"Roman blind" vertical opening gateway by Robin Hills

 Robin Hills Scout Group built this sliding portcullis gateway for KonTiki 2014. Robin Hills entered two teams, who placed 2nd and 3rd overall.

 The segmented door folds up out of the way when it's fully open, and slides down to cover the entrance when closed. The mechanism is similar to a Roman blind:

Two sets of ropes are tied to the door panels on each side. The dark blue set in this drawing are tied from the top of one panel to the next, fastening them to each other. The red set are tied to the bottom panel, and pass through holes at the top of all the other panels, before passing through a pulley at the top of the gateway.

 

 Pulling on the red ropes causes the bottom panel to move up, until it touches the next panel, when it stacks against it and starts pulling that one up as well. This continues until the entire door is smoothly stacked together at the top of the gateway.

Robin Hills built a sliding portcullis gateway for KonTiki 2011 that I blogged about here.

Pioneering from Mosta Venture Crew, Malta

Sean from Mosta Venture Scout Unit in Malta shared these photographs of various projects, including a raft, a ferris wheel, a carousel and a suspended platform in a valley.The suspended camping platform was made using abseiling ropes and a small hiking tent.

Sean says:

Our group, the Mosta Scout group is currently the largest one and we always shown a lot of interest in pioneering. All the above structures were of the first sort here in malta. The suspended camp was built by the rover crew, and the others by my section, the venture unit. For the suspended camp we used abseiling ropes, constructed a platform and then we pitched a hike tent on it. Recently I became a council member in the national scout youth council, and one of my ideas is that All the scout groups around Malta build a luna park, all with pioneering.

Mosta Venture Unit also has a Youtube channel, including the following rotating abseiling tower:

All photographs courtesy Mosta Scout Group.

Scoutsorama Tower - Belgian climbing wall/slide/observation tower

It's come up on Ropes and Poles before that being able to speak Flemish is a good way to improve your pioneering. This project showed up in my Facebook feed courtesy of Ploeg Technieken and I thought I'd share it with the English speaking Scouting world.

Here's a video of the construction process, including a timelapse and details of the planning process, using models, and the construction process, which included using a small backhoe to dig foundation trenches.

This tower was built by the 92ste Aartselaar - Reet group in Belgium as part of their Annual Scoutsorama camp. It included a viewing deck on top, a climbing wall including cargo nets and plywood sections with moulded grips, and a 'slide' designed to be ridden in a sled.

All images courtesy 92ste Aartselaar - Reet Scouts