It suggests that a person should aim to be strong, but not just in a physical sense. They should aim to be resilient, free thinking, confident and yet remain humble. They should learn to be self-sufficient and useful to their loved ones and they should be aiming to always progress in some way.
Written to have 5 parts, plus the introduction, he’s only completed two parts so far. But if parkour/art d’déplacement/free running you love, read this you must.
This tweet appeared the day I returned from training at the Académie Québécoise d’Art du Déplacement. Clearly I’m becoming a softie in my middling years, but I felt a real connection to the many people I had the privilege of training with. They were strong, humble, joyful, welcoming, and so much more.
On commence ensemble; On finit ensemble. Art du Deplacement – Force, Dignite, Partage
This change really seperates people. It’s not going to be like it used to be. You can’t ‘go back to training’ as you once did. That one Jam that you remember is a small part of your whole experience that you remember fondly. It’s one highlight in a long journey, which isn’t just highlights. What’s the constant in these memories?
My coaching style was akin to playing a game of “whack-a-mole” at an arcade, quickly reacting to every behavior deviation I was unswervingly causing due to my lack of experience.
Fitness, as we know it today, seems to be a relatively modern invention – something that started vaguely in the 70s with jogging and Jazzercise. But physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that, to a time where people wouldn’t have thought of it as working out, but rather a way of life. Centuries and millennia ago, they did not have all the machines and weights and gyms that we have today, and yet they were in better shape than we are. To understand why this is, how we got to our modern fitness culture, and what we have lost along the way, it’s helpful to take a look at the history of exercise.
Preemptive: To all my friends. Yes, I know about the movie “Tracers”. No, I have nothing nice to say about it. Imagine Hollywood used a generic formula to paste your favorite thing onto the big screen; Do you think you would enjoy it? Right. It pretty much highlights all the negative aspects of Parkour, and casts Parkour in a bad light. (That’s just my opinion of course.)
Truth is, there is no consensus on this. And – which really hefts a giant spanner into the works – you can’t just go and ask the founding father because this great movement is pretty damn far from being a nuclear family, 2.4 kids and all the rest. No. This child has had a whole host of surrogate step-parents influencing its development down through the years, the centuries, indeed even through the millennia. It has drawn on many sources, supped on inspiration from all over, and drunk from a hundred different cups as it has evolved – and by no means is this process over.
I’ve heard a mind-boggling number or ridiculous things about Parkour. If you EVER have the opportunity to talk about Parkour, please go read this. If this doesn’t fit with your view of history… great! Now you know.
One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don’t build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it.
My suspicion is that, in our convenient society, we don’t need to be acutely aware of our balance and body positions vis a vis the ground because many of us don’t do much physical labor anymore, or play freely as kids outdoors now that we have so many enticing computer games to entertain us.
More than a year ago, I wrote that parkour is about freedom (and much more.) There is also a visceral component that I’m finding is playing a greater and greater role.
Visceral, adj. characterized by, or proceeding from, instinct rather than intellect: a visceral reaction; characterized by, or dealing with, coarse or base emotions.
When you treat your body like a Cadillac meat vehicle – that is, when it’s just a mode of conveyance from one creature-comfort to the next – you soon cease to be intimately aware of what your body is feeling. A large part of the allure of parkour is the immediate and clear, honesty and reality of the experience of training. It’s obvious that your body and mind are not readily separable, but in normal daily life, one mostly ignores the body. In parkour, the body and mind have to work in harmony.
I have a lot more to say about this harmony (my personal interpretation, and explanation, thereof.) But for the moment, I’m just going to start with the above.
Two years ago today, I showed up at Wescosville Elementary at 4pm and tried parkour. A very big thank you to everyone ( Adam, Josh, Joseph, and Miguel in particular) who has been friendly, happy, and encouraging these last two years. This week I will be attempting the ADAPT 1 certification; I could not have accomplished what I have without all the help from the wonderful men and women of lehigh valley parkour. “allez, allez!”
To last? That old lesson about the brightest flame burning the quickest is particularly true in Parkour. What use is a person who lasts five years and has to stop training due to bad knees and a broken ankle? How useful is a body that can’t move pain free due to years of neglect and abuse? The journey of Parkour was never meant to be a brilliant flash of spectacle and show, it was always intended to be a lifelong pursuit of improvement and one that doesn’t need to end once the body begins to show signs of age.
Ignore the show reels. Ignore the spectacular. Those MAY be inspirational to you, but your journey SHOULD be a long series of small, eminently POSSIBLE steps. Go to your first class and try anything; try SOMETHING. Stop when your body has had enough. Repeat. In a few months, you will have grown so much that you will hardly recognize yourself.
Drop me an email: Comments, questions, and suggestions for improvements are welcome. Best of all would be if you sent me some photos of what you built, preferably a big group photo of you on them, or using them or whatever. My email is my first name, craig, at this domain. (Yes, this is a “.name” domain.)
I do NOT recommend using these plans to build a vault box. I’m putting this up for a historical record of what we did (so I don’t have to remember.) I’m already writing another article explaining a better way to build a vault box.
Really. Don’t build vault boxes using these plans.
We, (Lehigh Valley Parkour) built 8 of these vault boxes. They are rock-solid, portable, stackable, etc. They’re great! …but you can do better. So I’m creating another set of plans from a slightly modified second design.
What we did that went right
The “small” top-box from eight vault boxes.
One completed box. Notice it’s not perfect. Not shown: the ratchet strap you have to put on it before trying to use it.
Here’s one box nest-stacked in a Jeep.
You can get the materials for less than $100 per finished box. We collected $100 from everyone, up front and bought everything together in one go.
We built 8 of these. We started by building one box from start to finish. It was the worst box, but we learned a lot. Most importantly, you need one person who understands how the whole box should go together so you can make sure it goes correctly.
We had so much material, we rented a cargo van, (it was winter and we didn’t want to deal with unexpected bad weather messing up our scheduled “buy everything” date) to haul the 1,000+ pounds of lumber and plywood to where we were going to build. We had four people on the “buying night”, and then several 6-hour DAYS of 4, 6 and even 8 (on one day) people working on building these.
We had all the right tools. This is a lot of cutting and screw driving… circular saws are dangerous, second only to chain saws. We had people with safety glasses, ear plugs, work gloves. One guy working the circular saw with two helpers moving plywood. Other people with a battery drill to drill pilot holes, another person with a corded drill driving deck screws. People with orbital sanders and files, someone drilling the large holes and cutting the hand-hold slots. It was crazy.
What goes wrong
The root of the problem is that the design is sloped in both directions; There is a 15° lean from vertical on the “fronts”, (the bigger faces you’ll approach most often) and 7.5° on the “sides”, (the more narrow faces where the hand-holes for lifting are located.) This is simply too difficult to get it to work out correctly with rough lumber and basic building skills.
This box isn’t screwed together, it’s just leaning. But you can see how all the parts have to be perfect for this to work out.
The left face of that 2×4 should be angled about 2°. Then the 2×4 would correctly sit in the corner.
…instead, the deck screws pull the plywood in that 2°. :*(
The biggest problem is that the corners are compound miters. In each corner there is a piece of 2×4. When you put a 90° angle (the corner of a 2×4) into the compound miter at the 15°/7.5° corner, you find out that you really need about a 93° corner on the 2×4. It almost works. The 2×4 goes in, but when you screw the faces together, it “pulls” the big face inward, making the plywood bow concave. That messes up the bottom of the box’s fit onto the next box below. I ended up adding some additional 2×4 strips near the bottom of the box front to straighten the faces… but it’s fiddly to get it to come out right.
These extra braces are NOT mentioned anywhere in the plans.
When I was coming up with this design, I tried combinations of different angles and eventually settled on 15°/7.5° because:
These angles make the finished boxes nest when you stack them in reverse order.
When you stack them up, you won’t knock the pile over using the box.
15° and 7.5° are reasonable bevels to cut on plywood edges with a circular saw.
You can measure convenient lengths of “2 inches” and “4 inches” and cut diagonally across the plywood strips for the box faces to get almost exactly the angles you need.
I also spent a lot of time adjusting dimensions to make the box as large as possible from only two sheets of plywood. There is very little scrap material left over.
When building, getting the box to work out right is difficult; If anything is off by even ONE-QUARTER of an inch, then the box isn’t perfect. If anything is off by HALF an inch, you may not be able to get the box together at all. Every cut on the plywood has to be perfectly straight, which means you have to use a clamped straight edge to guide the saw on every cut and you must always get the bevel correctly arranged. So sometimes you have to cut “backwards”, (the opposite way from the normal, safe way you’d cut with a circular saw.)
Measure (here, from the edge off the bottom of the photo) then nick the plywood, and do not move the saw.
Set the straight edge against the saw’s shoe and clamp. Measure from the edge to the guide…
…set the other end of the guide. (pencil mark just shows you where the saw will really cut.)
Cut along the guide. This is an example of cutting “backwards”. (Because the bevel has to be in this orientation.)
Also, near the end of the plans it describes a little about how to put the top-piece of plywood on each box. It works fine for the top/smallest box. But for the middle and bottom, the way to do it is: measure the opening of the box above, then cut the plywood sheet and screw it to the box. It might not look perfect, but if you put the plywood on so it fits nice, the box above isn’t likely to fit correctly over it.
Finally, the plans, (in the notes near the back of the PDF) show how to figure out how much paint you need to paint them. We used a grey outdoor deck/porch paint, and we mixed in fine sand to give the box some traction. If you’re making artificial obstacles, may as well make them friendly too.
Specific notes
The PDF document above has notes added in red pencil:
Pages 1 and 2:
We added hand-holes for lifting. They’re not shown on these sketches.
“Bevel” means set the bevel angle on the circular saw, i.e., make the saw blade lean. Saws only bevel in one direction, so every cut in the plans has an arrow on end showing you which way to cut; This determines the orientation of the “under bite” made by the saw.
{ The saw we used is “right handed”, (as are most saws) the blade tips to the right, and the blade bites under to the left. Some of the cuts are difficult because the “easy” cut direction, (with the saw on the bigger part of the piece, dropping the cutoff away to the right) would produce the wrong bevel on the work. }
For cuts number ‘2’, ‘3’ (which you do twice) and ‘4’: The arrows point the wrong way; They should point to the right on the diagram so you have 3 cuts that are easy/the-right-way, and just the last one is “in the wrong direction”, against normal saw usage.
This column shows you the materials you’re using up as you go along. It just helps you keep track of everything.
Page 2:
Don’t bother stacking. Just measure, mark and cut each (‘A’, ‘B’ and then ‘C’) strip as shown.
Yes, all the strips’ edges have a 7.5° bevel on them. Yes, it really does not matter which way you have the bevel when you cut the end-angles.
Page 3:
Cut ALL of these cuts the other way. It’s easier. Cut ‘1’ just trims the sheet to put the bevel on, cut ‘2’ (5 times) drops strips off neatly. Then you turn the piece around and cut it the “wrong way”; “wrong” in terms of how you normally rest the saw and cut “off” the smaller part.
Nothing to see here.
Page 4:
This is the view of the end of the 2×4. Just run the saw along the right edge of the 2×4 steering generally straight.
Page 5:
At least 3/4″, more is fine.
Pages 10 etc:
These are just some notes from figuring out how many boxes of screws we needed. (We didn’t put the exact number of screws in. We just went with “that’s probably enough”. And we ended up using only half the deck screws.) Also some calculations of how much paint we needed to buy.
Copyright
"Vault box design 1, sloped sides"
Copyright (C) 2014 Craig J Constantine
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This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See
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Everything is harder, or rather, I should say everything is more complex. The result is that I learn how to tolerate stress, both mental and physical, and how to adapt to make something work despite the fact that the environment is not cooperating. I deal with it or fail. When I’m out there, it doesn’t matter that I can deadlift 3x my bodyweight on a bar, because that doesn’t change the fact that a rock is completely off-balance and seems to be actively trying to roll onto my toes. And that doesn’t change the fact that I’m picking it up and carrying it up the mountain anyway.
