A breakaway tyre - barn door

This is how I spent my 70th birthday. I made a breakaway barn door style tyre. Okay the tyre bit isn't quite circular and I had an audience consisting of two dogs and a husband. The latter took unflattering pictures and said my bum was big.

Anyway, here's how I made it.

I blagged a couple of bits of wood for the uprights. These were about 75mm x 75mm and about 1m high.
I found couple more bits of wood in the shed, 50mm x 100m and cut them into 45cm lengths. These are for the feet.
Then I found a length of wood suitable for the crossbar. This can be any size as long as it's strong enough to fix across the two uprights to stabilise it.
I also found a couple of lengths of old plastic pipe that were the right size for one pipe to fit inside the other. I cut the inner pipe into 35cm lengths and the outer pipe into 10cm lengths.
To hold the pipe in place I used four pipe clips.

To get the right height for the tyre the aperture centre from the ground needs to be
800mm for large dogs
550mm for medium dogs
490mm for small dogs
The top pipe clip needs to be fixed at 50mm below these heights for a fixed tyre height like mine. The bottom clip needs to go low enough to stabilise the pipe.

Fixing the pipe to the upright. The short piece of pipe will be fixed to the tyre with Gorilla tape so that it can slide over the top of the inner pipe.

For an adjustable tyre I would try stacking 50mm lengths of the outer sleeve pipe on top of each other. I haven't tried this myself so I don't know if it would work. Next I made the tyre.

For the tyre I used my old tyre which is made of foam insulation wound round with duct tape. I cut this in half and looked in dismay at the two odd shapes in front of me that were anything but semicircular.
To fix this I found a couple of bits of metal pipe that could easily be bent into semicircles and used them as formers inside the tyre. I was dead lucky that our bistro table was about the size I needed to bend the pipe as I could use it as a template.

The tyre cut in half and the metal rod

Using the bistro table to try and get the right shape

When it was done and Bernie had had a good laugh I taped the 10cm lengths of the outer pipe to the tyre exactly halfway down. It took quite a bit of doing. I had to lay the whole thing out on the ground and measure where the centre of the tyre would be and where 800mm was for Jilly's height. I temporarily taped the two halves of the tyre together to get the measurements right.

When I was doing it Bernie told me I was like a pig in the proverbial. Later I asked him which bit I was like, the pig or the proverbial and he just laughed. I presume he meant both.

Finally I screwed the frame together. You can see how this is done from the photo. The two halves of the tyre can be hung on the frame by sliding the outer sleeve of the pipe over the pipe that has been fixed to the frame. They are usually closed and held together by magnets but I didn't have any magnets handy so I used velcro.

I didn't spend the whole of my 70th birthday making a tyre jump. We went to Pencarrow House for a nice walk and some lunch. Bernie had rhubarb crumble and cake and the lucky bugger didn't put an ounce on. He claims this phenomenon is because he moves around so much and I don't!

Soup, rhubarb crumble AND cake and he never puts an ounce on.

A Breakaway Tyre Barn Door

A Breakaway Tyre
Barn Door