Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Compact Campus Board




Standard campus boards are huge (4ft by 8ft) and won't fit in the space available in our garage.  This compact design fits some nice features into a smaller 2ft wide by 6ft tall layout.  A couple weeks ago I installed the frame, the lower panel, and the first 5 sets of rungs.  Last week I added the top panel and some more small rungs, including half a narrow ladder along the left. Today I filled it out with the remaining  medium rungs.

The board starts at 44 inches above the floor, and finishes between the rafters on the ceiling at 10 feet.   The main ladder starts with Small #1, and continues up to S7, then it shifts left a few inches for S8, and then S9 is at the top between the rafters.  The shift is needed to center the climber prior to the final reach between the rafters.  The rungs are Moon spacing, so every jump between rung on each size ladder is 22 cm.  Every half step alternates the rung size between small and medium.  The first half row starts with Medium #1, and finishes on M8, the second to last rung between the rafters.  I chose to devote the maximum vertical distance to the small rungs in order to allow us to make the longest moves on the smallest rungs.  [Perhaps some rock star will drop by the Dojo and knock out some 1-5-9's.]

 The smalls on the half ladder (on the left side) are on the same level as the mediums on the main ladder.  This new half ladder will allow people to campus half step standard ladders on smalls or mediums for the first 12 half rows.

Of course, I realize that the Anderson brothers (Rock Climbers Training Manual) advise against alternating rung sizes (as I have on the main ladder).  I think  that the main down side of alternating is that we cannot do matching ladders at half steps, and we cannot work max ladders at half steps as easily.  However, matching at half steps makes for really short moves, even on the small rungs so I don't think that is a big loss.  The half steps lets us have full width rungs and fit two sizes onto a 2ft board, while also allowing us to do standard (non matching) ladders on both sizes.  We can also still work half step increments on single move max ladders, although with some constraints about which rungs we start on.

Anyways, I am hopeful that this design will allow us to ramp up our power workouts without sacrificing too much campusing flexibility and too much more of our storage space.

See my original post on the build of the board for other design details.




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