OK…If I do this again, and I may, I have a great pointer for myself. The gluing part was very hard for me. I had to work fast and was guessing that the pieces were aligned. You will see from the attached picture that the two bigger jumps are bowed. Was I disappointed. By the time I got the whole thing together, they were too dried to adjust. So, next time, when I do the pre-arranging, I am going to take different color markers and draw a line from one of the elbows to the PVC bar that it attaches to, so when I’m gluing, I will match up those lines and everything will be aligned like it was before I glued. I’m really bummed about that mistake. I even put them on the ground and aligned as I glued, but I didn’t have enough time to fix mistakes because the glue dries so fast.

The other thing I did was on the “second” jump – OK, I had issue with that. Not all of us know which is the second jump. There are 4 jumps and was the second jump the second from the tall or second from the small? I figured it was the second from the small, but that was just too much work figuring that out. Well, that is the one where she says to put the PVC pole on top of the elbow instead of into it. Well, I put one into it and then I screwed one on top of it, too, so it would be sturdy. I had trouble screwing, just as I thought I would. Well, it was unscrewing that was hard because the drill put the screw in, but when I made a mistake, it wouldn’t take it out, so I had to do it by hand. I was afraid the screw wouldn’t hold the PVC in place, but after that, I knew it would! My arm still hurts. So I put two bars down instead of the one like she said on the second jump. I need a few more screws to secure it, though, because now I have tape on it.

Otherwise, the plans were pretty good to follow. They were well thought out and pretty thorough. That thinking part had to take somebody a lot of time! Thank you for the free plans! My broad jump cost about $40 to make, which is well over half the cost of what I’d pay for them on-line, not to mention the shipping/handling and taxes added to that.

Now onto the high jump!  I’m expecting that to be easier.  I am.

Helen