Swing set build

After we moved to Fredericton last fall (2018), my father in law built a swing set for our kids as a welcoming present.

I thought this would be a cool subject for my website and YouTube channel, so I filmed some of it, hoping to turn it into a video later.

But filming someone else without disrupting the progress doesn't make for very good shots. There were also a few mistakes that needed fixing, which would have required extra explaining. And then my father in law didn't really want to be the subject of a video.

And by the time it was done and we had swings hung from it, it was getting quite late into the fall, which also wasn't ideal for filming.

I put it aside. But having seen neighbour's play set kits, from places such as Home Depot or Costco, I realized the swing set we had is actually quite good. It's less elaborate than these kits, but MUCH sturdier. And these kits aren't cheap, and they are a lot of work to put together. So it makes sense to just buy raw lumber and put something together from scratch.

I thought about doing animations in CAD showing how the whole thing is built to make up for lack of video, then had the idea of just building it as a scale model to show the process. This takes less time than creating animations and more satisfying to watch.

The scale model I built is 1:4 of the actual swing set.

What I left out of the model and the plans is that this swing set is slightly customized for a slope, with the down-slope legs about 20 cm longer, cut from 10' long posts instead of 8' long posts. The end of the slide also needed to be raised a bit at the end. The platform could have just been lowered to accommodate the lower side, but we didn't think of that until we mounted the slide.

The only real change is that the down-slope legs are longer, but this asymmetry contributed to a few errors during the construction that needed to be fixed.

And here is a swing set, built from the plans, by Chris. Chris also opted for just two swings on the main span, for extra margin. He also added some safety rails to the sides of the platform.

Swing set plans