Draft of Wall Jump Instructions Part I

Note that these instructions are subject to change as they are only a draft.   If you have any suggestions please let me know. 

Last change Saturday May 17 9:30 am.   

I will be working on the instructions for the wall jump in the coming weeks.  (Feb 23 2016) 

Tools

• Small hot glue gun - the large nozzle on some glue guns do not permit you to get it in between the pieces
• 50 - 100 glue sticks
• flat screw driver (to help with the gluing)
• #11 blade knife (if doing cut outs) and perhaps tape to avoid pen marks on the mats
• Sharp utility knife for main cuts
• duct tape (for top pieces)
• scissors
• straight edge
• tape measure or ruler
• Pen or pencil.  I personally found that pen was better to mark the mats.
• cardboard to put under mats while cutting.   I had some old mats.
  

Foam mats

• 2 packages of 4 mats for pillars
• 4 packages for wall pieces (revised from 3-4 as with the added width I will end up using 3.5 packages of 4 mats for the wall).  
• I bought Connect-A-Mat from Walmart.  You can also get them direct http://www.connectamat.com/shop/ (check their FAQ for a possible discount).

Optional items to help with wind

• 4 stick in the ground weaves
• Jump bars to put inside wall sections

General tips

• I use gravity to help when gluing pieces together. 
• You can use your glue gun to melt the glue if you need to take something apart
• I use a flat screw driver to adjust the joins especially when I can't get my fingers behind the pieces (picture)
• You can use the same screw driver to remove excess glue
• Don't attempt to cut through the mats in one pass.  You will get a cleaner cut if you do it in a few passes and cut slowly. 
• Sharp knives and scissors cut better.  Change blades when they become dull.

Pillars (8 mats total)

• Join two mats together.   Optionally add the edge pieces to the top and/or bottom. Not sure if adding the edge piece to the bottom will make it unstable. So far I have not done this myself.  Height of the pillars is not that important.  You can also add the edge piece to the long side if you want the pillar to be a bit wider.  Then you would only cut the one side with the tabs.  

• Place these mats upside down on a flat surface and glue the join of the two mats and optionally the edge pieces.  I do this upside down because the mats are not always the same thickness and hopefully this will make good side flat.  Do not use too much glue or it will come out the other side (the good side). I stick the nozzle between the two mats.  You can practice on two unused edge pieces. Note in the photo below I had cut off the sides first but changed the order of the steps later. You can see the glue in the joins. 
  
  

• Cut a thin piece off one of the long sides so that the edge is straight and no longer has the tabs.  Do this for both sides.  I don't measure this cut but I do use the straight edge to help guide the knife.
  
• Measure the width to figure out where the middle point is so that you can cut the piece exactly in half.  Mark and cut the piece in half.   Now you have two of the four sides of the pillar.
• Repeat this with two more mats.
• Decide which end is the bottom for each of the four pieces and cut off the tabs if you did not glue on the edge pieces.   If you don't like the tabs on the top you can also cut them off. 
• If you are doing cut outs now is the time to mark and cut them out.  I marked them on the backside and then cut them out because it was smoother and easier to draw on.  But since I wasn't always holding the  knife straight up and down this resulted in some gaps on the good side when I swapped the pieces.  It is better to mark on the good side and cut that side.  You can use tape if worried about pen marks.  Use clear tape on the mat, draw on the tape and cut through the tape and the mats. 
• Glue the cut outs so that they will not fall out.

Pieces for the pillar (again I changed the order of the steps so the bottom is not cut off in this picture)

• Glue two of the sides together.  I find that gluing the bottom end first ensures that the bottom will line up.

• Glue the remaining sides together.  Note how the pieces are put together in this photo. I only do the pillars this way. 
  

• Repeat to make the second pillar.

More on the Wall Jump

I have been getting lots of positive comments on my wall jump.  People say that they love it and find it very safe (comfortable to land on in fact).  I have been asked to give an Arts and Crafts day at a local training centre to help people make their own wall jump.  There is interest in instructions too for those who cannot come due to timing or distance. So I am busy working on those and preparing for Tamsu's Arts and Crafts day.  I am also working on a new wall jump which is helping me to prepare the instructions and try out some new ideas and improvements.  I have something special in mind for this jump when it is finished and once it is finalized I will let people know.  Here I am testing out some colour ideas - black top pieces.  There are two white tables behind the wall holding up the pieces.

As you can see I decided to give it a Canadian theme by cutting out maple leaves.  Below is my test before attempting it on the red and white mats.  The cut outs in the jump above took quite a bit of time (almost 3.5 hours for 8 leaves).

I was careful about where I put the red since dogs cannot distinguish between red and green as easily as we can (see www.dog-vision.com).   The photo below is what the dogs see using an iPhone app.  Sometime I will compare what www.dog-vision.com gives versus the app. 

Lots of decisions to make and here is one of them.  How high to make the top pieces?  Below is a picture of a taller rounder one that is about 3 inches tall and a shorter flatter one that is 2 inches tall. If you want a 4 inch jump height option the 2 inch one makes a bit more sense. But you could make a one inch wall piece. Which one will decide the height of the base.  So far I have two votes for the shorter one.

 

Another decision is which organization's specs to follow.   Here are the links where I found some specs. Seems like every time I look I am finding something different. 
http://www.fci.be/circulaires/90-2011-annex-en.pdf and http://www.worldagilityopen.com/WAORules&Regulations.pdf and https://www.ukagilityinternational.com/PDFs/RulesSecondEdition.pdf

Also metric or imperial?  The first jump's heights were in inches but the Canadian jump is metric.  

One thing that was asked was will it blow over in the wind?  The answer is yes but I am working on some ideas to prevent this and the most promising for the pillars is stick in the ground weave poles.   I also tried putting some jump bars in a wall section to keep from blowing away.  That worked as well. 

weave poles inside pillar

jump bars inside the wall section

It was very windy today.  I could hear the sand hitting my vehicle while driving along the highway.  Nessa was kind enough to sit by the pillar and you can see her hair moving.  I also tried to get in some of the background trees but should have left the iPhone in landscape orientation as they got mostly cutoff.  You can see the wind try to blow the pillar over at the 23 second mark and it settles back down.  




Not sure where or how I will put up the instructions - blog, facebook group, webpage, pdf etc.  Too many options with this too.  

On a more personal note this project is helping me keep my mind off why this project really came to be.   I have been unable to run in training let alone competitions with my dogs since the end of January due to an injury.  I had been thinking about making this jump for a while and with the winter weather and my injury I had some free time to work on it.  Unfortunately I still have lots of free time but trying to think positively.

Wall jump

I decided to try to make a wall jump out of some old and new interlocking foam mats.

You can tell that the pillars are faded and made of the old mats.  The wall is made of newer mats.  I also chose yellow and blue as my main colours because dogs are essentially red/green colour blind.  Everything but the curved top pieces are made from 2 foot by 2 foot mats (most recently I bought them from Walmart).  The top pieces are made from thinner 1 foot by 1 foot mats that I bought at a dollar store years ago.   I first tried duct tape and that was not holding so I switched to hot glue. 

Since I train at a place where my friends also train their 26" jumping dogs I made the maximum height 28".  I was actually aiming for 26" but to be able to get all the heights that I wanted (8" to 26" in 2" increments) I ended up with a total of 28".  In retrospect I could have made two 6" pieces instead of the 8" and 6" ones and ended up with a total of 26".  The base and curved top pieces total 8".  The additional pieces are  2", 4", 6" and 8".

A nice feature of the jump is that all the pieces fit in the pillars for easy storage and transport.  I will admit that it is a good thing that the pillars are flexible as I had to force them into the back of my CRV.  I am planning on taking it to the training facility this week and giving it a better test what I could do in my backyard in the snow.

Another very important feature to me is that this jump is less likely to cause serious injuries if a dog hits any piece of it. 

I am not sure how much wind the jump can take and it will be a while before it can be tested on grass.  It will hopefully be fine for indoors and calm days.

Here is a video of me assembling the jump.



Nessa and Taari testing it out in the backyard.






After more testing I can write out the way I would make it the next time (I learned some things along the way) and post it if there is interest.