"Hi there everybody! my name is Matt M. i am a good friend of alex... unfortunately we dont hang out as much as we used to. that is mostly due to the fact that i am very selfish and chose to move away with my family, kate and joshua (wife and boy), rather than stick around with my friends who need me. regardless, i am still a decent friend as i like to stay in touch regularly via the world wide intraweb!! i love the computators! now some of you out there may have heard of me before, yes i am sometimes reffered to as "horsey checks". i just want to take this opportunity to say once more, although i love scenic views of wild stallions roaming freely across the open prairie, i did not purposely choose them as a design theme to embellish my personal checks. i stand by this story, as improbable as it is...." ~(guest preface impersonated)
SO, anyway... recently i got an email from matt and he was pretty excited about his new project. matt is honestly my only true competition for number one gear nerd in our group of friends. we go back and forth i think on who has the most trad gear, but i think he wins overall... umm, what was my point? oh yeah read his email.
(actual matt) "So I thought you guys would appreciate this. It's no Online Blog about a Treadwall mind you but something cool nonetheless. I pretty much am going to run into a training wall at my local gym in the next 6 months or so. I've set a season Goal of 12c and a "career" goal of 8a (13b) for Sport climbing. I sent a 12a last week and am within a month of my next 12a/b route. Anyway, I can tell that I need to max my strength (I can always run laps for enduro) to get to the "next level". The best way I've read to do this is via HIT Strip training. I used to have a wall for this in my old house but that went away long ago. The other benefit is that with Kate working and/or deploying, I can get stuck at home on Gym nights doing daycare. NOT CONDUCIVE to hard training. So a garage wall started to gain momentum again. We've got the space per-se with a 3 car garage but the 3rd bay is somewhat filled with the weight of Suburban living - Bikes, Lawn Mowers etc. So I needed a WALL but it needed to be low profile and Wife approved (not a monstrosity). So I came up with the idea of a FOLDING WALL."
The Space where the wall needs to go. Note the base board.Putting good use to m Bosch I drill 3 anchor bolts into the floor. Framing up section 1. For it to fold, I used heavy duty hinges at the joints x3. Section 1 coming together. About a 50 degree overhang. Josh for scale. Josh likes the wall too!
I used chain to secure the folding legs and keep them from kicking out. The real challenge is part 2. The wall needed to be longer than my ceiling was tall so it had to fold in two places. Here you see the upper part.
Here's the wall in the folded state. I underestimated the weight I would have to lift to fold it so I need to rig a pulley system to help me lift it. It would be a cinch with two people but that kinda defeats the point. The upper part is folded slightly to a lower hinge point and then the whole thing fold up against the wall. It's secured to the wall with bolts into studs behind the drywall. Very little patching up will be needed if I have to move again. Another bonus. Once folded there isn't much weight pulling out on the wall mount. Most of the mass just sits on the floor. Another view folded from the side. So I still have to put together a lifting system - shouldn't be too hard but I'd like to keep it "clean looking". Then paint it the same color as the other wall (this gains a lot of spouse approval) and then mount the holds. HIT Strips and about 60 other holds with T-Nuts. Should be cool. I'll get another out when it's all done.
thanks matt! i put up this post so plenty of other people can exercise only their body and let their minds slowly atrophy, but i took so long to respond to matt about his project that he had a "look at me, look at me" style tantrum. which is cool, im the same way. but he poked the bear so he gets made fun of. but he is also a video editing guy or something and he made a little vid for every ones entertainment. check that out here:
if you guys have any questions about it... um, leave a comment? matt reads the blog and he might get back to you.... i guess...
