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.