I'm busy building a home wall and am following Andy Davies guide on his site. He recomends a 500mm high kickboard. Is there any specific benefits from this. Can't think of any but this might become obvious once it is built. The height of the ceiling is only 2.5m high so don't have much room to work with and thought it would be better to leave it out. Anyone have any ideas or comments?

You can't practically use footholds close to the ground on an overhang. the floor, overhang & your feet start to compete for space. Adding a kickboard increased the area of the board that you can use rather than reducing it.

A kickboard gives you somewhere for your feet for the sit starts, it is also useful for smearing against sometimes.

Hey Stu, not sure why the kicker should be so high, you basically only need it to establish on the problem from a sit start.

Here are some other sites with some construction plans:
1) http://www.uncarvedblock.com.au/vw/build.html
2) https://www.moonclimbing.com/index.php?form_action=school

The uncarved block board is too overhanging (60deg) but they do have a concave and convex board deign.

The Moon system is really cool. The board is 40deg overhanging and once you've obtained the grips you can download problems from the net and set them up on your own wall. No a system to use if you're coming back from a finger injury since the holds are pretty small in general and you're not going to find any slopers in the set. The downside is that you need quite a lot of vertical space (about 3.5m).

In both of the above wall designs the kicker is no bigger than 370mm.

Anyways hope this helps!

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Open hand, open mind...

My wall has a kicker of about 500mm. It helps with keeping it clean, fitting grips, parking the front of cars & using fairly thick mats. But those are all fairly pathetic reasons to make 500mm the rule. So I'm sure that size is optional.

Yeah thanks all, think I will go with a good size kick board as it does open up the base more for BS and mats. Also decided a 45 degree angle will work well as I can put on some slopers (love those slopers).