Swedish… “Gates”

Kids have it good in summer: any clearing is a football field, and a thick tree branch is a ready-made pull-up bar; and if the adults have also made an effort and set up a sports ground in the yard, then every day becomes a celebration of physical education.

But what remains when the season ends? Only computer games and, as a result, hypodynamia and diseases of inactivity? No — to some extent the opportunities of summer can successfully be replaced by the original home sports corner proposed by the Bulgarian magazine “Napravi sam”.

Indeed, the design presented can no longer be called a wall bars unit in the usual sense: it is placed not traditionally — against a wall — but in the opening of an interior door: it is more like a kind of “gate”. Yet its sports functions are largely the same. At the same time, the specifics of its placement also open up additional possibilities, which we will describe after outlining the construction of the apparatus.

What from and how

Making such a modular, universal apparatus is within the reach of any home craftsman, since neither scarce materials nor special skills are required, and the labour involved is minimal: after all, a reliable base that already exists is used — the door frame.

On both faces of the frame, wooden washers cut from a round rod 80 mm in diameter are fastened symmetrically with screws, spaced 300 mm apart from top to bottom. In each of them a 25 mm wide slot is cut from above, and into the “bottom” of the slot a small slotted “pin” is screwed (made from a screw with the head filed off) — to fit the groove at the end of a crossbar tube, which is inserted from above into each symmetrical pair of these support washers. By installing the full set of such tubes one after another, you get an exact copy of wall bars, with the only difference that at any moment they can be quickly dismantled: only the support washers remain on the door frame, and they will not get in anyone’s way.

Instead of them, as a simpler-to-make option, you can mount comb-like support boards with slanted slots on the frame, and insert into them not tubes but wooden rods (similar to a shovel handle).

All parts in both variants should be painted with nitrocellulose paint (different colours are fine) for decorative and hygienic reasons: when necessary they will be easy to clean.

A universal apparatus

As already mentioned, the functional possibilities of the apparatus are much broader than those of ordinary wall bars precisely because it is demountable and installed not, as usual, flush against a wall, but in a doorway.

Indeed, besides the traditional set of exercises that can be done on wall bars, other drills can also be performed here — and not only by children, but by all family members, which also plays an educational role for little ones and teenagers.

If you install only the top tube, the apparatus becomes a pull-up bar. Children’s swings can also easily be hung from it (and they can, by the way, be made by hand). A mid-height tube position allows the flips so loved by children. With a single lower tube you can work the abdominal muscles by laying a board bench on it at an angle. For this it is enough to take any sanded board and nail two battens to its underside so that it does not slide off the tube while exercises are performed. The position of the bench on the tube is clear from the drawing. The load on the abs is easy to increase by moving the tube higher.

“Modelist-Konstruktor” No. 9’2009, B. VALENTINOV