How to Make Homemade Agility Jumps (Part One)

With pictures!

We bought our wood from B&Q yesterday, and it cost the princely sum of £11.47 (the nails cost the most, typically!) and we bought treated timber. Each peice is 2.4m long, and we bought three 5cm x 2.5cm, two 3.5 x 2.5, and two 10 x 2.5 planks. This easily made us 2 jumps (4 wings), and we didn’t need to use the second 10 x 2.5 of wood — although it came in useful later (see Part Two!).

The main upright post (5 x 2.5), which will have the jump cups on, is 90cm high.

The back post (5 x 2.5), the smaller upright, is 50cm high.

The two bottom horizontal peices (one on each side for stability, 3.5 x 2.5) are 45cm. This gives us a fairly sturdy base and a tent-peg in the gap will hold the jump upright if you’re on uneven ground or there’s a bit of a breeze. It would be very easy to add a peice across the front to create a stable cross peice if you live somewhere particularly subject to violent storms or just don’t have any tent-pegs.

The diagonal crosspeice (10 x 2.5) we measured against the frame of the first wing that we built. We found this was easier than trying to do maths and work out angles and so on. Once we’d measured and cut the first diagonal we just marked off the remaining three on the wood. (It ended up being 48.5cm).

We haven’t included the smaller uprights in the gap because they’re (as far as we can tell) purely decorative. They don’t add to the stability of the jump and it means we can save the wood for something more useful. It would be fairly easy to include them though, they’d slot in easily between the bottom two peices.

We debated about using glue as well as nails to secure all the peices, but in the end we decided against it. The jumps that Katie made a few months ago used glue and nails, but as the jumps live outside, it meant that the glue just didn’t hold.

We also debated about jump cups. We thought about making our own out of the wood that we had left, and in the end decided it was easier and less dangerous for us (we’re not great with a jigsaw) to buy 10 pairs of pre-made jump cups from Jump4Joy on ebay. That brought our total cost to £28.42, but even with 4 cups (35, 45, 55 and 65cm heights) on each wing we will have some spare cups for any future jump-making escapades.

The final thing we debated was paint, and we still haven’t decided on that. We want to keep costs down but these jumps have to live outdoors for the most part, but varnish is a bit boring and generally quite expensive, but the suitability of paint is currently a bit of an unknown. We’re looking into it.

You may notice Mollie is attempting to get in on some of the pictures. Mollie enjoys all kinds of DIY and gardening, and without her running off with bits of wood, throwing her toys at us, knocking over the freshly-made wings, and forcing someone to stand guard to make sure she didn’t attack the electric saw, we couldn’t have made these jumps. Thank you, Mollie.

Click here for How to Make Homemade Agility Jumps (Part Two).