3/13/08

THE PLAN

The first thing that I did when I decided that I wanted to build my own bouldering wall was figure out exactly where to put it. I knew that in the garage was the only practical place. The only problem with the garage is that there is only one place that I could really put it any where else and there would be shelves in the way or the garage door tracks would be within head striking distance if you fell on the overhang wall. Right next to the side door that comes in to the garage there is a nice section or wall that doesn't have anything next to it, so this is the place.

I am planning on my wall having about a 20 degree overhang just to the right of the door (the one on the left), with a 15 to 20 degree overhang to the left of that and a vertical wall to the left of that.

The next step was to clean up the mess along the wall of the garage.

Next I decided to forget about cleaning up the mess until the wall is at least designed and I am ready to buy materials.

THE DESIGN

To design the wall I came across a little program that Google made called Google Sketch. I highly recommend it if you are interested in prototyping a wall of your own. It only takes about 10 minutes to design a simple wall. This really helped in deciding what angles to use and what the wall was going to look like. I went through several designs but decided to settle on a simple design that I felt would not be too hard to construct. Especially since this will be my first framing type of construction without the guidance of someone who really knows what they are doing. I have been doing a bit of reading on how to frame walls off of existing structures and I feel that I have enough of an understanding to get started and just move along slowly to avoid any big problems.

Here is the design that I came up with using Google Sketch.

At this point I am just waiting to buy some materials to get construction started. Construction will happen in several phases:

1. Build the frame for the overhang wall on the ground and then raise it in place and secure it.

2. Build frame for less overhung wall raise it in place and secure it.

3. Build frame for vertical wall raise it in place and secure it.

4. Cut plywood to cover faces.

5. Mark studs on plywood and drill holes for T-nuts.

5. Secure plywood to the faces of the wall.

6. Bolt on holds

7. Climb!

It sound easy but I am sure it will be quite a chore...

THE CONSTRUCTION

3/15/08

Today I went to the hardware store and bought the lumber and hardware for the overhang wall. Here is a list of the items that I purchased to frame the overhang wall.

4 2"x6"x10' s

2 2"x6"x8' s

a box of 3" self drive screws

a box of 1 5/8" self drive screws

4 4" expansion bolt anchors

In total these supplies only cost about $50.

The first thing that I had to do when I got home was clean up the wall the I was going to frame. After clearing out that space I made a bunch of measurement to see if my drafts were correct and of course my drafts were not correct. I spent a few minutes recalcualting my measurements and figured out how to make everything work.

The wall all cleared off and ready to be framed.

First I angled the bottom and the top of the 2x6s so that they would sit flat on the floor and up against the ceiling joists. The wall will only end up having a 20 degree overhang, so that is the angle that I cut the bottom and tops of the 2x6 studs.

The studs that frame the garage are on 24" centers and I decided to make my overhang on 16" centers so that the plywood has the least amount of flex possible.

Next I cut the bottom and top plates to which the 2x6 studs would get screwed to, these plates needed to span from the left edge of the stud on the garage wall to the right of the door, to the right edge of the third stud over from the door.

After the plates were cut to the right size, I lined up all the studs with 16" spacing and screwed the plates to the angled ends of the studs.

Here are the unassembled and assembled frame.

After the frame was assembled I checked to make sure that it was square and it turner out to be only 1/4" off from sqare. With a couple taps of a hammer it was square and ready to be hoisted up and secured to the ceiling joists.

The Google Sketch and the finished product. I got the spacing of the garage studs wrong. In the google sketch they are 16" rather than 24".

Here the frame has been secured to the ceiling joists. I put two screws through the top plate into the middle ceiling joist to hold it in place. To finish making the wall secure I used 90 degree framing connectors at each corner between a ceiling joist and the top plate there were a total of 4 along the top. I will be placing a straight plate on each end that will span form the ceiling joist to the outer studs for added strength. After the top was secure, I made sure that the out studs on the overhang wall were lined up with the studs on the garage wall and then placed two concrete expansion bolts through the bottom plate into the garage floor to keep the wall from sliding side to side at the bottom. (expansion bolt not shown in this photo.)

Making and installing the frame for the frist overhang wall took about 3.5 hours. Remember this is the first framing project that I have ever done on my own.

Construction Phase two, the second section

I decided to change the plan on the second section of wall a little bit. Instead of having a lesser than 20 degree angle, I decided to go with a 20 degree overhang for the first 4 feet and then go to vertical for the last 4 or so feet. This turned out be make a nice bulge effect. I figured that having an overhang of less than 20 degrees would be boring.

20 degrees to vertical.

I have 500 T-nuts on their way, and I will be buying about 6 sheets of plywood later this week.

Section three and sheeting

For the third section of wall I was considering building an adjustable angle wall, that would be 8 feet tall when vertical but tip out to about 45 degrees, with a 16" kicker panel. After building the frame and thinking it over for quite some time, I decied that a dead vertical flat wall would be the best choice, rather than an adjustable angle wall. If I only had an 8' x 8' wall then adjustable would be the way to go. I tore apart the frame that I built for the adjustable wall and will probably use the lumber to build a shelf behind the wall to store bouldering pads. Putting up the vertical wall was very easy, just drill t-nut holes, pound in t-nuts and screw it to the already existing studs.

For the t-nut holes, I used a 1/2" forstner bit, this allowed for easy installation of the t-nuts, but pounding them in with a hammer. On each sheet of plywood I installed about 125 t-nuts. I used a 6" square pattern and alternated each row by 3" I find that alternating the spacing to make a diamond pattern works a lot better than just a rectangular pattern of t-nuts for hold placement.

T-nut holes space 6" apart in a diamond pattern

Rather than drilling t-nut holes in multiple sheets of plywood at once, I decided to do one panel at a time. By cutting the wood to the shape of the frame, marking the studs on the back and then drilling the t-nut holes I didn't have to worry about holes with no t-nuts if they ended up in a corner or on a stud.

Cutting the plywood for the ends of the wall was pretty easy. I just took the smaller chucks that were the result of cutting sheets down to size for the second section and tacked them up to the wall. I then used a pencil to mark the profile of the end of the wall and where the studs were on the back side, and pulled the piece of plywood down. I used the pencil marks as guides for cutting the plywood into the correct shape and the marked studs on the back of the plywood allowed me to space the t-nut holes so that I didn't hit the studs. after all the t-nutting all that was left to do was screw the panel up for good. I did this with each panel of the wall. It took quite some time to get them all done, but they all turned out just the way I wanted them.

I am going to install a shelf for crash pads behind the wall.

The finished product!