Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Slackline Project - Implementation - Building A-Frames

This post is a follow up on my earlier post Slackline Project - Requirements & Feasibility. You might have a look there.


Disclaimer: This goes on top of the standard disclaimer. I'm neither a experienced slackliner nor some sort of construction engineer. So if you want to utilize some information from below: Just do it but your should crosscheck the information with some experts before you apply it! No guarantees from my side.


Looking at the low budget requirement, I decided to build my own frames rather to spend something like 50 - 90 EUR each. As I mentioned in my last post already: The web is full of self- and professional build a-frames. Should be possible to build something by my own. So I went into the garage to inspect the pile of left-over wood boards and found a former kitchen work disc (170 cm x 60 cm x 3 cm) made from massive beechwood. 

From that I obtained two frames- roughly 80 cm high and support three different slackline heights (30, 50 and 75 cm). The basic design is depicted below.

I was not sure about the proper heights. I might want to add a fourth one between 50 and 75 cm at a later point of time. To be honest - I asked some friend to saw the frames as I don't have the proper tooling at home, but that shouldn't be to much of a problem if you are somehow a  do-it-yourselfer.
That's how the frames look like after being glazed to be protected from the weather impact:

So that are my frames. I guess the low budget requirement wouldn't be fulfilled if I couldn't reuse the work disc for this purpose. In this case it might be a better idea to go for a design which goes with less amount of wood ( video linked from my earlier post.)
In the next post, I will talk about the fix points I have chosen to hold the line.