Swing Set

Around 7 years ago, I put up a swing set. It was little more than a 16' beam strung between two trees and the swings, trapeze and rings bolted to the beam and hung by chain.

There were several things I did, which in retrospect I wished I had done differently but I figured that it was good enough. Certainly too good to justify tearing it down and re-doing it. One of the things I did was to use regular framing wood. I didn't like pressure treated wood and thought that if I coated the regular wood with preservatives then it would be fine. Not so. A week or so ago, serious rotting was detected via Surenna pulling a chain, associated hardware and some wood down from the structure when she tried to use the trapeze.

Last weekend I put up a new structure with the following changes:

--I used pressure treated wood.

--The beam is made from 6 2X6X8 boards. Last time, I bolted the boards together and I staggered them by having two intact pieces on the outside layers and one full length piece in the middle of the center section, a board cut in half made up the rest of the center section. This time I cut two of the boards in 1/3 and 2/3 lengths and staggered the pieces so that no place along the length had more than one junction. The boards were held together via industrial adhesive (liquid nails) and regular nails. The regular nails are essentially only clamps to hold the boards together until the adhesive set, though enough nails were used to hold the structure together all by themselves.

The old setup lasted 7 years with many design flaws. I expect to never have to change this one. This is a good thing since I seriously doubt I will be strong enough (in 10 years or so) to replicate the efforts of this past weekend. Each board of the pressure treated lumber weighs around 26 lbs and there was additional weight from the nails, glue and other hardware bolted on. The total was around 160 lbs, which is a bit more than the author of this blog weighs. I got the thing in place roughly 10' up, but I was at the limit of my strength and at the tail-end of my 40's, I'm not getting stronger.