Reinforcements

Hilary and I got Brynna a pair of Big Girl Swings for her birthday (shhh, it's a surprise!). These would replace the utterly decrepit and downright dangerous swings that were attached to the swing set when we bought the house. For some time now, Brynna has been content to swing in the baby swing, after I restrung it properly with new hardware. But she's more or less outgrown that and is ready to move up to the kind of swings she likes at the park. We decided to get two so that there's one for when friends come over.

That's all well and good except for one thing: the structure of the swing set itself is definitely not up for the increased load. It may have been designed for it, and it may have been capable of it when it was first built, but at this point it is decidedly not up to snuff. The main structure has a very noticeable 10-degree list. When Brynna swings with just the little swing, the crossbar it hangs from bows back and forth, rocking the whole structure along with it. I tightened up numerous bolts a few months back, but hardware can always loosen up. I had to add reinforcement to one end just to be able to string the closeline this summer without greatly distorting the shape of the thing. In general, I've found the choice of construction to be greatly lacking as well. 4x4s for vertical posts, fine, but 1x4s for crossbracing? The framing is square all around. Have these people never seen a proper truss? See all the triangles? Squares and rectangles can, as demonstrated here, get pulled out into parallelograms. Suffice it to say: if I were to design and build a platform/swingset, I would have made very different decisions.

In any event, I decided that I wouldn't put up B's new swings until I had done some reinforcement work. I started by loosening many of the bolts. Then I took off the ladder. These would make it easier for me to pull the thing back into square. This I did with a sort of block-and-tackle arrangement.


Into the ground I drove two 12" garden spikes. On each was a pulley. The rope got strung from one stake, through a pulley on the structure, through a pulley at the first stake, through another pulley on the structure, through a pulley on a second stake, then tied off to the structure.



In all, there were the equivalent of five ropes strung between the ground and the structure. When I pulled on the free end, my pull was multiplied 5x into force pulling the structure back into plumb. By my guess, I had 50-75 lbs of tension in the line, or about 250-375 lbs of force tugging on the structure up high. This was enough to bring the posts back to vertical.


With the pulley system still in place, I applied Loctite to all the bolts and tightened them back down. The red loctite should ensure that these bolts don't ever loosen again.


I also added a diagonal brace between the posts to help keep it square (triangles, people!).

The cross piece that the swings hang from is basically a ladder. It's missing several rungs, and two were pulled out from there holes and dangling. So when Brynna was swinging before, most of the load was going through one single 1x6. Lovely. I put the rungs back into place and tightened the hardware at either end. Then, for good measure, I also added diagonal bracing across the top of the "ladder" to tie it all together.


This done, I feel like I will be able to put up the swings tomorrow without being deathly afraid of something breaking. And, gosh, it only took four hours of hot work on a Saturday.

If I'd designed and built it, it would have been a freakin' tank!

Ball Crawl

Were you to walk into our living room right now, or anytime in the last few months, you would see a cuboidal, fabric-walled tent sitting between our living and dining rooms. Look a little closer, and you would (or at least, any parent in this day and age would) be able to pick out the fuzzy red profile of Elmo from Sesame Street. And, if you were there at just the right time, you might hear some satisfied giggles and thumping feet coming from inside. This is Brynna's miniature ball crawl - a Christmas gift from her grandparents.


Brynna's favorite activity in here is to be hoisted in through the portal in the roof, then dance around inside while someone shakes the everloving out of the tent - causing a small blizzard of red, blue, and yellow plastic balls. Like a rodeo, the real measure of this activity is how long she can keep her feet before falling down. Eight seconds is pretty good. Second favorite is to have someone hold her by the ankles upside-down and get lowered in, head first, and pluck balls out like some sort of crane. That one is limited largely by the upper body strength of whoever's doing the lifting. I can manage about five lifts before my shoulders start to tremble. Her third favorite is to pass one or more balls out through the several port holes in one wall, then have a ball returned - first in this hole, no in this hole, this one, over here, now this one, etc. After five or six teases I usually let her have it, because I want her to keep enjoying her self.

My favorite activity? Shaking the tent makes Brynna's hair stand on end!

DEH-do

Or, as most of the rest of the world knows them, Lego. Brynna received a box of large-sized Duplo Legos for christmas from her Aunt, and has really taken to them. She can, when the moods strikes her, amuse herself with building Lego towers for a substantial period of time - 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch, which is a really, really long time for her to be occupied on any one thing at this age.

Daughter of an engineer? You better believe it!