Building The Foot Bridge
As you may remember, we have a lovely babbling brook in our back yard – most of the time. But once or twice a year it turns into what you see in the picture here, and after any decent thundershower it turns into what you see in this video.
We have been building a foot bridge over that spring branch (creek) for a few weeks now. It was mostly finished in the video linked to above, but I just got around to screwing down the planks over the weekend. We are using two stumps on either side as steps. I don’t think we’ll be needing rails, but our minds might change about that if one of us ever slips on an ice-covered bridge.
I am quite proud of this foot bridge, as it is the most substantial (or maybe I mean substantive) thing that I have ever built. I know, I know… sad. But it is true, and we all have to start somewhere. I’ll tuck my tail between my legs when the carpenter who built our back porch learns how to do link graph analysis on a competing contractor’s website. … I digress.
Without further late-night rambling, here are some pictures:
Cutting a telephone pole to use as posts. Each "pier" is about five feet long. Over half of it is underground.
Sawing notches in the posts for the rails to lay on.
Drilling on the rails. They sit on top of the notches and have two lag-bolts attaching each to the post.
Cutting wood for the planks. This is solid oak here. We treated the entire bridge with linseed oil, also known as flax seed oil.
Drilling in the planks. This oak was HARD. I broke two drill bits, a driver bit, and stripped a few dozen screws.
Taking a walk on the bridge. This photo was taken before I actually finished the bridge, but you get the idea. We now have tree-stumps for stairs as well.
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- Busy Weekend FUN Photos!
- The Stomach Virus Has Left The Building!
- The Caption Challenge: Butterflies on Donkey Dookie
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[...] Finish building solid foot bridge over creek (Done) [...]
Very nicely done! Mark ran into the same problem with real hardwood while putting on the roof of our shed. He eventually started drilling pilot holes because he was sick of stripping screws.
Anna,
Would you believe that I actually WAS using pilot holes? The drill bits weren’t long enough to drill the entire hole so the screws were stripping on that last little bit.
Well, *I* am impressed. This project exceeds my husband’s and my carpenter abilities.
I believe it — Mark ran into that problem too.
(I think that subscribe to comments button is broken. I subscribed, but didn’t get an email about your reply…)
You’re right. The subscribe to comments button isn’t working. I don’t have time to fix it right now, but thanks for the tip. It is officially added to my “list”.
[...] have a good after photo yet, but imagine that the barn roof is now green; the barn siding is red; a new bridge has been built over the creek; a fence is around the house; the clothes line is moved over to a [...]