Getting into building TreeNets... It's a lot of Fun!!!

Treenets are REALLY Fun!

Yeah, so I have a bit of a new passion now... and it's got something to do with building playgrounds in the trees!!! I can't stop thinking about it these days.

In my first years on the blockchain, back when we were all on steem, I wrote a post about an interesting playground in the canopy of a French forest. I was so inspired to make one of these one day.

All those treehouses were connected by rope bridges, ladders, and slides... it was really cool!

---

I did think that day was to come un-announced like it just did!!!

Oh man!!! This is going to be a pretty awesome journey. The friend who's taken me under his wing to teach me the ways of the arborist, is the one who has revived this dream of building a Playground in the Trees, and I am super grateful for it. It was a forgotten dream of mine... another one of those moments where you realize that your dreams are in the midst of becoming reality!

My arborist friend and I are building our first treenet at our kids' school, and we're hoping to turn this into a service of some sorts... There must be a ton of people out there who would love having the freedom to play up in the trees safely, yes?

We start with a simple square to make it as large as we can between four trees. It's also supposed to be an easy shape to start out with.

Each point is anchored into the trees with protection as to not choke it out.

There's quite a lot of tension at all four points of this square, though I couldn't really tell you how much since we didn't have anything to measure it with... I mean for now it's a school project and our budget limits us to what we have on hand! That being said we're trying to be as safe as we know. We both donated climbing gear and paracord, along with about ten hours so far. I just love working in the woods!

The learning curve...

Lesson 1: Bring the tools needed

We had to obviously watch lots of youtube videos (which wasn't even calculated in our time spent on this net so far), and yet when we got to the actual site, we discussed a lot about strategy, placement and materials. The first day, we both showed up without a knife, or a saw. Both of these tools were needed, one for cutting the ropes, and the other for cutting pieces of dimensional lumber to protect the trees from the ropes. We managed, somehow we found a knife inside the school that happened to be opened at that time, and I had started to cut incisions into the 2x3's we found laying about, with a sharp piece of blue stone to be able to break them better! Talk about work...and wasted time!

Lesson 2: Always build treenets with rope rated to have at least the same load bearing strength the professionals have said to use.

We couldn't find enough paracord to start weaving the net, so we decided to opt out with something that looked promising at first, but when it came down to really putting some pressure on some areas that needed to be tighter, that rope just snapped.

In a way, it was a good thing to learn. Had we bought something only slightly under-rated, it may not have broken until thirteen kids were wrestling, jumping, and abusing the net. I mean the thing will be sitting at an un-schooling establishment where kids from 5 to 18 years old will be playing hard on it. It needs to be strong!

What we're going to do next time is use paracord or something stronger for all the weaving to be done... just like the pros, no more compromise! Hell, if we want some good reviews for our first net, we need it to last a long time!!!