Building With Red Rubber Hose

Red rubber hose. Makes you feel powerful and professional at work, gives you hose envy at home when you have to use your run-of-the-mill garden dribbler. Great as it is it doesn't last forever, especially if you have to slide it across any paved surfaces. But even as the red gave way to black and then to ever-fraying white threads until finally you got a blowout of high pressure water all over your pants right before your keeper talk you still didn't throw out that sad 50 feet of rubber, did you? All those months (years?) of working together making the world clean and new and the quality time looping it over and under into the perfect fireman's coil. And hell it was like $80; when are you going to get approved to spend that again? Honor it. Give it a second life as something for your animals to poop on.

I thought about tabs and slots like the fire hose, but the round rubber hose is so soft I'm pretty sure the ends would tear in no time. This project is probably only suited to smaller, non-chewing climbers like lesser apes and other small primates. Still keeps it from going into the landfill, though!

Instead of tabs just cut simple slits into the sides of the ends of your "rungs." These will have the longer lengths of hose shoved through them just like hanging items without fasteners with fire hose. It's easy to cut a slit for something flat, but for other shapes all you need to think about is the circumference. For my 3/4 inch inner diameter hose that's about an 1 1/2 inch long cut. If that's too much math just make it big enough to shove the end of the long piece through. You want it small enough that the rubber will bite but not too long that the hose slides through on its own.

 That's pretty much it! Cut a hole, shove stuff into it. It's simple but there's a lot to explore with this construction technique.

I only fastened one side but with evenly cut rungs you could fashion a simple flexible ladder ...

... or group them more closely together to create a hammock type structure ...

... or create the framework for a round or spiderweb-shaped platform. The outer ring(s) will be much longer than the inner ring for this to work.

If you don't want any pieces to move around or you cut a slit juuuussssst too wide a zip tie will keep it all in place. Because it's all so flexible you can have a lot of fun hanging it in different positions, even twisting it into a double helix. Just playing with my finished ladder/hammock I realized I could make my own ghetto version of a hayball feeder. More fun would be to wrap up a whole watermelon and suspend it animals to smash.

Maybe you noticed this scrap of hose had stains, was faded by the sun, and shaved by dragging to within microns bursting. This hose was in the prime of its life. The only thing that ended its service, purpose for being on Earth, was being too near an animal with large teeth. Here it lives again by your hand.