How to Inspect Your Swing Set Before You Buy It

From our experience, if something is priced too good to be true, chances are it is! Whether you’re talking about a cheeseburger for a buck or a shiny new playset or swing set, if the price is too good to be true — be careful! While eating a fast food cheeseburger every once in a while is okay, your children’s playset isn’t the place to cut corners and compromise on quality.

After all, when you’re buying a playset for your children, your number one concern is ensuring that they’ll be safe as they play for years to come. This makes perfect sense to us. While that should be an easy thing to find, it can be hard to tell just by looking if the playset or swing set you are considering is truly safe. Some playsets can look great on the outside, but like a flabby fast food burger, they can let you down in more ways than one.

At Adventure World Play Sets, we know quality swing set construction and we know children’s safety. So we make it our mission to not only build the most fun sets on the market, but also the safest. As an insider in the swing set industry, we can give you the scoop on what to look for when buying a children’s swing set or playset.

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How to Inspect a Playset

The best way to know if your playset is good enough for your children is to examine it up close. Here are the tell-tale signs of a quality playset — or a “fast-food” playset.

• Examine the bottom of the playset deck — Cheaper playsets will have splintered wood or even exposed nails or screws. Adventure World playsets are made using safe and smooth poly boards, the kind you’d see on upscale decks and porches.
• Feel the posts/rails of the playhouse — Posts and rails should never cause splinters. To prevent this, you’ll want to make sure posts and rails are made of vinyl. Cheaper sets will cut corners and use painted or plastic-coated wood posts — in a few years, that’ll be the splinter central of your backyard. Ouch!
• Look at the playhouse roof — While it’s not exactly a safety feature, checking out the playset roof will give you a good idea as to the overall quality. A cheap set will use fabric for the roof which weathers, fades, tears and gets moldy — a plastic roof won’t do that.
• Check for extra/unnecessary screw holes — When you’re looking at the set you might buy, examine it up-and-down for extra/unnecessary screw holes in the frame of the set itself. This attention to detail will get missed on some manufacturing assembly lines, but not from true craftsmen.
• Get hands-on with the slide — If the slide doesn’t feel sturdy to you, trust your gut. It probably isn’t sturdy enough to handle your children’s activities.
• Locate rubber sheathing on the swing chains — A little safety feature that says big things about the set’s quality. If the set has rubber sheathing or plastic sleeves on the swing chains, that’s a sign that it was made to accommodate children’s comfort and safety.
• Get a feel for the overall sturdiness and weight of the set — When you feel one of our playsets, you know that it’s well-built from the structures’ weight alone.

Learn about the other ways our sets are designed with safety in mind.

One other thing to investigate when looking at a swing set is the warranty — particularly on the set frame. The warranty the company offers says EVERYTHING about what they think of their own product quality. For example, we offer an unprecedented 20-year warranty on the frame of our swing sets. It’s easiest for us to have the best warranty because we build the best sets.

However, an average playset warranty is about 5 years. Here’s what we say: If they don’t trust their set for more than 5 years, why would you? It’s as simple as that.

American Parts and Construction for Maximum Quality

If you inspect an Adventure World playset, you’ll see that it passes every point of inspection with flying colors. That’s no coincidence either.

Our playsets are built exclusively in our Lancaster, PA workshop by skilled Amish craftsmen. We use top-quality, local American materials, to craft the playsets and swing sets of your children’s dreams. While most “fast-food” playsets tend to come from overseas, your Adventure World sets are built right in Lancaster County, PA!

We’re proud to use local materials to build our backyard playsets — check it out:

• The lumber at the core of our sets comes from several forests in the southern United States and they are pressure-treated in Lancaster County, PA.
• Our metal brackets are powder-coated to resist rust, and they are made in Honey Brook in Chester County, PA.
• Our vinyl exteriors are made in Dauphin County, PA.
• Our slides are made in Leola & Strasburg, right in Lancaster County, PA.

Find an Adventure World Play Sets Dealer near You

Interested in finding a world-class swing set for your children? Adventure World Play Sets is the name to know. Top-to-bottom, our huge variety of colorful playsets are built to maximize safety and fun.

Like we always say, the best way to find out about a playset is to check it out in person, and if possible, that’s what we recommend doing.

From our family-owned workshop in Lancaster County, we bring our playsets to the world through our dedicated dealer network. Find a dealer near you and check out our world class sets in person today!