Tag Archives: DIY

Gravity boots on the cheap!

I recently made my own gravity boots using parts that can be found at your local hardware or home improvement store.  I have some coworkers with severe back problems who have shown significant improvements while using inversion therapy.  So I wanted to try it out for myself, but I didn’t want to invest hundreds of dollars in the equipment without knowing whether or not inversion therapy would even work for me.  My solution … make my own to try out before buying.

Theory

The theory behind inversion therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_therapy) is that it uncompresses the soft disks in your spine and allows moisture back into them.  Other touted benefits are improved posture and improved circulation & oxygen to the brain. Critics of inversion therapy suggest that the touted benefits are not real and have not been proven.  Critics also maintain that inversion therapy is dangerous because of the risk of falling and also the danger imposed by the increase in blood pressure in the head and eyes.

Disclaimer

I must insist that nobody try making their own gravity boots at home.  If you fall on your head, you could get seriously injured and I cannot be held liable.  Even if you don’t fall on your head, there are other physical and physiological dangers involved, so again, please do not try this at home.

Products

I looked at the Teeter Hang Ups gravity boots to get an idea of how these things were designed (see photo).  This appears to be a very popular brand, according to Google search.  These boots appear to be a pretty simple design just from looking at the photos.  They appear to be basically a piece of plastic around your calves with a heavy duty hook attached to the plastic and foam for cushioning and buckles that tighten similar to roller blade or ski boot buckles.

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Trials

I own a typical door frame pull up bar that I’ve had for eons (see photo), so I thought I could use this pull up bar to hang upside down from.  I just needed some boots to strap around my ankles with a heavy duty hook attached securely to the boots.

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I tried making these gravity boots three different ways before I finally got it right.  My first attempt used denim from an old pair of jeans to wrap around my calves with some utility hooks bolted through the denim (see photo).

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I wrapped a hand towel around my calves first for cushioning and then the denim contraption around that and tied the denim ends together in a knot as tightly as I could.  It felt fairly strong, but when I carefully let more and more of my weight on it while hanging from the pull up bar, the denim started to tear.  Not strong enough.  Now I can see why they used plastic on the commercial product.  Denim is tough, but not strong enough to hold my weight.

So for my second attempt, I used the plastic from an old mop bucket that was laying around the garage and I bolted the same utility hooks onto this plastic and wrapped it around my legs … also around a towel for cushioning.  I don’t have a photo of this configuration because I tore it up and used the plastic for something else before taking a photo.

This configuration was definitely stronger than the denim, but the plastic torqued enough when I tried to put my full weight on it, that I didn’t feel good about the situation.  I decided that these particular utility hooks had too large of a radius which was making them rotate away from my calves instead of just pulling straight up along the plastic bucket surface.  I decided that I needed a smaller radius hook that was also very strong.  So I went shopping at my local Lowe’s home improvement store.

I found these heavy duty utility J-hooks (see photo) at Lowe’s.  They are made by Tornado and they are small yet very strong.  I also bought some nice big bolts to attach the hooks with and I also bought a 5 gallon bucket to use as the base plastic.  I also bought some squishy foam matting … the kind that cashiers stand on all day to cushion their feet.

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I had some 2-inch wide strips of Velcro laying around that I used to strap the boots tightly around my calves.  The Velcro holds very well when it has lots of surface area all the way around the whole boot to attach to.  You can see one of my fully assembled gravity boots in the photo below.

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Getting them closed tightly enough to not immediately slip and pull on my ankles took lots of trial and error, but I’ve got a system now that seems to work pretty well.  I decided that the rubberized foam matting that I bought at Lowe’s was too stiff and not really helping to hold on to my calves, so I bought some light pillow foam at WalMart and I wrap that around my calves first and then put the gravity boots on over that and the combination seems to work pretty well at holding onto my calves without allowing too much slippage.  Below is a photo of me using my home made gravity boots.

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When I first started using these home made gravity boots, I could only stand to be upside down for about 5 minutes at a time.  After a few days I could do 10 minutes, then after a few weeks I could do 15 minutes.  Usually what keeps me from hanging longer is that my legs or feet go to sleep and then start to hurt.  So I’m wondering if the commercial gravity boots are able to hold on to your calves tightly enough to not slip, but without cutting off your circulation.  Seems like a fine line to me.  Maybe the key is using the right kind of foam that can grip your calves without having to be too tight.

Conclusion

Do they work?  Do they help my lower back pain?  Well, kind of.  That’s the best answer I can give right now.  I’ve only been using inversion therapy for a couple of weeks so far, and I haven’t been able to do it as regularly as I’d like.   But sometimes after hanging upside down I can tell that my back pain has immediately stopped.  Other times, I don’t notice any difference at all.  So I don’t have any significant and repeatable short term results to share, but I’m going to try it long term and see if I can notice a long term difference in my lower back pain.

Thanks for reading.  If you have any comments or questions on this article, please be my guest.  Article comments can be read by anyone on the Internet, so if you’d rather send me a private message, just email me directly.

Kurt

Update: Click on the “ad” below to buy the Teeter brand Hang Ups gravity boots on Amazon.com:

Garage Lift for Toddler Swimming Pool

I did this weekend project a long long time ago, but just recently cleaned out my messy garage, got the Ranger back in and finally took some photos of the project.

I built a pool lift for the toddler swimming pool. This pool is too big to deflate and blow up every other day or even every other week, so we keep it inflated all the time. But we had no place to store it when it was fully inflated. So I built the pool lift.

It has pulleys and a block-and-tackle and you just tie the rope off at the wall anchors. I tried it without the b&t, and it was way too hard to lift. It’s light as a feather with the b&t, though. My wife gets the pool down all the time while I’m at work and puts it back up. When the kids outgrow the toddler pool I can think of all kinds of things that I can store up there.

One word of warning, though: the bottoms of your garage ceiling joists are not designed to hold the weight of heavy objects! Attic joists are designed to carry a heavy roof load only on the topmost spans. The lower spans are only designed for compression or tension.

Pool Lift - Lifted up over truck

Pool Lift - Reverse angle

Pool Lift - Lowered down from ceiling

Kurt

1950’s Peoria Cinema Club Films

A few years ago my dad transferred some of my grandfather’s old silent films that he and his friends from the Peoria Cinema Club had made from the original edited films onto VHS format. I recently transferred them onto DVD and then stumbled across a website called CreateSpace where you can publish and sell your own DVDs. They do a nice job of printing the packaging and also printing onto the DVD itself, and they also set you up a store to sell your DVD. They even let you upload a 30 second trailer that they stream to potential customers. That’s a nice touch.

.CreateSpace website with DVD for sale

So if you’re interested in watching some historic 1950’s Peoria Cinema Club films, just go to the below link and order yourself a copy. It will only cost you $9.50 plus shipping. What a bargain! https://www.createspace.com/243975

.DVD cover Peoria Cinema Club

2/17/2008 Addendum: As if CreateSpace wasn’t cool enough, they are also affiliated with Amazon, one of the largest online stores in the world! So you can buy this 1950’s Peoria Cinema Club DVD from either the CreateSpace store linked above or you can purchase it from Amazon.com! (http://www.amazon.com/1950s-Peoria-Cinema-Club-Films/dp/B0013TPGE2/)

.Amazon screenshot of 1950's Peoria Cinema Club Films DVD

Build Your Own Yard Shed

According to recent website statistics, my Yard Shed Plans web page (http://www.leucht.com/kurt/shed/) is pretty much the most popular web page on my whole website. This is very cool to me because this is exactly the sort of content that I had most hoped to be able to provide with this website back in the late 90’s when I first created it. Sadly, that Yard Shed Plans page never even got completely finished. Mostly because the 3D models and images were difficult and time consuming to create. Also because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, which makes them even more time consuming to make.

.Shed Plans .Shed Plans

So busy-ness has kept me from finishing that particular page and also it has kept me from providing more content like this on my site. But the invention of the blog in the past few years (and my subsequent use of it here) has allowed me to quickly and easily create simple web pages, or blog posts, about even the most simple and small projects. So far the traffic on my blog is no where near the amount of traffic on the Yard Shed Plans page, though. Maybe most people that find my Yard Shed Plans page are searching specifically for “plans”. And it’s hard work and time consuming to put together actual “plans” for a project. So maybe I’ll have to go back and add “plans” to all my other projects that are on this site. In my spare time, of course. 🙂
Kurt

Get your Leucht.com merchandise right here, folks!

I found this really cool website called CafePress.com. It’s a site that lets you set up your own store with your own merchandise. You upload your own designs to be professionally printed on said merchandise and let people buy the stuff! Very cool. I threw together a quick Leucht.com T-Shirt design in about 5 minutes and it is now on sale for under 10 bucks. I designed some other stuff too.

.leucht.com magnet .Lemon Blossom Clock .leucht.com shirt

You can let people purchase the stuff at cost, or you can actually mark up the merchandise and make a little bit of cash in the process. This is a very cool idea. Check out the official Leucht.com online store now!