Mini Moonboard

First of all, big thank you to my friend Ryan for helping me with this project. He had infinitely more experience than I did with woodworking... which isn't really a high bar to clear. Somehow we made this all work. Other than the wood, the only equipment we (I) had to buy was a miter saw, which we needed to cut the angles for the beams. We used Jake Krebs' plans for the mini moonboard. 

I didn't actually take that many pictures of making the frame, but here it is all put together. Since I bought pretty cheap wood, they were all in varying amounts of warped, which made lining them all up to actually mount to the base and keep a consistent angle a hassle. Somehow we forced everything together and each beam was at a 40 degree incline. Nothing seemed particularly complicated and the plans we followed were nice and clear. 

I used escape climbing 3 hole T-nuts, and their various bolts as well (I bought 50 3" flat head, 25 3.5" and 100 2" standard socket head bolts). My one mistake with only getting 3" flat head bolts. Since they aren't fully threaded, that meant for the smaller wooden holds, the bolts were too long. Luckily I had left over standard socket head bolts of shorter length, and so far, they haven't ruined the wooden holds. 

The most annoying part of this project was drilling out all the spaces for the T-nuts; and not even the drilling part, but the measuring part. It is definitely not perfectly spaced, but they are all within the "eyeball test" margin of error. Eventually I got too fed up with actually measuring for each spot, and made a spacer with a piece of printer paper I cut to size. I really should have just done this after I had the first vertical line, as it made the process so much faster. 

Since I also bought pretty cheap plywood, it also split a lot when drilling. Although that was also probably a combination of me not doing something correctly as well. 

Mounting the plywood onto the frame was actually not as bad as we thought it would be. We used some heavier screws that don't seat flush with the plywood. I was worried that it would be an issue (namely, I accidentally cut myself on them while doing a big movement), but I think we placed them in good enough spots that so far (knock on wood) I haven't done that yet.