You can space these out however you’d like, but make sure they’re evenly spaced on both sides, or your sheet metal might hang slightly crooked. Especially on the bottom, these measurements are important, because you don’t want your drill holes to be over the Tees that connect to the base. On the top and bottom (24″ edges), I punched holes at 3″, 12″, and 21″ across. I just used a simple drill bit that was slightly larger in diameter than the zip ties. I’ve seen some folks that just hammer a nail through their sheet metal to make the holes for the zip ties, but I think that would result in some bends to the metal that I wanted to avoid. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of my sheet metal when I was painting it, but you can see what it looked like from the first photo at the top of this post. The galvanized steel finish looks good on its own, but some color really makes it look finished. I also painted my sheet metal, but you certainly don’t have to. Either way, a coat of paint will do wonders. Pick your favorite team colors, or just go with black. (See how much cooler the angled legs look?)Īt this point, you could say you’re done with the frame, but I highly recommend painting it. Once you’ve gotten the two sections cut and assembled, put them together! Your strike zone should resemble the one below. That being said, I simply used a rubber mallet to make sure all of my pieces were completely connected, and that seemed to make it strong enough. It will make your strike zone virtually indestructible. I would generally recommend using some PVC primer and cement at this point. When you assemble the base, it should look like this, where the legs tilt in towards the center a bit: I decided to emulate that look, because it looks cooler. I saw some photos of a strike zone that another person had built, and it had angled legs that reminded me of how a catcher sits behind the plate. I know, I know, you’re all about that base. The entire frame should be able to come from ONE of the 10′ PVC pipes. I ended up setting my dimensions of the inside of the frame to be an inch larger in both directions, 25″ x 37″.īecause we’re using the Tee joints to connect to the base, I had to break the bottom up into three separate pieces, that’s why you see those cuts in the list. This meant that I needed to make a PVC frame that would hold a 24″ x 36″ piece of metal, with a little space to give. I’d do a poor job, and it was pretty close to the standard strike zone size, give or take an inch or two. I knew that I didn’t want to have to cut the sheet metal.
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