The first summer I worked for The Adventurous Child I spent most of my time just cutting parts for the different playground equipment that we built, which was a pretty simple (if not boring) job; However the second summer was not as easy…

Things must have been busy in the shop when I started working because one of my first assignments was to build a Truck Pit.  Up until that point the most complicated thing I had built was a few decks and maybe a short platform, but nothing as complicated as a Truck Pit which has a lot of parts and bent plastic tunnels.  While there are a lot of individual parts, once they’re all cut actually assembling the Truck Pit is relatively straight forward since there are several jigs to help with spacing everything out.  As a young ” kid” the hardest parts was actually getting each side out of the jig, becasue once everything is screwed together it becomes incredibly heavy (although at this point they were still built out of wood, they’re even heavier now that they are made out of plastic.

Once I got them out of the jigs I needs to clear a space in the shop larger enough to assemble the Truck Pit so I could cut and attach the “roads”.  Once the roads go on the whole thing becomes really heavy, however that actually works out to be a good thing for two reasons;  one is that in the both shop and on the playground its shear weight keeps it from moving around while you are working/playing on it (in fact once its installed you only need a stake or two to keep it in place, permanently).  The second advantage is the Truck pit is that its pretty close to indestructible due to how solidly its built, which consequently adds a lot to its weight.

After the Truck Pit was squared up and roads and ramps into the pit were attached it was time to  cut the tunnels and ramps while the heating elements warmed up, but I’ll talk about actually bending all of that in my next post…