Carletta Trains
How I Made the Monkey Bars
The monkey bars were by far the easiest piece of equipment to build. This is in large part to the creative idea I had to use a left over z scale fence as the bars.
The fence was a picket fence that I didn't need. First I cut off the lower and upper portions of the fence boards and then I cut every other board out of the center. This was close to what real life monkey bar spacing would look like.
Once I had the bar part all set I created the rest of the structure. I feel that it's always best to make the biggest part of a structure, any structure, out of one solid piece. In this case it was the sides of the monkey bars. So the legs and bar across supporting the bars is are all one piece cut out of a styrene sheet.
I next cut a base place (with a notch out for each leg) and glued all pieces into place. I did this because if I glued the frames to the base and not the bars, I might be off on the spacing and once the modeling cement dries you can't reposition things and restart easily.
Once the pieces dried I glued in the steps for the monkey bars. These are the steps kids stand on in order to get to the monkey bars. This also adds additional stability to the structure.
I decided that the base coat would be red so I painted the entire assemble red
Next, to add a little color, I painted every other bar blue and yellow. When that paint dried I used Testors "Dullcote" spray paint to take the gloss off of the finish.
Once that dried it was time to attach it to the playground base plate and paint the base black. All that was left was to add the "wood chips".
