5' Turbo Tube Slide

I bought this slide for my DIY playset, I needed a slide for a 5' deck that had a small footprint. I'm not sure you can beat this slide for the price. I bought it on Amazon through a partner (Wayfair). It arrived promptly and in good condition. I was missing one star head drill bit, and the other was loose in the box, but otherwise everything was in order.Assembly was time-consuming but straightforward. After reading the other reviews I varied the installation by attaching the entry section to the playset first, then attaching the clamshell sections one at a time; as opposed to assembling the entire slide then trying to mount it. This allowed me to do the job myself. As others have said, there is some prying and squeezing that needs to take place to allow the holes to come together, and in about 10 cases I used a drill to widen a hole to allow the bolt to slide through. Also I used GRK RSS structural screws instead of the included lag screws for the upper mounts due to the high quality and strength of the GRKs, and GRK exterior wood screws instead of the included wood screws because I was unsure of the quality of the coating for use with pressure treated wood. The instructions also require you to fabricate a little stand at the bottom so the weight of the slide is not on the lip; the instructions for this were clear and it was easy to build, just chop up a 2x4 and screw it all together.I've gone down the slide a few times, but it is tight for an adult. The kids love it, they climb up and down it two at a time without any problems. It seems very solid and I expect it to last a long time.

So, as almost every other reviewer on here has said, this slide comes with 'some assembly required'. It is a somewhat tedious tasking inserting all 35,861 bolts. I didn't actually count them, but it felt like this many. But really other than being a little time consuming, assembly is pretty straight forward. As others have mentioned, it can be difficult to everything to line up. Each 'half' of the tube has a portion of a flange that is supposed to mate up to the opposite half to make assembly and fit easier, but I found that these flanges were in the way and prevented a tight fit more than they helped. Simple enough to fix by just shaving them down a little bit with a utility knife. Once that was done, Between that fix, and a small alignment punch to help flex everything in line, I didn't have too much difficulty putting it together. If you follow the instructions and assemble everything first and then try to stand it up and mount it to the playset, this is definitely a 2 person job. And while I cussed a couple times and the sheer number of bolts and the amount of time it took to assemble, it was all worth while the first time our toddler went down it grinning ear to ear the entire way. This was quickly followed by 20 minutes of sliding down, circling the playset to the ladder, climbing back up and repeating.Overall quality seemed okay for the price. It is a little flimsy out of the box, but once bolted together is more than strong enough for even my test runs down the slide. For $350, you are not getting a commercial slide with a 1,000 lb load rating. But you are getting a nice tube slide for a backyard playset that should give your kids years of fun.

I've been building my daughter a raised play house and an enclosed twisty slide made the most sense design-wise, for the look, functionality, and terrain. I shopped through a few of the offerings available online before landing on this model.The Good: it's fun and it works! It also has a fairly compact 2-dimensional footprint for its size/vertical volume, which I think is a strength. My kid LOVES it. It's a good quality-price ratio overall, and the materials when it's put together feel strong and durable. The shipping is also pretty easy, as it all comes in one single box that is pretty manageable.The Bad: Assembly,machining/alignment, amount of hardware assembly, and instructions.Instructions: mostly clear, but not accurate. There were a few places where there were notable differences in the images/diagrams and the written text on the same page, such as saying to provide a space of 27" but then showing 25" on the diagram. But the instructions will get you 90% of the way there, and the rest is clear enough to determine with logic. I will say that towards the end (when setting up the base and creating the port up top for the chute) I found myself abandoning the instruction and simply measuring and improvising.Hardware: There is a MASSIVE amount of hardware to put together. Looking at images of other, similar slides, they seem like they have less. So that's a bit of a negative, but certainly not a dealbreaker. If you're doing this purely with hand tools though, you're an absolute masochist.Assembly/Alignment: This one caused the biggest stink for me personally. The main body of the slide is straightforward enough once you get going, but there are these little flanges that are in theory supposed to have clear separations where they fit together, providing a secure fit between pieces and showing you the logical construction. Well, my model had one part (towards the top of the slide) that was miss-machined. It led me to undo my work, redo it, undo it again, and then redo it again and cost me about an hour of frustration and doubting myself. It's not exactly an easy shape to see clearly that it's working, when you can't lift it up and you can't assemble it vertically. I eventually just forced the pieces together the way I originally had them (ignoring/squeezing out the 'flange' bits) and that was ok. I'm not worried about the structural integrity of this piece, it's solid.I was tempted overall to give the product three stars bc of these concerns/frustrations, but I landed on four instead bc one frustrating afternoon vs likely years of continuous play didn't quite tilt the scale that far. That's just how parent life is sometimes, right?Overall, I would recommend you purchase this product. If you don't already have them, spend the extra $20 or so on tools to make your life a lot easier (such as bits for your driver to handle the screwing action, a hex-tipped screwdriver to hold the other end of the bolt, etc. (IIRC these are 1/2" bits for everything). I did the assembly mostly alone, but it would definitely help to have another person with you too.Note: I've added an image so you can see the slide attached to the project, but please note that it's still under construction and that this is not the permanent setup. I plan on grading up the terrain around the slide base and putting a more permanent support underneath of it/landscaping around it a little bit. The deck was a little higher than 5' and I knew this would have to be done when purchasing the slide.