Building a Labyrinth in our front yard

[geodave]

My wife asked me about making one of these earlier this year & the time thought it would be more complicated. After walking the new one at a church in our town, I realized we had enough flat spot in our yard to make a 26’ diameter one. The 1st day I spent about 2 hours laying it out to see if it work. The next day I laid it out shifting it about 4’ or so into the yard for better clearance using the compass on my tablet to find compass points. The rings were 16" apart which were easy to see on the tape measure. I did the 4 compass points 1st & placed a river rock at each marking. I then did the same thing half between them & then half between them. I then was able to just visually fill in the arcs between them. After I did the rings, I added the necessary radial lines of rocks to complete it. After 4 hours or so it was mostly done. Not leaving well enough alone, I decided to design a couple of plastic parts to hold PVC pipe & a real compass on top. I added a coupling to the PVC pipe to get the full radius length. I was glad I did this as the real compass was more accurate than my table compass. I used a wide sharpie to mark the rings on the pipe & just hand spun it around for the each radial line again & adjusted the labyrinth where needed. The nice thing about this project is I used left over river rock my wife had from a waterfall pond project. Think it took a little over 1/2 ton of rocks. It came out quite well & my wife was ecstatic. Now we can walk a labyrinth anytime we want. It will be even easier if I have to make another one of these. This design is based on the Santa Rosa labyrinth design. I will not have to do any grass trimming around it until Spring.

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There is an interesting world wide labyrinth locator website if anyone is interested in finding a labyrinth in their area. I am waiting to see if ours will be permanent before adding it to this site.
https://labyrinthlocator.com/

[macboy (Kelly D)]

That’s super cool. What’s the appeal? Is it like a zen meditation thing? It’s a nice piece of “installation art” regardless.

[forcerouge (Roger)]

Nicely done.

But that will be a nightmare to trim the grass now.

I suggest you to put your lawnmover somewhere inside the labyrinth so you can tell your wife you lost it.

[geodave]

We use the labyrinth as kind of a walking meditation. There is a labyrinth at UNC Asheville that has a big boulder in the center. Standing on that boulder feels really nice & I feel really calm for quite some time after walking some of these labyrinths.

That is the best suggestion I have for the lawnmower. Unfortunately I showed that comment to my wife, so I can’t do that now. My push mower did break after building this labyrinth. Actually I have the replacement part on order & should be here today. I had that problem fixed for 4 years before I had to replace the whole front axle assembly($34). The adjustment lever finally got too far out of whack to stay in the adjustment slots. I created a plastic shim before so the lever did not have to reach as far to adjust it. I used a 2D scanner to make an image of the part, imported into CAD & traced the outline. It worked quite well until now. I actually printed that in ABS. I probably would print it in PETG now. I might could even cut it out of thick aluminum plate now. Here is what that part looks like.
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[vicious1 (Ryan)]

I went hiking in Martinez, Ca and in a clearing deep into this park there was a pretty giant one of those. So glad I know what it is all about now. Fun project and happy wife…!