Beam Building

The next step was to start building the 16 foot beams. We ripped 4 strips of plywood to sandwhich with the 2" X 10"'s. We debated on whether the seam in the plywood should be in the center of the beam, or out toward the end. We decided it was safer in the middle, since otherwise it'd end up where the suspension points where, which already was going to be a weak point. We intentionally undersized it a bit, we didn't want it to form a ridge on the beam that would make laying the floor difficult.

We then clamped the four pieces together, and ran carriage bolts through the beam to hold it all together. Next, we used the outer plate of the suspension brackets as a template to drill holes through the beam. We wanted to get as much done on the ground, in the shop, as possible. Trying to do this kind of work up in the tree sounded nearly impossible.





It took a solid day of work to build up the two beams this way, and get the hardware mounted to them properly. We estimated that each beam was well in excess of 200 pounds, possibly as high as 300 pounds with all the hardware on them.




It took a few more hours to build the two connecting beams. We used two 2" X 10"s again, but this time without the plywood in between. In hindsight, I wish we had put the plywood in there due to the stresses on these beams caused by the suspension points.





We then bolted the whole thing together, and checked for squareness. The angle brackets appeared to keep everything square, it measured square on first try.





We labeled all the sides so that we could match everything up correctly when we were in the tree. We disassembled the platform, and tried to mentally prepare ourselves for the next big task, actually getting it up in the tree!