Horse Teeter Totter - Part 1

As part of our trade for a pool table, I needed to build a horse teeter totter. Tia has one, and I upgraded the top, but I needed to paint it to prevent slipping. That's the plan for tomorrow, so today was the assembly.

The idea for this is a basically a large, thin, rectangular box that the horse can walk on. It has a pivot, so it tilts and as they walk across it, it tilts the other way, just as if you walked across a playground see-saw.

The way I built this was the start with 2 8' pieces of 2x4 as the sides. Since I have 8' pieces for the top, this worked out fine. I measured and cut 4 cross braces, though I made them as bit long as we'll see. Once they were cut, I screwed them into the side.

Once all 4 were on, I put it on the ground, added the other side rail, and screwed that in.

It was at this point that I started to realize I had a problem. I put the 2x10s on the top, lining them up and realized that I was short about 2".

Grrr.

I could have unscrewed things, cut the braces and tried again, but I decided to try something else.

Once I had the pieces there, I added a 2x3" to the space. This just had the one part hanging over, and barely. I thought this was a decent setup, and since I can always trip the 2x10, I screwed everything together like this.

I spent a few minutes sanding, and tomorrow I'll get Tia's teeter totter and put it  next to this one and paint them both. I have paint with a non-stick granule additive that I think will do the trick.

Then it's adding a bottom and delivering it to my friend.