This is a quick unplanned video today because we have an awesome opportunity. We are in north Mississippi now still greater Memphis area but this doesn’t even happen in tennesseel ike we have many inches of snow however because this is north Mississippi nobody has sleds but I realized with the shop built out I’ve got some extra supplies it’s going to be great first up i want to say the only uncommon tool I’m going to use is a conduit.
the alternative would be the same concept and idea would work with PVC pipe and then you just have to buy fittings and glue it which mean if you’re going to make more than one it’d probably actually be cheaper to just buy a conduit bender and conduit and do it this way if you’re going to do probably going to pay for itself I’m going to try to keep this very quick.
I want to get this done and go enjoy the day with my kids snow. The sled is going to be about 18 inches wide between the rails and from end to end it’s like 43 inches so that lets you cut an 8-foot board in half 48 inches and gives you some room to attach the straphangers on the bottom to hold my conduit bender has a five-inch stub length i’ll just give you the dimensions use for a bender with a five-inch stub nail right so i’m going to mark four inches in from both endsand one things i’ve learned handy with using the conduit benders it’s better to make your mark all the way around the conduit that way whichever way you have to orient your bender you can seethe mark and i’m going to mark the middle of the.
nothing too crazy here and then I’m going to mark again four inches away from that middle mar know we’re going to take these marks and that mark is going to go right where the arrow is on our bender and then these first bends we’re going to do because we’re going to make are tangle we’re going to go all the way to 90. there is a mark for 90 because 90 is basically bending all the way and there.
my arrow and lines lined up with my marking thing remember as a conduit bender is not about using your arms it’s all in your foot so you just stand on the little thing use your hand just keep everything straight and we’re going to 90. conduit tends to come back a little bit so you have to bend slightly farther than you want to go and it’ll end up there that’s actually a little touch too much but i can just tweak it by hand till.
mark do the same things for the second bend you want the handle in line with this now this is actually kind of handy really tricky thing binging conduit normally is keeping all your orientations the way they need to goso what i’m going to do is just squeeze this my handle is right against my conduit and now i know these bends will bein in the same plane in line with each other.
close to the same heights i was off just a tiny bit but not a ton that’s going to be okay and i think this one’s out a little bit on the mark now getting to 90.okay now, unfortunately, i can’t keep this here to try to keep everything straight because it’s going to be in my way so I’ve got to go caddy corner a little bit which is not going to keep all my bends totally aligned but that’s all right we can tweak it by hand.
get it perfect just all right that way and also this direction because the pipe it was in the wave itself this one’s coming up some this one’s coming down some nice thing is with just half-inch EMT we can tweak this by hand now and as far as the overlap here once I open it up that actually brings everything square it’s just because one of those or both are slightly more than 90.
Write this one’s down this one’s up so i’ll bend this by hand the trick is not to just push here because then i’m actually going to bend it down there I need to hold it where I want it to end that way the bend happens where i wantit to same thing here need to push this one down so i’ll hold here to make sure the bend happens here not down there okay pretty good now for.
Twist same way that way a little bit and this one the other way a little bit. Nothing crazy we just got this little thing that both then slide into it’s got two screws and we tighten those down okay now everything’s pretty flat and plain but you can see i do have some wobble and i imagine that the more in plane or flatter.
the better it’s going to slide because it’s going to havemore even engagement with the snow I don’t know I’ve only ever pretended to be an engineer but it makes sense in my head so since these are my high ones i need to twist this way so we’ll just give it some little adjustments okay that was a little too much.
position works pretty well sometimes you just gotta experiment findout what positions work for you what you uh what you like we’re looking good now for the next step obviously this going down the snow is more of a plow than a sled so we need to elevate the ends I’m going to do some marks five inches away from this edge here what would have made this easier so whenyou do marks don’t just do four inch.
nine inches because four plus five the stub length is nine and then that will be your start pointfor your next bends I forgot to do that told myself to do that when i did the first one on this one but okay i’ve got my stub length marked allthe ends which is where the curve begins again, if i’d marked from the center, fourand nine inches i would already have those marks and from the end when i did it four and nine.
and again we just make sure we hook ourstart point right thereon that mark and we’re going to bend to45 degrees which is on the side of our bender we just go till this line is level and that’s 45 that seemed to work outwell on thefirst one i did i tried 30 but it just wasn’t enough and if you’re thinking oh no it’s going to get all out of whack if we only bendyou know one side at a time it works.
oh no it’s all wonky it’s okay its gonna work out just watch all right eight quick bins and the frame is done now we’re gonna make the deck my board’s actually longer than eight feet because i didn’t get out of store I just have this laying around so i’ve gota mark at eight to cut off some of the slop at the end make another mark at four feet this is a little wide this is eight inches wide my other one.
so this one will be for my older son just because you don’t want to clean off the table saw and rip this down narrower till work fine and then there will beone for my bigger buttand a trick to cutting straight with the circular saw use your speed square as a guide the mark just gets me in the right place and then the speed square keeps mestraight[Music]now these edges might be a little sharp.
it’s got snow but i want to round these over some if you have a router and a round over a bit that would work super quick just going to use some 80 grit inthe sander or if you uhjust use paper by hand that’ll do itjust a little slower this is absolutely extra and unnecessary but one of the nice things about this project is even though it’s pretty quick and rather inexpensive i mean this is definitely going to be way cheaper than the equivalent would be as there’s no reason this thing cant last for years and years and years which is great because who knows when it’s going to be that we see snow like this again so i’m just going to put some finish on this and we will go have some fun.
about it ifwe pull these out again in three four to five years they’ll be just fine and just because the coupler sticks outa bit i space the boards and then try to keep that gap even now we’ll screw it down and of course you know make sure the ends of the board are even just to make it easier to hold on toi’ve got some leather scraps and i’mgoing to use these to make some handles.
handles buti think this will just look a little nicer and you can always drill a hole in the leather but i’ve got a leather punch why not use it and also unnecessary but since I’m waiting on the finish to dry on the wood anyways for longevity’s sake may as wellgo ahead and wax and condition these leather handles it doesn’t hurt anything of course if i screw this flat it’s not.
make sure we leave push it up some give some slack, therefore, a gloved hand okay for a final touch i’ve got some 550cord paracord whatever you want to call it make a little tow rope for pulling itbackup the heel and i’m realizing if you wanted to make these a little classier could have instead of centering the boards on the frame slid the boards forward a.
knock some 45s on the edges or something it would look a little classier but whatever or whenever you mess with paracord always make sure you burn the ends just to help keep this tower up in place so it doesn’t slide down the frame I’m going to run it through how to loosen the brackets so i can run them through these brackets that way it stays in place good and that’s long enough that theycan sit on it to keep it up.
Kids don’t know what i’ve been up to so time to make them go put on some winter clothes and see what they think give them a real test but before we put these things in action we’ll do the formal outroso hope you learned something were inspired or at least entertained if you feel like i’ve earned it please hit that subscribe button and the bellso youtube lets you know when i actually make videos.