Here’s something I slapped together with some boards and screws I had lying around.
I have a wall of out-0f-control evergreen trees that grow on two sides of my lot property. Notice the power line up high. Normally the public utility
outfit trims my trees down every so often, but after Covid maintenance has slowed down and the tops were getting close to touching the high tension wire. Not good!
This rickety platform gets me ten feet off the ground, just tall enough to reach these fast growing tree tops.
I chose to place the scaffold on the front part of the bed to better center my weight, and it leaves room for the clippings to fall in the back of the bed.
I also have the working platform area back from where I’m clipping, again to center my weight and to keep me from leaning too far over the edge.
I started the scaffold with four 2 by 4 by 8 foot boards, forming the 6″ ends to snuggly slip into the holes on the truck bed.
I added 40″ 2 by 2″ boards to the 2 by 4 ends, then added 1 by 3″ boards as hand rails.
Again, there was not one nail used in making this scaffold. Only screws. You would be an idiot if you used nails or rotten wood.
1 by 2″ cross braces were added for support. They don’t seem like much but they did the trick. A small bolt was used for the cross braces center pivot.
I started with adding screws as seen in this picture to secure the tower from slipping out of the mounting holes.
But later added the tow blue cargo straps, which turned out to be a good idea. I’m sure OSHA would still shit a brick if they drove by, but this works for me.
After I was done I made a tree fort. Why not! The view was spectacular, and I miss my tree forts on my old property.
I added location markers on the board ends and disassembled the wider section, leaving the two side sections in tact for later use.