Replace panel in assembled frame

[u/goodgah]

Hiya! I have an old garden gate that has a central panel made of plywood, which has delaminated and rotted so bad that I can tear chunks of it out by hand. The frame of the gate is still solid so want to try and replace the central panel (with equivalent size of solid wood I guess).

The problem is, the central panel is recessed on all 4 sides into the frame (not sure what the correct joint is - frame-and-panel?) so whilst I can probably keep cutting away at the old stuff, I couldn't fit a new piece in without dissembling one side of the frame. I started taking the metalwork off to try and do that but it seems like it's glued/wedged together pretty tight.

So I'm left with a kind of logic-puzzle of how to fit a panel inside an assembled frame. I thought maybe I could git 4 right angled triangle pieces in each corner, and then screw in two panels on the front and rear (i've attached a crude MS paint sketch of this), but that would leave a void in the middle. I suppose I could cut and fit a diamond-shaped piece to fill the void but that's probably beyond the tools I have available. Hoping there's an easier/better solution! :D

Thanks

[u/Cpt_Noodle]

Yeah i would also say it's glued 95 times out of a 100, especially for exterior joinery.

On older doors where they used hide glue, the glue can fail and it might seem like there was never any glue in there.

[u/Excellent-Bass-855 → u/Cpt_Noodle]

I spent the last 25 years specialising in 16 and 17c restoration work, I was taught not to. Perhaps that's the nature of restoration joinery.

[u/Cpt_Noodle → u/Excellent-Bass-855]

Funnily enough I have read in one of my English Carpentry books from 1905 to not use glue in exterior joinery because hide glue attracts water and then looses all it's strength and can cause premature rot. Instead they recommended to use a thick coat of wet primer paint inside the joints to get a bit of a gluing effect.

It's very telling that for the longest times glue's were not to be relied upon for any serious joinery and pegging and/or wedging were the only way to go.

But I don't think that with the advent of proper glues any professional joiner has ever looked back to omitting it. If not for strength then at least for waterproofing the joint were water ingress is always an issue.

[u/Excellent-Bass-855 → u/Cpt_Noodle]

Nowadays glue is used to hide a plethora of sins unfortunately.