When we bought our new house, we were looking for a nice big back yard where our kids could play. We lucked out and managed to find one that's not only big, but surrounded by other houses.
I wanted to build our own play set for them to play on, but the cost of quality cedar from home improvement stores was far more than I wanted to pay for the size play set we wanted. The kids had certain ideas of what they wanted:
- Tire swing
- Two traditional swings
- One bench swing (where you sit back to back with another person)
- A twisty slide
My wife also wanted:
- An elevated area for the kids to play on (like an old school tree house)
- A climbing wall (we like to rock climb and who doesn't like their kids to share a passion?)
We ended up with a play set that had everything except the first requirement -- a tire swing. Oh the irony.
Read on for how we solved the missing component...
To be honest, we could have bought the swingset with a tire swing, but it was something like an extra $250. The previous home owners had a swingset several years earlier, and there was a tire swing just laying in the woods. It didn't have anything wrong with it.
We grabbed the tire swing and went to work figuring out how to attach the swing to a brace and the brace to the play set. We decided that simply screwing lag bolts up through the bottom of the brace would probably be ok, but we intended for it to hold the weight of four kids. That's at least 300 pounds. Due to the nature of a tire swing exerting forces downward, outward, and at various angles, I wanted to be absolutely sure the brace wouldn't fall down and hit someone in the head. That would be a sure fire way to ruin the fun of the play set.
The deck on the play set had two by fours 16" apart. We positioned the brace between those two by fours and cut out a notch so the bracket for the ball and socket joint fit beneath the deck. The notch gave us enough space to attach nuts to the bolts.
In addition to the nuts & bolts, you'll notice lag bolts on the sides of the brace. There are two lag bolts going up into the two by fours, and two lag bolts going horizontally through the two by fours into the brace.
We got three adults totaling around 375 pounds sitting on the tire swing. It didn't budge. :)
A few knots in the rope shortened the length enough to fit:
And the final product:
