Photo by G. J. Charlet III at Flickr

Swing sets and playsets are mostly used from kids. This should be telling you enough by itself: safety is extremely important. It’s a top priority even over features and price. How to recognize the safe swing set at the store? How to keep your existing swing safe for longer time? How to build a safe swing set yourself? How to safely use it? To learn this and the other aspects of swing set safety keep reading the article. Swing Set Safety Planning The right approach to swing set safety is to carefully plan before you even buy the tool. When choosing the location, make sure it will be large enough, properly drained, flat and with appropriate shape.

It’s recommended that you buy equipment which meets the Home Playground Standard ASTM-1148.

Safety Considerations When Buying or Building A Swing Set

Once site planning is done, you may consider buying or building the swing set. There are several aspects of safety that you have to consider at this stage:

• Safe equipment. The equipment used in your playset should be suitable for their age. A lot of the accidents at the playground happen because young children use equipment which is intended for older kids. Economically it’s often a wise decision to buy the equipment for years ahead at once, but if you do that make sure to remove or hide those tools that are not suitable for your kids.
• Distances and number of tools. The more tools and features a swing set has and the closer they are placed to each other, the more riskier it becomes. Of course it’s nice to have a playset with many things and kids like that but it becomes easier to hit a hand or wedge up a finger in some of them. You should prefer cleaner and more elegant sets with enough distance between the swings. It’s recommended that this distance is at least 22 inches.
• Quality of materials and parts. Most parents are concerned if the playset is stable enough. But I have never seen one that falls apart and thus injured the kid. More often than that the swing set hard parts are not well protected and expose dangerous sharp points. So rather than getting obsessed by the weight sustainability pay more attention whether the parts ares mooth or properly covered.

The quality of the wood, metal or plastic used for the swing is also important.

Ongoing Safety Supervision

After you have chosen a proper location, prepared a smooth surface and bought/built a good safe swing set the swing set safety becomes a question of ongoing supervision and teaching the children to use the tool safely. If it is large and stable enough, use it together with them to show them how to swing without falling from the seat.

Depending on the kids age you may want to supervise them each time when they use the playset. This can be time consuming but it’s also a good way to have more fun with them and feel really safe.

You need to regularly check the chains, swings, sliders, nuts and bolts for deterioration, cracks and tightness. Tighten up the bolts when needed and replace equipment when it shows first symptoms of damage.

Refrain children from climbing on the swing set when wet, when the weather is inappropriate or when they are not dressed safely (any too loose dresses are potentially hazardous when using such kind of tools).

The key here is to find the balance between teaching the kids about safety risks and at the same time keeping most concerns away of them so they don’t get frightened but remain reasonable. Don’t forget outdoor swinging should be more about fun than about anything else!

There are many links to building plans on this page. I have not created them myself as they are on other sites. So if you notice some of them disappeared or you have any comments, please let me know!

So, Here Are Some Plans:

Detailed Play Plans offers several detailed plans for complex play sets. You can download a prospect of the plans for free in PDF format.

Some very good wooden swing plans are available at all4thekids.com at low prices – most are less than $20 per plan. Their plans include a bill of materials as well.

FREE! This link goes directly to a free PDF swing set plan. It’s only one, but asks no money.

MORE FREE! Here’s another PDF link giving an excellent wooden playset plan by Hot4Cad. Thanks guys!

Photo by Chickenboots at Flickr

If all you need is to build a simple swing set these plans are exactly what you need and cost only $12 each.

Extraordinary and probably not what you are looking for, but anyway I’d like to share it – this swing set planter plan is sold for $9. Honestly I would prefer to swing myself instead of my plants, but everyone is different.

Some cheap plans (most under $10) for canopy and adult swing sets can be found at Woodcraft, and again there. They also have a funny plan for toddler swing.

Few nice wooden playset plans can be found here. Each one is between $10 and $20. And if you feel keen on building other stuff too, perhaps you’d better buy 14,000 woodworking plans for all kind of stuff as a package for around $50.

FREE! Very simple, but free plan that can be printed can be seen here.

If the free plans listed here don’t suit you, better spend few bucks and buy some plans – less than $20 for a package is a good price. Some vendors sell plans for $50+ which in my opinion is a bit too much. But spending hours searching for free swing set plans is not a very good idea – believe me, I have spent enough hours already to find some free plans for you. And all I could find is on this page.

You can keep an eye to this site and subscribe by RSS because I plan to publish some free plans and more guides on building swing sets here pretty soon.