**Building a Zip Line: A DIY Adventure**

We're just going to zip through this so that we can get to the zip line, so our launch platform is done. Except that we don't have a good way to get up and down yet, so we're going to make a really simple ladder with some 2x4s and 2x8s. This ladder is going to be temporary because eventually, I want to build more platforms, another way to get onto this thing. But for now, we're going to do that so that we can easily get up and down to add the zip line done.

I could totally climb that, I mean, the ground's wet, so my shoes are wet, but I did need a ladder or steps that they can kind of come up and down easily. You definitely need to have it at more of an angle if you're going to want a ladder or steps that they can kind of come up and down easily. But I'm not going to do that, like I said, this is temporary, so I'm going to do a straight ladder just two pieces that are vertical and some crosspieces that they can use as rungs to get up.

Theoretically, they should only come down on the zip line, so the plan here is to make this just really dead simple. Like I said, two by four rungs, and I'm going to go from the top down a little distance so that you have room for your foot to clear because there's that 2x8 running across the front of that thing. From there, I'm going to screw these together and make sure that they're all the way against the outside edges. Then, do the same thing further down at the bottom, and that will get these two vertical pieces the correct distance apart.

And then we can just add some rungs in between them, screw this thing in place. It's going to be setting on the ground which means eventually it will rot, but like I said, it's temporary so what I did here was measure the distance to the very top of the decking, so it's actually taller than it needs to be for that space and that's because I want to kind of tuck it in under the decking force the bottom down into the dirt to kind of hold it in place.

If you wanted this to be more permanent, you need to put something to separate the wood from the ground, something to lock the bottom in place so it doesn't swing back and forth. But for now, this should be good enough just to get it in place so we can get up and down to put in the zip line.

**Using a Zip Line Kit**

Last time I did a zipline, I did the whole thing from scratch found all the pieces. This time, I just got a kit and it ended up being pretty cheap. It came with a really nice carriage to hold on to, it came with like a safety harness and brake which is really cool. It's a spring brake that you just put over the line comes with everything you need.

This thing turned out to be a whole lot of fun and to be honest, I was a little bit scared going into the build but as I started building it and it felt how strong and stable this thing ended up being, I'm really confident in it now. No matter how many YouTube videos you watch no matter what the situation is, you are still responsible for the things that you build so if you're going to build something like this, you have to take the health of the tree into consideration you have to take the use case where it's going who's going to be on it all that stuff into consideration and do your own research there's a million ways to do this stuff you want to make sure that you do it safely so go ahead, do the research and then don't be scared just jump in start building and figure it out as you go along.

**Conclusion**

Hopefully, this video gave you some confidence or some ideas of something that you can make outside to enjoy this fall. And if so, I'd love to hear about it down in the comments. We've got tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well. That's it for this one, thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey i'm bob and i like to make stuff today we're gonna make a launch pad for a zip line today we are out at the farm and fall is falling all around us it looks beautiful out here but we're out here to actually make something that i should have made at the beginning of the summer but we're going to make a giant zipline now if you've been around the channel for a while you've probably seen the really super old video i made about making a zipline in our backyard and that one still totally works for a small space but today we've got 175 feet that we're going to try to cover now another video we did in the past was a big tree house and that was attached to a tree but also attached to the ground with some legs today we're just going to make a platform that is just wrapped around a tree so while the construction is pretty much the same the attachment is going to be pretty different i'll show you what i mean when we get to that but i wanted to point out that one of the things about building onto a tree is making sure that the tree is strong enough and being aware of how you're attaching so that you don't damage the tree i've done some research on this and one of the best ways that you can attach something to a tree without damaging it long term is to drill holes directly into it now that sounds like it might hurt the tree but the tree can heal around a hole that's going straight into it the thing you don't want to do is wrap something around that's going to wear off the bark the bark can go around small things like ropes or chains but if you have a big board here that's constantly rubbing against the bark that's going to be bad so we're going to try to avoid that the boards that we're going to be putting on this tree are going to be bolted to it so when the tree moves the board is going to move with it they're not going to be moving against each other because that would tear off the bark i just want to throw that out there because any time that we do something with the tree a lot of people complain about hurting the tree and i've done the research the tree's going to be fine trust me i learned a whole bunch of stuff from the comments in the treehouse video that we did a couple of years ago and so i'm going to try to take the stuff that i learned out of that and put it into here but i wanted to throw this out there there is a little bit of fear in me building a thing that's going to be in a tree the fear is in me telling you the wrong thing to do and then you building something where somebody gets hurt i want to throw that out there as that there's a million ways to do this and some of the ways that people show to do it are really expensive and require really specific hardware i'm just letting you know that i'm going to do it as safe as i possibly can but i'm also going to use stuff that i can find at a local hardware store rather than special ordered stuff just want to throw that out there so that you know i'm doing my best to be safe and you should too this stack of lumber has actually been in my driveway for about two years because it was supposed to be for something else that never happened so i drug it all out here it's looking pretty tattered and torn but i think it will work fine for this project so the first thing we're going to do is to get two ledger boards i guess you would call them around the tree and that's going to be our platform that we're going to build everything else on so we're going to cut a couple of these down get them mounted up drill some holes drive in some bolts and then we'll have a place to start the whole idea here is that we're going to put this board on the tree right on the center line and so we're going to be putting in two really big bolts through here lag bolts but to get this up there i want to make sure that i can just hold it in place and then get it level so i'm going to take a decking screw put it right in the middle and actually just screw this to the tree to temporarily hold it in place so i don't have to wrestle with it and level it at the same time once we get it level i'll go ahead and drill these holes and drive in the bolts i'm going to be using half inch bolts for this obviously the thicker the bolt the stronger weight it's going to carry this should be more than enough for what we're doing up here but a lot of times if you're building like a really big tree house you're going to want to go to a one inch bolt or even something bigger than that so so all you do if you want a zipline is you stand on top of those things and jump off thanks for watching we'll see you next time i am going to put these up with screws and i wanted to point this out because this is one of the things that i learned from the treehouse video that we did a long time ago these decking screws while work just fine and have held up perfectly fine are not made to have the same shear strength as a connector or a structural screw which is what i'm going to use so this thing theoretically could snap just from the weight and the shear force is coming down on it this one is less likely to do that and so i'm going to end up using these but you could also use nails and typically that's what people would use to put up joist hangers and different framing is they would use a nail made for that purpose i realized that these screws that i had are way too long so i went back and got shorter ones so that they won't stick out as far on the inside of this whole thing this last board on the end has to be measured and put into place but it has to be attached differently because it's on the end so i'm going to use this kind of a strap that will attach here and on the side of that board now gotta put some two by eights across these and then start lining them up i gotta figure out how it's gonna interact with this tree because i gotta stop it about right here or maybe go around the tree i didn't really totally plan this house this is called a joist tanker normally you would put this on a piece of wood then you set a joist in it and that will support the weight of the joist on a piece that's acting as a beam now that's not what we have here we're going to end up using these later on for something else but i decided to use these upside down as a way to make it easier to actually mount this board up on the side so we're going to put this on the end of the board temporarily and then use this little ledge to hook the piece in place so i can drive on all the screws check this out so with that we've got the structure done but you'll notice that there's still a lot of movement in this because it's not finished yet we got to put all the decking down and that will lock everything together on the same plane but we also need to support these corners so we're going to put in some knee braces that go from here down to the tree at a 45 degree angle so all the pressure that's up here will be pushed down to the tree and it will support it really nicely so we're gonna get those knee braces in before we do any of the post or any of the decking on top to make sure we have access to everything basically it's a 45 degree diagonal piece that carries the load down directly to the center of the tree so we've got a little notch here but the frame is going to sit in and then a matching notch down here at the bottom that's going to set in a joist hanger and then that's going to be attached to the tree now there's many other ways to do this part of it there's some specialty bolts that you can get to put in the tree to set these on again those are expensive and kind of hard to find locally so we're going to go with these you can always swap them out in the future now i've already got a few of these in place and i wanted to point out that i'm using two by fours for these because i'm using lumber that i already had from a previous project like i mentioned before i've got two by fours and two by eights a two by six would actually be perfect for this so if this is not enough for whatever it is you're building you can double these up or you can use something bigger like a two by six also you wanna make sure that it's at least 45 degrees not under because if it's like this it's not going to do as good of a job as if it's like this so if anything doing it too long is probably good i will say that this one is long longer than the other one and this one's shorter the entire thing is not really square to the tree and so i'm trying to make all of these fit but they're not going to be uniform if you had a perfect tree and you were trying to model to that you could get perfect measurements for all this stuff i'm just kind of building it in place instead this is a different type of structural screw that i've used before i really like these this may not be necessary but i'm going to go ahead and drive one of these through this board into the tree just to keep this in the joist hanger right now gravity and force is the only thing doing that because typically you would drive in nails to go into the joist into the thing that this is hanging on i'm not really going to do that i'm just gonna use this instead now that i've got these knee braces up here the whole thing is a lot more sturdy but there is still some twisting because it's just attached to the tree right at that center point and so there's nothing really stopping it from being able to do this i mean but that twist doesn't feel like much up here one thing i just thought of that actually might make this a little bit more sturdy from twisting is adding some corner brackets inside in between all these joists to the front right now the screws are just running in from the outside so there's nothing really stopping them from doing this so adding some brackets in each one of these may help luckily you can do that from underneath so even if we finish the rest of the thing up we can come back and add that later next up we're going to add some posts in the corners i'm going to use four by fours for that and that's going to give us a place to add railing after we get the decking on i've got these posts cut to 40 inches i need 36 inches above the top of the frame so to make it easier to mount these in place i've actually marked off on two sides of the corner post where that 36 inches is i'm gonna take a temporary block put it right there and screw it in on both sides that way i can take this entire thing and just kind of set it down in it will rest on top of the frame i can drive in screws from the outside and i won't have to worry about trying to keep it at the right height and holding it in place and all that stuff hmm now that we got the posts up uh we're ready to do the decking and the railing now this is the exact same stuff that everybody does on decks nothing special in fact we covered all of it in detail on the treehouse video from before so if you really want the specifics go check those out we're just going to zip through this so that we can get to the zip line so so our launch platform is done except that we don't have a good way to get up and down yet so we're going to make a really simple ladder with some two by eights some two by fours and that ladder is going to be temporary because eventually i want to build more platforms another way to get onto this thing but for now we're going to do that so that we can easily get up and down to add the zip line done i could totally climb that i mean the ground's wet so my shoes are wet but i did now if you're going to want a ladder or steps that they can kind of come up and down easily you definitely need to have it at more of an angle but i'm not going to do that like i said this is temporary so i'm going to do a straight ladder just two pieces that are vertical and some cross pieces that they can use as rungs to get up because theoretically they should only come down on the zip line so the plan here is to make this just really dead simple like i said two by four rungs and i'm gonna go from the top down a little distance so that you have room for your foot to clear because there's that two by eight running across the front of that thing and so from there i'm going to screw these together and make sure that they're all the way against the outside edges and then do the same thing further down at the bottom and that will get these two vertical pieces the correct distance apart and then we can just add some rungs in between them screw this thing in place it's going to be setting on the ground which means eventually it will rot but like i said it's temporary so what i did here was measure the distance to the very top of the decking so it's actually taller than it needs to be for that space and that's because i want to kind of tuck it in under the decking force the bottom down into the dirt to kind of hold it in place now if you wanted this to be more permanent you need to put something to separate the wood from the ground something to lock the bottom in place so it doesn't swing back and forth but for now this should be good enough just to get it in place so we can get up and down to put in the zip line i guess another thing you could do would be drive steaks down behind it and screw those into those cool beans cool beans cool beans last time i did a zipline i did the whole thing from scratch found all the pieces this time i just got a kit and it ended up being pretty cheap it came with a really nice carriage to hold on to it came with like a safety harness and brake which is really cool it's a spring brake that you just put over the line comes with everything you need this is honestly the easiest way to do it the only thing i didn't get in this kit that i wanted was the correct line now i'm going 175 feet this kit is made for 150 and over that distance you actually have to get a thicker line so i had to buy a separate spool of line i've got the correct thickness here and we're going to follow the instructions and put this thing up and so if you want to do one of these it tells you everything you need to know this thing turned out to be a whole lot of fun and to be honest i was a little bit scared going into the build but as i started building it and it felt how strong and stable this thing ended up being i'm really confident in it now no matter how many youtube videos you watch no matter what the situation is you are still responsible for the things that you build so if you're going to build something like this you have to take the health of the tree into consideration you have to take the use case where it's going who's going to be on it all that stuff into consideration and do your own research there's a million ways to do this stuff you want to make sure that you do it safely so go ahead do the research and then don't be scared just jump in start building and figure it out as you go along hopefully this video gave you some confidence or some ideas of something that you can make outside to enjoy this fall and if so i'd love to hear about it down in the comments we've got tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time hey i'm bob and i like to make stuff wait do we know what you want to say nope but we only need the first half right what are you doing i dropped my screws no hmm huhhey i'm bob and i like to make stuff today we're gonna make a launch pad for a zip line today we are out at the farm and fall is falling all around us it looks beautiful out here but we're out here to actually make something that i should have made at the beginning of the summer but we're going to make a giant zipline now if you've been around the channel for a while you've probably seen the really super old video i made about making a zipline in our backyard and that one still totally works for a small space but today we've got 175 feet that we're going to try to cover now another video we did in the past was a big tree house and that was attached to a tree but also attached to the ground with some legs today we're just going to make a platform that is just wrapped around a tree so while the construction is pretty much the same the attachment is going to be pretty different i'll show you what i mean when we get to that but i wanted to point out that one of the things about building onto a tree is making sure that the tree is strong enough and being aware of how you're attaching so that you don't damage the tree i've done some research on this and one of the best ways that you can attach something to a tree without damaging it long term is to drill holes directly into it now that sounds like it might hurt the tree but the tree can heal around a hole that's going straight into it the thing you don't want to do is wrap something around that's going to wear off the bark the bark can go around small things like ropes or chains but if you have a big board here that's constantly rubbing against the bark that's going to be bad so we're going to try to avoid that the boards that we're going to be putting on this tree are going to be bolted to it so when the tree moves the board is going to move with it they're not going to be moving against each other because that would tear off the bark i just want to throw that out there because any time that we do something with the tree a lot of people complain about hurting the tree and i've done the research the tree's going to be fine trust me i learned a whole bunch of stuff from the comments in the treehouse video that we did a couple of years ago and so i'm going to try to take the stuff that i learned out of that and put it into here but i wanted to throw this out there there is a little bit of fear in me building a thing that's going to be in a tree the fear is in me telling you the wrong thing to do and then you building something where somebody gets hurt i want to throw that out there as that there's a million ways to do this and some of the ways that people show to do it are really expensive and require really specific hardware i'm just letting you know that i'm going to do it as safe as i possibly can but i'm also going to use stuff that i can find at a local hardware store rather than special ordered stuff just want to throw that out there so that you know i'm doing my best to be safe and you should too this stack of lumber has actually been in my driveway for about two years because it was supposed to be for something else that never happened so i drug it all out here it's looking pretty tattered and torn but i think it will work fine for this project so the first thing we're going to do is to get two ledger boards i guess you would call them around the tree and that's going to be our platform that we're going to build everything else on so we're going to cut a couple of these down get them mounted up drill some holes drive in some bolts and then we'll have a place to start the whole idea here is that we're going to put this board on the tree right on the center line and so we're going to be putting in two really big bolts through here lag bolts but to get this up there i want to make sure that i can just hold it in place and then get it level so i'm going to take a decking screw put it right in the middle and actually just screw this to the tree to temporarily hold it in place so i don't have to wrestle with it and level it at the same time once we get it level i'll go ahead and drill these holes and drive in the bolts i'm going to be using half inch bolts for this obviously the thicker the bolt the stronger weight it's going to carry this should be more than enough for what we're doing up here but a lot of times if you're building like a really big tree house you're going to want to go to a one inch bolt or even something bigger than that so so all you do if you want a zipline is you stand on top of those things and jump off thanks for watching we'll see you next time i am going to put these up with screws and i wanted to point this out because this is one of the things that i learned from the treehouse video that we did a long time ago these decking screws while work just fine and have held up perfectly fine are not made to have the same shear strength as a connector or a structural screw which is what i'm going to use so this thing theoretically could snap just from the weight and the shear force is coming down on it this one is less likely to do that and so i'm going to end up using these but you could also use nails and typically that's what people would use to put up joist hangers and different framing is they would use a nail made for that purpose i realized that these screws that i had are way too long so i went back and got shorter ones so that they won't stick out as far on the inside of this whole thing this last board on the end has to be measured and put into place but it has to be attached differently because it's on the end so i'm going to use this kind of a strap that will attach here and on the side of that board now gotta put some two by eights across these and then start lining them up i gotta figure out how it's gonna interact with this tree because i gotta stop it about right here or maybe go around the tree i didn't really totally plan this house this is called a joist tanker normally you would put this on a piece of wood then you set a joist in it and that will support the weight of the joist on a piece that's acting as a beam now that's not what we have here we're going to end up using these later on for something else but i decided to use these upside down as a way to make it easier to actually mount this board up on the side so we're going to put this on the end of the board temporarily and then use this little ledge to hook the piece in place so i can drive on all the screws check this out so with that we've got the structure done but you'll notice that there's still a lot of movement in this because it's not finished yet we got to put all the decking down and that will lock everything together on the same plane but we also need to support these corners so we're going to put in some knee braces that go from here down to the tree at a 45 degree angle so all the pressure that's up here will be pushed down to the tree and it will support it really nicely so we're gonna get those knee braces in before we do any of the post or any of the decking on top to make sure we have access to everything basically it's a 45 degree diagonal piece that carries the load down directly to the center of the tree so we've got a little notch here but the frame is going to sit in and then a matching notch down here at the bottom that's going to set in a joist hanger and then that's going to be attached to the tree now there's many other ways to do this part of it there's some specialty bolts that you can get to put in the tree to set these on again those are expensive and kind of hard to find locally so we're going to go with these you can always swap them out in the future now i've already got a few of these in place and i wanted to point out that i'm using two by fours for these because i'm using lumber that i already had from a previous project like i mentioned before i've got two by fours and two by eights a two by six would actually be perfect for this so if this is not enough for whatever it is you're building you can double these up or you can use something bigger like a two by six also you wanna make sure that it's at least 45 degrees not under because if it's like this it's not going to do as good of a job as if it's like this so if anything doing it too long is probably good i will say that this one is long longer than the other one and this one's shorter the entire thing is not really square to the tree and so i'm trying to make all of these fit but they're not going to be uniform if you had a perfect tree and you were trying to model to that you could get perfect measurements for all this stuff i'm just kind of building it in place instead this is a different type of structural screw that i've used before i really like these this may not be necessary but i'm going to go ahead and drive one of these through this board into the tree just to keep this in the joist hanger right now gravity and force is the only thing doing that because typically you would drive in nails to go into the joist into the thing that this is hanging on i'm not really going to do that i'm just gonna use this instead now that i've got these knee braces up here the whole thing is a lot more sturdy but there is still some twisting because it's just attached to the tree right at that center point and so there's nothing really stopping it from being able to do this i mean but that twist doesn't feel like much up here one thing i just thought of that actually might make this a little bit more sturdy from twisting is adding some corner brackets inside in between all these joists to the front right now the screws are just running in from the outside so there's nothing really stopping them from doing this so adding some brackets in each one of these may help luckily you can do that from underneath so even if we finish the rest of the thing up we can come back and add that later next up we're going to add some posts in the corners i'm going to use four by fours for that and that's going to give us a place to add railing after we get the decking on i've got these posts cut to 40 inches i need 36 inches above the top of the frame so to make it easier to mount these in place i've actually marked off on two sides of the corner post where that 36 inches is i'm gonna take a temporary block put it right there and screw it in on both sides that way i can take this entire thing and just kind of set it down in it will rest on top of the frame i can drive in screws from the outside and i won't have to worry about trying to keep it at the right height and holding it in place and all that stuff hmm now that we got the posts up uh we're ready to do the decking and the railing now this is the exact same stuff that everybody does on decks nothing special in fact we covered all of it in detail on the treehouse video from before so if you really want the specifics go check those out we're just going to zip through this so that we can get to the zip line so so our launch platform is done except that we don't have a good way to get up and down yet so we're going to make a really simple ladder with some two by eights some two by fours and that ladder is going to be temporary because eventually i want to build more platforms another way to get onto this thing but for now we're going to do that so that we can easily get up and down to add the zip line done i could totally climb that i mean the ground's wet so my shoes are wet but i did now if you're going to want a ladder or steps that they can kind of come up and down easily you definitely need to have it at more of an angle but i'm not going to do that like i said this is temporary so i'm going to do a straight ladder just two pieces that are vertical and some cross pieces that they can use as rungs to get up because theoretically they should only come down on the zip line so the plan here is to make this just really dead simple like i said two by four rungs and i'm gonna go from the top down a little distance so that you have room for your foot to clear because there's that two by eight running across the front of that thing and so from there i'm going to screw these together and make sure that they're all the way against the outside edges and then do the same thing further down at the bottom and that will get these two vertical pieces the correct distance apart and then we can just add some rungs in between them screw this thing in place it's going to be setting on the ground which means eventually it will rot but like i said it's temporary so what i did here was measure the distance to the very top of the decking so it's actually taller than it needs to be for that space and that's because i want to kind of tuck it in under the decking force the bottom down into the dirt to kind of hold it in place now if you wanted this to be more permanent you need to put something to separate the wood from the ground something to lock the bottom in place so it doesn't swing back and forth but for now this should be good enough just to get it in place so we can get up and down to put in the zip line i guess another thing you could do would be drive steaks down behind it and screw those into those cool beans cool beans cool beans last time i did a zipline i did the whole thing from scratch found all the pieces this time i just got a kit and it ended up being pretty cheap it came with a really nice carriage to hold on to it came with like a safety harness and brake which is really cool it's a spring brake that you just put over the line comes with everything you need this is honestly the easiest way to do it the only thing i didn't get in this kit that i wanted was the correct line now i'm going 175 feet this kit is made for 150 and over that distance you actually have to get a thicker line so i had to buy a separate spool of line i've got the correct thickness here and we're going to follow the instructions and put this thing up and so if you want to do one of these it tells you everything you need to know this thing turned out to be a whole lot of fun and to be honest i was a little bit scared going into the build but as i started building it and it felt how strong and stable this thing ended up being i'm really confident in it now no matter how many youtube videos you watch no matter what the situation is you are still responsible for the things that you build so if you're going to build something like this you have to take the health of the tree into consideration you have to take the use case where it's going who's going to be on it all that stuff into consideration and do your own research there's a million ways to do this stuff you want to make sure that you do it safely so go ahead do the research and then don't be scared just jump in start building and figure it out as you go along hopefully this video gave you some confidence or some ideas of something that you can make outside to enjoy this fall and if so i'd love to hear about it down in the comments we've got tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time hey i'm bob and i like to make stuff wait do we know what you want to say nope but we only need the first half right what are you doing i dropped my screws no hmm huh\n"