- How's the view up there?
- Why are you standing on the ground?
- Hey everybody my name is Graham Averill,
I write about adventure for REIs Co-op Journal.
And like everybody else, I'm stuck at home.
So, I decided to turn an old swing set into a climbing wall.
I'm not a very good climber,
I'm an even worse carpenter.
So, I figure why not combine these two
mediocre skills into one project
and see how it goes.
So the materials that I'm going to use
is basically some plywood, some 4 x 8 plywood.
2 x 4's for the actual frame,
a variety of different hangers and fasteners,
screws and nails.
Basically, to put everything together.
Today I'm just going to focus on building the
actual frame for the wall.
What you want to is you build the frame
basically a box and then you fill that box with studs
that are 16 inches apart.
All right, let's see if we can pick it up and carry it.
Oh my gosh, it's so heavy.
Yeah, there we go.
Should've cut that branch down.
There we go, oh god.
Woo mama.
Okay.
Okay, I got the frame onto the structure.
Which was a little harder than I was hoping
because nothing on the swing set was square.
We even have our first climber, this is Thelma,
our neighbor's cat.
She couldn't even wait for me to put the rest of the
wall up, she scaled it no problem.
She's a daredevil.
That's it for the day though.
Now it's time to drink a beer.
Now it's time to set the marks
where I'm going to screw the holes for
the T-nuts and the bolts.
Some people will put in a random pattern of holes
or you can do a grid pattern.
I'm going to do a grid pattern with each hole
staggered at 8 inches apart.
It ends up being a lot of holes, like, I don't know
70 holes or something, so you need a lot of T-nuts.
We're going to use a 7/16 inch drill bit to drill the holes.
And what you want to do,
is you want to drill with the nice side of the plywood
facing up.
So you drill into the nice side because it's going
to create some trash on the back of each hole.
It's not a big deal but it just looks nicer,
if you drill through the top where you'll
actually be doing the climbing.
Okay, so I finished staining the plywood and
I've drilled the holes for the T-nuts.
Now its time to actually hammer in the T-nuts
which go into the back of the plywood.
And you see it's got these sort of four teeth
that will grab hold of the back of the plywood.
And allow you to screw the hold and a bolt in
on the other side, it's a cool system that works
pretty well.
But it's a little bit of work, essentially I've
got to hammer roughly 70 of these into the back
of this piece of plywood.
And then maybe 30 others into the other half
of the plywood.
So I'm going to get going.
When your building your own climbing wall,
you can paint it, you can stain it.
A lot of people will add sand to paint to
give it sorta a rocky, sandy, rough texture.
Which is super cool, that's what most climbing
wall gyms do.
But I just want to keep it super simple and clean for this.
Okay, the wall is up.
That paint is dry and now it's time to do the fun part
which is actually setting the climbing holds.
I'm going to be using two different kinds of holds
the first is a bolt-on hold,
which is what you find at most climbing gyms.
And these are cool because you can move them around
and set different routes depending on
what you're going after but I'm also going to be filling in
with some less expensive screw-on holds,
which are just good filler and they actually make really
good foot placements as well.
Well that's it, the wall is up, the holds are on.
I'm sure we're going to keep rearranging the holds
as I continue to climb this thing.
But right now, I'm just going to enjoy the hard work
that I already put into this thing.
Now it's time to climb.
I'm really happy with the end result.
I've been climbing for about an hour on it.
Super fun, can't wait to get my kids out here.
So that they can check it out.
As soon as there done with their school work.
And we're going to climb together as a family.
I'm really excited about that.
That's pretty good Cooper.
All right Addie, let me see you climb up.