence is permitted, with exceptions for residential lots under 10,000 square feet and where a view-obscuring fence is required for screening elsewhere in Title 22. On top of that, at least 70 percent of the entire fence area has to be non-view-obscuring. No slats or other view-obscuring material may be inserted into or affixed to the fence, and any solid lineal section has to be there primarily for structural purposes or as a minor architectural feature.

In plain terms, a solid steel face privacy fence is not the product in Acton. What the code describes, nearly by name, is welded open picket and ornamental iron. On the fences we build, the solid lineal sections are the frame, the posts and the rails, which is exactly what the section allows them to be. If you have been quoted a solid panel run for an Acton perimeter, that is worth a second look before anyone cuts steel.

Height still comes from the county section the district points at. LA County Code 22.110.070 holds a fence in a required front yard to 3 feet 6 inches and an interior side or rear yard to 6 feet, measured at the highest average ground level within 3 feet of either side.

The district also governs the entrance most Acton properties actually want. Under 22.302.060.F.2.c a residential ranch entrance sign is limited to one span per lot, the top of the sign may not exceed 20 feet from natural grade, and the combined sign faces are capped at 12 square feet. If you want a property name over the drive, that is the envelope it has to live inside, and we fabricate the span and the gate to fit it from the start.

The ground does the rest. Acton is canyon and ranch country off the 14, and the drives climb. A gate on a grade is a different problem from a gate on the flat. Two swing leaves need arc room inside the property and a drive close to level at the opening, or the bottom rail drags at the end of its travel. Where the grade will not allow that, a slide gate clears it, provided there is a clear run beside the opening of roughly the gate width again to park the leaf.

The entrance on an Acton property is often a long way from the house, so many owners plan a motor for it, now or later. The motor and its wiring belong to other trades, but the gate it drives is ours, and two standards reach it. UL 325 sorts gate operators into classes and calls for two independent means of entrapment protection in each entrapment zone, with the two not the same type. ASTM F2200 covers the gate itself, including that a gate must not fall more than 45 degrees from vertical if it comes off its supporting hardware. Those apply from the day a gate is motorized, which is why we build the frame to take a motor whether or not one is going on now.

Wind on a canyon lot behaves differently from wind on the open valley floor. It funnels, so the load arrives from a narrower range of directions and hits harder when it does. The open fence the district requires is the easier thing to carry. The gate is the hard part, because a leaf is the largest single object hanging off a post on the property. Gate posts should go at least 36 inches below ground and deeper on a wide leaf, which is our own practice and not a published minimum.

Tell us the lot size, because under 10,000 square feet changes what the district allows, and say whether the entrance sits on a grade. On an Acton property, photographs along the drive tell us more than a single measurement does.

We build all of it at our Lancaster shop, so you get the same fabrication and the same crew as the yard down the road. Call (818) 220-8704 for a free estimate and we will come measure.