This will be my longest post ever.
A couple of months back our neighbours offered us an old swing set that they were planning to trash. It was around 10 years old and had SUFFERED in the Canadian winter. But my wife and I, being industrial little squirrels, thought we could fix it up. TLDR, we could not. Every time my kids tried to swing on it we feared for their lives and that was after we added new bracing.
So after dealing with it for a couple of months my wife decided we needed to build a new one. While my wife is a wonderful person and incredibly competent, smart, and beautiful (hi sweetie). Carpentry is not one of her multitude of skills. So when she announced this I knew I had a project on my hands. Let me make this clear, I was perfectly fine with building a swing set but I can’t activate project mode like my wife can. It takes me weeks of thinking about it before I get over that mental hill and begin.
So we bought some premade brackets to handle attaching the legs to the beam and got the wood. Once I started the build, I quickly realized that it would not be as simple as bolting everything together. For one, the brackets we purchased were built with a lot of tolerance. Meaning I needed to use shims to fill in the extra space. Second, it calls for a 4x6 wood beam to act as the main piece but that’s not a common size here. So I had to take a 4x4 post and a 2x4 board and screw them together.
Even the leg holds on the bracket had a bunch of tolerance meaning that even after I bolted in the 4x4s legs they would wiggle. So I needed to add some (a lot) of bracing. That wouldn’t be a hard thing with the right tools but I didn’t have a mitre saw or even a mitre box. The latter would have been useful anyway because mitre boxes only have a set number of angles they can cut unless you get something expensive. So I did it all by freehand with my tiny little battery-powered circular saw. Speaking of which, that thing is fine for 2x4 boards but cutting 4x4 is a nightmare with it. If I ever get into a big project again I will definitely buy a corded model.
Bracing is great if you can find the right type of screw to connect them. As it turned out Home Hardware sells some serious structural screws that are amazing. They grip like no other and are really easy to insert. Even my lowly little drill was able to zip these guys right in like butter. Finally to ensure they the swing would be incredibly rigid, I bought a number of metal plates and L brackets.
With the basic structure ready the last thing I needed to do was to install the swings themselves. We decided to reuse the ones from our older set since they were still in decent condition and this project was already racking up the cost. All I needed was the right eye bolts and quick links. The problem is that I live in Sault Ste Marie Canada and the hardware needed to be tough. So I elected to buy stainless steel hardware rather than zinc-plated. This doubled or tripled the cost of the items I needed in comparison to the zinc versions. But with that final bill I was able to let my kids test the swing and it was excellent! Super rigid, sturdy.
This whole thing took me 5 days between rain, work and life but I am overall pretty happy with how it turned out.
