The Plank in Joy Park

The plank in joy park I decided to take some risks. The museum faced a few problems with the old plank/bridge in joy park. 1. The bridge runs over a water play area and had become completely saturated with water and this prevented the grip tape the ability to adhere to the plank without removing it for weeks, 2. would flex dangerously bad if any visitors over toddler age walked or bounced on it, 3. and was developing a large split across the entire bottom face of it. I had done some temporary fixes, but it was time to replace it. This project provided me a great opportunity to greatly improve it and make some beautiful design upgrades to it as well.

To solve issue #1 For the water saturation and grip tape adhesion I routed out the entire design onto the top of the bridge. Sadly, the bridge is over 10 feet and does not fit on the CNC machine. The plan was to then CNC out plastic pieces that then fit into these routed out portions. This way if a piece of grip tape came off it was easily replaceable.

The bridge was constructed out 4x4 cedar posts for cedars natural weather resistance. The old bridge was 2 inches thick and one solid piece, but it proved extremely difficult to find a cedar slab in the thickness we wanted. The cedar posts are glued together with square mortise and tenons running through the entire bridge. This was the gamble because I was confident in my mortise and tenon abilities (and no we don’t have a mortiser) but I was not confident in making perfectly aligned mortises across 5 4x4’s every 2 feet. Although it paid off, and while I know my hand cut mortises weren’t perfect, the square holes were good enough and provided a tight fit for the tenons. Not only creating a beautiful feature but also creating a redundancy in case the glue started to come apart or the panel split. With the extra thickness the flex had disappeared. Solving the museums issues with the previous plank and being able to put my woodworking touches, and the new leaf design I had made.