Creating Hoopers Equpiment.
This week we started putting together our own hoopers equipment! If you want to know more about what Canine Hoopers is check out this blog. We love a good D.I.Y and with a bit of research were able to find the right products to help us put together a set of 5 hoops for under £35! So we thought we’d share it with you so you can have a go yourself!
We started with ScrewFix, we used the 21.5mm FloPlast pipe. We ordered ours in a pack of ten, three meter lengths because we needed them delivered but you can buy the three meter lengths individually if you don’t want to have lots of spare or only want one or two hoops to start with and are able to collect from a local branch. Each hoop needs two and a half meters of pipe, so roughly one three meter length per hoop. Once we’d selected the pipe we added the t-connectors and elbow joints/90º bends to our basket, both come in packs of five, you’ll need one elbow joint per hoop and two t-connectors per hoop, so we ordered two bags of t-connectors and one bag of elbow joints. If you’re looking to keep your hoops up permanently or just want something more substantial you could consider adding some solvent cement to your basket too but we’re planing on storing ours in pieces when not in use so we opted to leave this out. Other optional purchases include special pipe cutters, again to save some money we opted to leave this out and use a trusty hack saw we already had at home!
While we waited for that to arrive we popped to our local B&M store to buy some large hula hoops, we bought five of the largest ones that they had on sale. You will need one hula hoop per hoopers hoop, so you can buy however many you need for your project. They’re also available to buy from online retailers such as eBay and Amazon, so this is a great option if you don’t have any available locally.
Once we had all of our parts ready it was time to trim the pipes to size. For each hoop you will need one 34” piece, this will form the base, two 16” pieces, these will hold the hoop, two 12” pieces to create the feet and one 2” joiner piece to connect your feet to your hoop!
Once trimmed down to size you could choose to sand the edges down but most of the edges will be hidden within joints so it’s not an essential step!
Starting with your 34” base piece add an elbow joint at one end and a t-connector, with the ‘t shape’ facing up, at the other end. To this, attach your two 16” pieces one at either end to the connectors, facing up. This should leave you with one hole to your connector empty, this is where the 2” connector piece of pipe you cut can slot in, followed by another t-connector piece, but this time you want to attach it the other way round so you connections are lateral on either side of your hoop base. Finish the base by slotting the two 12” pieces into this final connector. Your hoop base should now be able to stand freely.
Depending on the hula hoops you’re using you may need to trim them slightly. Make a cut in your hoop and measure the circumference, you need your hoop to be 92” all the way around, we had to trim ours slightly. Once cut down to size, slot into your hoopers base, creating the full hoop. The hula hoop should slot right down into the base creating a hoop with an inner diameter of 36”. Then you’re done and it’s time to play!
1 thought on “Creating Hoopers Equpiment.”