Okay, so today I messed around with a “keel basketball hevea timber” project. It sounded fancy, but really it was just me trying to figure out what this stuff is and how to use it.

Getting Started

First, I grabbed some of this hevea timber. Honestly, I just went to the local hardware store and asked for it. The guy looked at me a little funny, but he pointed me in the right direction. It’s basically rubberwood, which I guess is used for a lot of things, including…basketball court floors? That’s what I was going for, anyway.

The “Keel” Part

The “keel” part confused me at first. I thought of a boat, you know? But in this case, it’s like the support beams under the floor. I cut the timber into strips, pretty rough, nothing precise. I’m not a carpenter, so my cuts were, uh, “rustic.”

Putting it Together (Sort Of)

• I laid out the strips on my garage floor, trying to make a grid.
• I used some heavy-duty wood glue to stick them together. The instructions, which I barely glanced at, suggested screws too, but I was feeling lazy.
• Then, I placed some plywood on top, just regular sheets, to see how it would look.

The Result?

Well, it wasn’t exactly a basketball court. It was more like a…slightly raised, slightly bouncy platform in my garage. My kid bounced a ball on it a few times, and it seemed okay. I definitely wouldn’t try a slam dunk on it, though. The whole thing felt a little wobbly, probably because I skipped the screws.

So, my “keel basketball hevea timber” experiment was…interesting. I learned a bit about rubberwood, figured out (kind of) what a keel is in this context, and built something that resembles a very small, very unstable section of a basketball court. Would I do it again? Maybe. But next time, I’ll probably use the screws.