With the kids getting bigger, I thought they might like a zip wire. We're fortunate enough to have a part of the garden that has a few trees off to the side of the main grass area, so I selected a large willow tree and off we went:
This is the tower for launch...
And up..
And up some more...
Needed to get an arch together so that it would do for the landing zone....
This is about as far as the tower got...
But we got the cable up
And figured out a retrieval system so that you could wind the trolley and seat arrangement back once you'd slid down...
Unfortunately, our neighbours, who'd not noticed all the building of zip wires apparently up to this point suddenly did. And decided they didn't like the look of the tower. You could see into their garden from the top of it, so that wasn't ideal. Long story short, the lot had to come down.
So part deux, more holes, more concrete, more cable, more digger hire, more timber, more rope. It's bloody expensive the first time, and although not quite double to do it twice, it wasn't far off. That'll teach me I suppose.
Make some foundations, get the tower partially broken down, and get a digger:
That tower weighs an awful lot. Tipped the digger aa couple of times. 3.5 tonne digger. And that's only the bottom and next floor
Then we had to put the top floor back on. Because I'd needed to take a chainsaw to the tower to get it to pieces, it took a fair bit of rebuilding to get it back to being one tower again.
You can get something of an idea of the scale of it from this pic. The arch for the landing zone has now been moved, is facing the other way, and a new cable is back up.
You can see the attachment of the cable in this shot - heavy duty turnbuckle too. Not sure what the breaking strain of the cable is - it's about 9.5kN I think. Plenty in any case. - 12mm steel cable.
Anyway, in action, it looks like this (the orange lines are to retrieve the zip line post slide):
I was in my best clothes for this one....
This is the tower for launch...
And up..
And up some more...
Needed to get an arch together so that it would do for the landing zone....
This is about as far as the tower got...
But we got the cable up
And figured out a retrieval system so that you could wind the trolley and seat arrangement back once you'd slid down...
Unfortunately, our neighbours, who'd not noticed all the building of zip wires apparently up to this point suddenly did. And decided they didn't like the look of the tower. You could see into their garden from the top of it, so that wasn't ideal. Long story short, the lot had to come down.
So part deux, more holes, more concrete, more cable, more digger hire, more timber, more rope. It's bloody expensive the first time, and although not quite double to do it twice, it wasn't far off. That'll teach me I suppose.
Make some foundations, get the tower partially broken down, and get a digger:
That tower weighs an awful lot. Tipped the digger aa couple of times. 3.5 tonne digger. And that's only the bottom and next floor
Then we had to put the top floor back on. Because I'd needed to take a chainsaw to the tower to get it to pieces, it took a fair bit of rebuilding to get it back to being one tower again.
Then it needed a sort of outrigger for the launch platform because the branch we were using for the line didn't go over the platform properly. I don't like heights, so bit of squeaky bum time building that. There are two removable planks so you can get the zip wire seat up there.
You can get something of an idea of the scale of it from this pic. The arch for the landing zone has now been moved, is facing the other way, and a new cable is back up.
You can see the attachment of the cable in this shot - heavy duty turnbuckle too. Not sure what the breaking strain of the cable is - it's about 9.5kN I think. Plenty in any case. - 12mm steel cable.
Anyway, in action, it looks like this (the orange lines are to retrieve the zip line post slide):
I was in my best clothes for this one....
No comments:
Post a Comment