Forays into woodworking: The Great Wall of Ironjack

I'm not sure how this came about....

I don't think I could tell you what caused me to start this project. I can only tell you once I get my mind wrapped around something I tend not to let go (like some sort of rabid dog). In anycase, for some reason the idea of making my own climbing wall sounded appealing. I did a Google it. There were many results. Most of them detailed a flat wall. It really came down to 2 candidates, a tiltable flat wall (the whole wall was a homogenous pitch) or a multi surface wall. I decided to go for the hard path, as taking the easy path is just never my style.

Planning: Reminising about highschool

I think one of my favorite courses in highschool was drafting (Mr. Frailey). So every project and chance I get I try to do a full architectual drawing of what it is I'm doing. Below are some of the snapshots of the various plans I drew out. Since I really only had pictures to go on I had to make some basic guestimates. Firstly, these guys made this wall to go into a dorm room (meaning ceilings not exceeding 8-10ft tall) and since it's most convinent to find wood on the 8 ft range I took a guess at a height of 8 ft. The wall appeared to have 3 surfaces, it started flat, jutted outwards at a pretty good angle and then came back in a bit towards flat. It was pretty easy to tell the first angle had to be 45 degrees. And since it didn't make much sense to pick anything other than easy well known angles, the upper face had to be a 30/60 triangle. With those bits of information in my head the rest of was highschool geometry. (Mr Thompson would be proud). I engineered it with a high safety factor being that, since I live by myself, it wouldn't do to have the wall fall on me, and have my friends find my corpse (half eaten by my cat) 2 weeks later. So you'll note in the pictures all the braces and metal plates I put on, which was an add on to the original design. (design scans to come)

Execution: Trials and tribulations of a one man team

I think one of the hardest parts of building this wall was sawing all the components. Apparently a dull mitre saw does not make for easy sawing through 2x4 pieces of wood. After all the effort I think it would have been cheaper to spend 50 bucks go to a pawnshop and pickup a mitre saw that would have made short work of this stuff. But by the time I was frustrated enough I had already gotten through most of the cuts. My biceps are a bit more healthy as a result. The second hardest part was getting everything to fit together. Plans and measurements are fine and all, but they are not always perfect. Some tight wedging and shifting were necessary. Also, when I started getting close to finishing the whole project that wall got real heavy (and thus it was harder for me to work on it.)

I'll spare you the details of the cutting but the first step was to assemble the back scaffolding structure. It's the frame that holds everything together.

This was diffcult since i had to do a lot of wedging and making sure things fit right (sanding stuff down recutting and the like).

This is the part where i cut all the plywood faces and made sure it all fit together on the wall. So far so good. Except for the fact I wretched my back at this point, (see the title of this section: trials and tribulations of a one man team)

All in all this part was pretty easy. I had to pound in some 250 some odd T-nuts to all the faces before screwing the faces into their final position

Finally the legs and it's time to put this bad boy up and see what it can do!

@!#&&%$!: Measure twice and cut once lesson learned

So one serious flaw I didn't anticipate was the part where we try to tip this wall up and sit it up in it's final resting place. My garage ceiling is 10 ft. I would have thought that 8 ft would have been fine. *except* that the leg bars prevented me from pushing it up (it hit a cross bar). So we tried tipping it on it's side and pushing it vertical. Let me tell you, even as a 2 man job it was heavy and even then we missed the clearance by about 2 inches... *sigh* needless to say I was quite frustrated, the only option I could think of was to disassemble enough of the structure (all faces included) and put the scaffolding and superstructure up first and then reassemble the faces and legs... I definitely had no patience for that, so I worked on the chair instead. But just to give the wall the finger, I at least put 1 hold in place.
Pooh pooh. :(

after a flash of insite, I decided I need only take off the legs and the heaviest face and retry the operation. My friend Baris came over and we decided to conqueror the beast.

Here's Baris looking all tough with the drill, and here's me reattaching the legs.

SUCCESS!

Screwing on the first holds

The first test! Please don't break, please don't break. So first run was a success only thing left was to screw in the other holds here's some more pictures for your perusal.

Yes That's right, i'm trying to relive the garage culture days of the 70s so i've put up a dart board,and i've got a minifridge that will sit in there as well as a TV. what the heck, if my car won't fit in the garage, I might as well use it for something.

Final steps: the future

The last bit of this will be to sand down the faces and paint it with this textured wall paint for that sandstone grip. You'll note i've got some bolts with quickdraws on it so i can suspend myself to reorganize the holds up top without dragging out the ladder.