Our place has a large wooden fence and gate. There's a gate for people, and then the fence itself can actually be opened by pulling up a latch from the ground. The gate for people ("door"?) has become unhinged this year and I want to figure out how to best repair it. Photos below to show damage:
Here's the gate itself. The hinge at the bottom-left is where the damage is.
Close up of the bottom hinge's current condition.
Another view of that busted bottom hinge.
It looks like the hinge itself is undamaged, and it's simply that the screws lost their bond with the wood, either due to the wood deteriorating and/or too much force on those screws. That bottom horizontal 2×4 is pretty solid (aside from the torn up screw-holes).
I'm thinking to reconnect the bottom hinge back to that same horizontal 2×4 with longer screws and in slightly different screw holes. I'm not sure how to avoid the same problem happening again however. Should I first beef up the bottom horizontal 2×4 by screwing in another piece of wood on top of it (but that would tilt the door)? Should I add another hinge, but where (there's no horizontal 2×4 in the middle, and if I added one, it wouldn't extend across the door)? Can I add another latch on the right side of the door to take off some pressure from the hinges when it's closed?
Currently, when the door is closed it leans against the 6×6 beam it latches to, and when the door opens it has to be held up by the user or its latch-side will scrape against the ground. I presume both of those things happen because of the broken hinge.
Note that the 6×6 beam the door latches to is starting to bow a little bit, as are other 6x6s supporting this fence/pavilion (similar to this). We've asked carpenter and engineer friends about it and they said those posts should be OK for quite a while, but it does worry us (they're big, and all this wood is heavy and on one end attached to the house itself!) I share all that in case it affects options for supporting the gate.
Best Answer
The hinge is damaged, it's bent. You should either bend it straight or get a new one. The hinge has three holes for screws your only using two of them. That's putting extra stress on the two that you are using which is probaly why they pulled out. Hard to tell from the picture how bad the wood is split. I would not try to add any wood, if anything perhaps replace the bottom horizontal piece if it's split badly. If it was my gate I would drill holes all the way through and use a nut and bolt as opposed to wood screws to re-fasten the hinge. You should be able to find decorative ones that match. Someone else may come along with a better answer.