spurred by a comment in the “picnic table jump” thread, I decided that we need (here’s me making a choice for a group of people) a thread about your homemade trials/obstace course, and how strong it is. I remember someone posting (a long time ago) about how he just stacks things up the way he wants them, and then practices on it until it all falls apart.
I do the same thing.
I have a grand total of about eleven pallets, which I stack in piles of three or four high. I can rolling hop up four, but sometimes I like to lean a 2"x4"x10’ against a stack of three pallets, and practice riding up it.
I have 2 pallets, 2 boxs 6 and 8 inches an 8X1.5 inch skinny and three hopping posts. the posts are not what you would call stable. they wobble around making it very difficult to do. I also have a short clip in my gallery where one breaks. I must say that having a well built trials course does wonders for your confidents, when I ride at home I have to jump lightly around in fear of my trials course breaking:p
I agree. I plan to take a bunch of the cedar that we have left over from rebuilding the deck (after hurricanes last year) and build a nice, sturdy obstacle course. I don’t have much of an idea how I want it all to lay out, but hopefully it will come to me as I build it.
I also have a nice, strong plastic milk crate that is good for practicing rolling hops onto. I’d estimate it to be about 14" tall (cube). I try to hop all the way over it, but it seems to be just a tad too far for me at my current level (14" high for ~24" distance).
i just stack stuff up too… or ride somewhere where stuff is actually solid and strong… although my stuff is more northshore than trials, but as stuff breaks it turns into trials cause i have to get around the broken parts
I have a pretty awsome home trials place. I have tons of stuff, all in a big indoor “shop” thing, which is an old car shop, like bigger than a 4 car garage.
I’ve got… pallets, tons of big boards, planks, etc. of all sizes, big logs and stumps, a 9 foot long metal pipe/grind rail, spools, a big bench I made… most of the stuff isn’t too bad, but some of it does wiggle.
I don’t have any course set up really, I just constantly move stuff around when I get bored with something. And I never have everything set up at once…
It’s easy to stabilize spools if you do it the right way…
When you want to lay a spool on its side, all you need is a piece of rebar and a couple nails. There should be holes in either side of the spool, not on center, but just next to where the first wrap of cable would go. Drive a piece of rebar through these holes and into the ground. Use nails to secure the rebar to the spool… drive a nail into the spool next to the rebar then bend the nail around the rebar. Voila!
When you want to put a spool upright (so you’d be gapping onto the edges of the spool, or inbetween the sides) then you need to build a triangle of 2x4s on either side of the spool. The hypotenuse of the triangle will lay along the ground and the legs will run up the sides of the spool. The triangle can be further stabilized with short pieces of rebar driven into the ground.
When driving rebar into the ground, make sure to take two precautions:
wear eye protection! striking metal (sledgehammer) against metal (rebar) can cause fragments of metal to go flying! baaad!
protect the ends of the rebar. make sure there is never any rebar sticking up without something to cover it (such as a side of a spool or a palette) or without bending it into an inverted U. even though it doesn’t look sharp, you can impale yourself on even the shortest piece of rebar if it’s planted in the ground.
Yeah that’s what I was about to say. But, thanks anyway for typing all that up Maestro
Plus, the unstable part is in the middle. The bottom sits fine, but the middle is really weak, and no matter what I reinforce it with it won’t stop swaying back and forth.
I have 17 pallets, 1 cablespool, 1 sandwichboard, 1 weird ladder thing, 50 skinnies of wood, 1 cart to transport the pallets and hop on 2.
I hope to get a car to when I live on my own:p
