How Its Made Part 2 (post 8)

Posted by Miles Morosi on May 17th 2025

Finishing the wall!!

Because Pure Boulding Gym closed the whole downstairs, they took advantage of this opportunity and did some maintenance on the walls that were already up. This maintenance was mainly filling set screw holes with putty and sanding it all flat, which took the longest out of the whole addition.

Now that all the walls have been repaired and prepped, they were ready for paint. Pure decided to go with three different tones of grey for the paint job, the lightest grey being on top. Matt explained that climbing shoes leave rubber marks on the walls, and because people rarely put their feet on the top of the walls, the lightest grey will go up high and get darker as it goes down to help hide the rubber streaks.

They taped off the pattern they wanted across the whole gym and then painted the top and bottom with two coats. They then re-taped the lines and painted two coats in the middle. After the two coats of paint had dried, they applied a water-based clear coat to protect the paint. They had to allow this to fully dry, which took four full days, so the holds wouldn't stick to it.

While the clear coat was drying, Matt started working on an adjustable crack. He made this out of 2x12s and some really long bolts. On the bolts, there are nuts and washers to hold the position of the boards and lock them in place. This crack goes all the way across the roof and is about 18 feet long. To make sure no one grabs or bends the bolts that are hanging out of the crack, Matt used some cut-off pieces of foam to cover them. Right now, the crack is set up to fit about #2 or #3 cams.

Once the clear coat was dry, they installed two layers of foam: a softer, more cushiony layer on the bottom and a stiffer layer of carpet-bonded foam on top. Cutting the carpet-bonded foam to size was a little tricky, but once all of it was in and Velcroed together, all that was left was to set, climb, and have fun!