Splining the Miter

Tanya designed and largely single-handedly built a really nice redwood fence in our front yard last fall. But the gate never got built until a couple days ago. Here's the (almost) final product:

Creating the joints at the corners of the hexagon was interesting. I didn't want to have any exposed hardware (screws, metal plates) so I used a technique called "splining" that Tanya found for me on the web. It's pretty simple, you just cut a notch in the back of the miter and glue in a strip of wood:

It's a lot trickier to do the spline notch in a fence post that's already standing. Here I am up on the fence, using a circular saw as a router:

It was lots of fun, redwood is really pleasant wood to work with.