Review on Cardinal Gates Auto Lock Gate White by Tara Hammack

Having tried 3 other gates this gate is by far the best. Yes, it's a bit more expensive than most, but I think the difference in price is small, but worth it. The installation is very easy. The screws that come with the gate are short and are probably intended for mounting the gate in doorways where you screw it directly into the wooden door frame. But if you're like me, you'll probably be installing it in drywall, so you'll need longer screws (and possibly drywall anchors if you can't screw them directly into a stud). For me, this is a minor inconvenience because I have a lot of extra screws and various fasteners in my garage. I'm quite skilled (engineer by trade) and was able to install this gate in about 15 minutes. The set screws that adjust and set the width of the gate were too short so I put a coin between the set screw and the gate. This helped close that gap and also protected the gate from being cut in by the set screw. I don't see that as an obstacle. What I love about this gate is how easy it is to use, especially with one hand. Pull the ring up and rotate it. The mechanism is simple and that is the beauty of it. As an aerospace engineer, we like to design by the KISS mantra (keep it simple, dumbass). The simpler the design, the less likely something will fail or go wrong. The main reason I bought this gate was the auto-lock feature (not to be confused with auto-close). This feature is perfect because as soon as you unlock/open it, all you have to do is close the gate and it will lock again automatically. The gate can open in both directions, or you can set it to open in one direction only (for safety reasons, e.g. when installed at the top of a staircase). Another nice feature is that it is very easy to remove the gate. You simply remove the split ring (also known as a key ring), slide the pivot bar up and the entire gate is removed. What remains is what is screwed to the wall – the hinge bracket and the lock. At night when we like to leave the gate open, I put a magnetic latch on the wall near the floor that keeps the gate open at night so we don't accidentally bump into it. The magnetic latch is around $2 at your local hardware store and attaches nicely to the steel bracket (where the set screws are) at the bottom of the gate. The main part of the gate is aluminum so the magnet doesn't work, but luckily these brackets are steel. My wife loves that I came up with this as it keeps the gate out of the way when we need it. I might even suggest to the manufacturers to put this cheap but very useful magnetic latch in the gate. All in all we like this goal. Other gates are difficult to open/close, flimsy, difficult to install and/or too thin. I would like to point out that our "main gate" is starting to show signs of wear. The locking mechanism has a pin that runs through a 90 degree rotatable channel. This corner starts to round off, making the latch a little more delicate in the open position (i.e. a simple nudge against the latch will cause it to rotate and latch). This hasn't become a problem yet - I say "yet" because as the channel wears out the latch eventually becomes unable to stay in the open position. This does not affect the security of the gate. All of this means that you have to manually lock the gate. However this gate has been our main gate for the last 2.5 years which means it opens/closes about 20 times a day. That's about 18,000 hits! Personally and professionally (as an aerospace designer) I find that impressive. I'm also impressed that metal fatigue isn't an issue given the high impact loads the small pin in the latch experiences every time it is closed. In general, if our main latch wears out, I will try to contact the manufacturer. see if they can sell me just the bar. This would be a more economical solution. And worst case scenario, if they don't, I'd buy a new gate anytime. And in case some of you are wondering why I still need a goal for almost 3 years - well because we will have a little girl at the end of April :)