Latches on wooden gates keep shifting out of place

I have a few wooden gates with these self-adjusting gate latches: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Black-Self-Adjusting-Gate-Latch-18591/202042259

Our weather swings from super dry and 100+ Fahrenheit days in the summer to weeks of rain in the winter. The wood keeps shifting, expanding and contracting, and the latches stop lining up properly, even with the "self-adjusting" mechanism. Pictures below are of one gate as an example, but this has happened to all four! And I need to install four more gates this year.

The best solution I've found so far is these heavy duty flip latches: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Black-Extra-Heavy-Duty-Gate-Flip-Latch-20474/203561799
However as you can see, they are much more expensive and require wider pieces of wood to attach to.
I thought of creating my own flip latches with pieces of wood, however I worry those would also expand too much to function during the wet weather.

All the latches need to be accessible from BOTH sides of the gate, AND I can't reach over the top of the gate to access them - so I need to be able to open/close through the 2x2" woven wire fence.

Any ideas for me?

Interesting problem. By any chance do you know what kind of wood the gate is made from? It looks kind of red, but that may be a stain or treatment.

Other than building a new gate I don't know of anyway to stop wood moving with humidity changes. So yes, creating a latch that doesn't care if it is 2 inches off vertical seems like the other option.

You can design a gate/door/etc such that the movement doesn't create a problem like this. You can also build with wood that experiences minimal seasonal movement - Japanese cedar is a good example here, I don't know what you have there.

It is a common problem. I dug up the key posts the gate attaches to as well as the post the latch attaches to.  My frost line is about 24”.  I dug down 36 inches.  I sunk both posts into a hefty amount of concrete. It seems to be a solution.  At least it has lasted over 24 months.  There are still minor shifts, but the latch continues to work.

L. Johnson wrote:Interesting problem. By any chance do you know what kind of wood the gate is made from? It looks kind of red, but that may be a stain or treatment.

You can design a gate/door/etc such that the movement doesn't create a problem like this. You can also build with wood that experiences minimal seasonal movement - Japanese cedar is a good example here, I don't know what you have there.

It is some sort of pressure-treated lumber, but I don't know anything more than that. Sadly, getting any sort of specialty wood would be out of my budget at this time. Good thing to remember for the future, though.

John F Dean wrote:It is a common problem. I dug up the key posts the gate attaches to as well as the post the latch attaches to.  My frost line is about 24”.  I dug down 36 inches.  I sunk both posts into a hefty amount of concrete. It seems to be a solution.  At least it has lasted over 24 months.  There are still minor shifts, but the latch continues to work.

3 feet, that's buried quite deep! Makes sense that that would be the solution. I will keep that in mind for future projects.

To add to my comment, when I have a post supporting a gate, I make sure it I’d on 5he heavy side of things.  Posts 6hat hold 4’ gates are normally 6” when the fence posts are 4”.   If the gate is 6”, I have an 8” post.  

A lot of your gate problem has to do with it's design. You are having a lot of trouble because of the physics involved.

In your picture, you show a gate with the hinges on the right side, yet it is on a corner post. Because of that arrangement, the single post is trying to hold up a gate that is always putting weight to the left side; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and yet you have NOTHING to counteract it

The quick and dirty way to fix this gate is to put a ground anchor 4 feet to the right of the gate post, then loop a series of wires from the ground anchor to the top of the gate post. Then using a stick, wind up the wire and get it super tight, or use a fence daisy wheel to tighten it, Now for the gate to lean over to the left, it must pull the ground anchor out of the ground, and that is not going to happen.

If you cannot do that, then you could put in a decent H-braced corner, then put your gate to the left of the corner. Your gate won't be in the far corner, but it won't be toppling over either.

You also put gate posts and corner posts twice as deep as line posts, and make them twice as beefy.