Garden Dog Walk

Our mini dogwalk has served us well over the years but there comes a time when you have to stop replacing bits and making running repairs.  We decided to put it out to grass and make a new one.

The new design is quite a posh affair.  Here it is in the raw before it's been painted.  It's about 28" to 29" high.  The ramps are 6ft long and the central section is 4ft long so it's quite compact and is fairly easy to make. 

For this design I decided to make the trestles from timber.   Mine taper inwards towards the top.  The legs are made from 50mm X 75mm  timber and the cross pieces are made from bits that I had handy.  The trestle legs are hinged at the top using strap hinges. 

When the dog walk is painted and it's ready to set up I'll adjust the height of the trestles so that the whole thing is about 28 to 30" high.  I can then use chain to string between the legs of each the trestles so that they open up to exactly the right width.  

If you don't want to go to the trouble of making trestles you can buy builders trestles or get a pair of saw horses from somewhere like B&Q or Homebase.  I wanted mine to be fairly heavy as we live in a windy county where normal equipment can get blown over. 

For the top of the dog walk and the ramps I bought two sheets of 4' X 2' 19mm exterior ply.  I asked the DIY man to cut these sheets into 12" wide strips so that I had four bits of ply measuring 4' X 1'.  The man was very nice about it considering it was Sunday afternoon and he wanted to pack up and go home.

The ramps are 6 feet long and the top of the dog walk is four feet long.  This meant attaching two pieces of ply to frames made up from 25mm X 50mm timber.  The slats are just cut from a length of moulding.  The top was built on  a similar framework and this is shown below.  I have also made a second central section which is eight feet long so that I can have a longer dog walk if needed.  More details and photos are shown further down the page.

The ramps and the top were joined together using loose pin hinges.  These are strong hinges meant for hanging doors and they have a steel pin that can be withdrawn from the hinge so that it comes apart.  I thought this idea was good for making dog walks and it has been used by other people.  Shown right is one end of the top of the dog walk.  I used a couple of bolts on each side of each half of the hinge to strengthen the arrangement.  The hinges aren't really meant to be jumped on by big hairy dogs.

Below left is a top view of the ramp joined to the top of the dog walk.  I had to make an insert to fill the gap!  To join up the hinges I discarded the steel pins and used a metre of steel rod cut in half.  I bent the ends to make handles. 

We used this arrangement for a few months but it was quite fiddly getting the rod to slip into the hinges. 
Further down the page you'll find the modification I used to join the ramp to the central section.

	Here's the hinge handle pushed through the slots in the loose pin hinge.  This has made a firm joint between the ramp and the top and it has the advantage that the dogwalk can easily be dismantled and moved or stored in the shed.  Now all I have to do is to paint it.

The whole operation was closely supervised by Jamie and Sasha but they did have a few diversions. 

Sasha has been keeping a close watch on activities on the other side of the gate.  If she watches just long enough she might catch a passing postman or an unwary cat may venture into the garden.  Jamie has been working on an escape tunnel.  This is located beside the garden shed and is veering towards the stone hedge at the back of the garden.  Did he really think I wouldn't notice the enormous hole that he's dug in the compost heap?

Having made the dog walk it then had to painted.  This was quite a big job.  I used gloss for the trestles, undersides and the sides.  The top had to be painted with non slip paint and there are several things you can use for this. 

I used gloss undercoat with a bit of blue gloss added to give it some colour.  The contacts I did in white.  I mixed in a bit of fine sand which I sieved with a fine sieve.  If you use the one from the kitchen which is meant for sifting flour it works really well.  Mine had to have a good wash afterwards and I didn't tell the OH. Other things you can use are, deck paint coated with anti-slip granules,  CooVar Sure Grip paint which is expensive but good, or use non slip yacht or floor paint.  

Before I put the dog walk together I put one of the ramps in the garden to let Sasha and Jamie test it out for grip.
 

First Sasha has a go and Jamie gets jealous	Then Jamie has a go and Sasha watches to make sure he gets the contact.
Then they both want sweeties for being good dogs	....and finally we musn't forget the most important bit of all.  A plentiful supply of tea.
Update: After we'd used the dog walk few times I got fed up with trying to thread the hinge handle through the bolts to hold the ramps in place.  I decided to replace the hinges and hinge handle with some right angled brackets.  I pushed some coach bolts into the hinge slots on the top section of the dog walk so that the brackets could just slip over the top.  I found this much easier to set up but you do need to push down on the ramps to make sure that everything is stable. This year (2011) I decided to extend the garden dog walk and I've added some pics below.
Extending the garden dog walk Last year Sasha went a bit funny on the dog walk and no-one could see any rhyme or reason to it.  She would do it once in training and then look scared.  Then one day the trainer and everyone else said for the umpteenth time that it was a mystery but I had spotted something. (I'm getting to the extended dog walk in a minute so please bear with me while I digress.) As Sasha came off the up ramp it made a funny noise behind her and she shrank down.  Now the trainer's dog walk is a full sized jobbie and quite a lot bigger than ours.  What's more ours doesn't make funny noises.  Also the central section is so short that Sasha's over it in a jiffy.  (You can see where this is going.) It's all nice and stable and there's not much time for strange things to happen .  The answer I thought would be to extend it.  Later that week I went to the DIY shop and bought a bit of ply which they cut down the middle for me and I bought two lengths of 25mm x 50mm planed timber.  I had loads of offcuts  of timber and so I made up a framework using the two bought lengths and the offcuts and nailed the plywood to it.  I had to find some bits of ironwork for the ramps to rest on and I screwed these to the end of the central section.  I didn't know if it would work or if it would be stable but the ramps slotted easily into place.
I'm delighted to say that the whole structure felt even more solid than than the previous version and better still I discovered how to make non slip paint.  Being a skinflint I couldn't resist the bargain I spotted in B & Q.  It was water based quick drying gloss and it was the right colour.  For £3 I snapped it up.  To make the paint I sieved some fine sand through a tea strainer and mixed it with some of the quick dry gloss.  It made the perfect non slip surface.   It isn't supposed to be for exterior use but I thought, "That's OK.  I keep the whole thing in the shed anyway."  Ahem and oops!  Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have realised that you aren't going to get an 8 foot bit of dog walk into a standard 6 by 4 shed.  It doesn't go!  And finally....did it work?  Sasha loves her new extended dog walk.  I managed to reproduce funny noises by shaking a bucket of bits as she leaves the up ramp.  It scared her a bit at first but now she's perfectly confident.  I don't know what she'll be like in the ring and at training classes but we'll see.  Update: Sasha has continued to gain confidence on the dog walk and she will go over it at training classes and in the ring.  Now she won't do the see-saw!    Jamie said she's a complete wimp and she'll never be as good as he was but I couldn't leave it at that.  The only way to get her confidence back was to build a full sized see-saw.