Before you start reading, I just want you to know that I have no idea what this article is meant to be, it just is. As a child I had always been interested in skateboarding, from my earliest memories pushing boards as I was learning to walk, to being about the age of 12 when the monumental Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 came out. I was part of new wave of kids who got into skating in a big way, a wave the sport is still well and truly riding today. Suddenly my interest in skateboarding was no longer carving down hills and scraping knees to bits at the bottom, skating was all about doing switch 720 judo airs into a 2 meter long darkslide off a miniscule kicker… The possibilities (if the game was to be believed) it seemed were endless.
The only skatepark on my island home of Guernsey was made during an entire different era of skating, and has closed when my age was still in single figures, so after essentially forfeiting a Christmas and birthday, and having begged for the months leading up to the following birthday I convinced my parents a miniramp was in order.
The plans were set, the wood was sourced, and a week was set aside one summer to build my beloved. My first idea was based heavily on Don B’s Spine Ramp on RampPlans.org[/url], but it just wasn’t doable, in the end our shopping list was as follows:
- 25 Sheets of Marine Ply
- 10 Sheets of chipboard
- 4 Lengths of 8X2
- A ton of 2X2
- Coping
- A ton of pallets
Let me walk you through this list…
Marine Ply
If you live anywhere where its likely to rain a lot (and can’t afford SkateLite) Marine Ply is essential. Marine Ply is treated for use on boats, so its designed to deal with a lot of water contact, this does not mean you do not have to additionally treat it. Obviously you can use regular ply and give it several coats of water-sealer, but you really may as well shell out the extra £3 for Marine, its worth it in the long run. With every sheet of the ply I used to build my ramp treated the edges with an extra water-proofer. The real trouble areas with ply tends to be the edges, so treat these well and you’ll help prevent them peeling up. If there is one piece of advise I could give you for the future, water-proofer would be it, the long term benefits of water-proofer have been proved by scientists… whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.
Each sheet of ply at time of build was a shade under £11, and through a building contractor I know we got it all for ~£9 a sheet, which for you yanks is around $17 in todays money.
Chipboard
This is the stuff a lot of Americans seem to build their houses out of… so any of you silly little people who’ve put holes in their walls probably know what this stuff is like. Chipboard is a god send, its essentially reconstituted chippings, the offcuts, barks, etc from wood that’s been processed into clean cut lengths is churned up, and pressed into sheets.
Many of you may be wondering “Very good Viv, thanks for the education, but what good is this in ramp building?”, the answer is quite simple, as formers. The curve of every ramp to which the ribs must be attached has to be sturdy, and as such chipboard represented the perfect solution. For those of you who haven’t worked out what i’m talking about, you simply map out your transition out on your chipboard, cut it out, and then screw your ribs to it – job done. If you’re using a 1:1 transition this is easy peasy (string, nail, and workmans pencil), but you can pretty much do this by hand with a jigsaw and then use your first former as a template for the others.
Being that it doesn’t cost much to produce, chipboard is cheap, very cheap. If I were to have bought thicker plywood to shape the formers it would have cost double, if not more. And although chipboard soaks up more water than ply does, the skin of your ramp will, I guarantee, degrade before the formers do.
8X2 & Pallets
Pallets formed the base of my ramp, they allow air to flow underneath the ramp really well, and cost pretty much nothing. If you get them all the same size/shape they’re very easy to put together. You can be conned into paying a few quid for each pallet, but I got mine (about 20) for free. Any builders merchants or supply store will get lots of their products delivered on pallets, and have to get them taken away. You’ll be doing most of them a favour by taking them away for them, and they make a perfect flat bottom base for your ramp. The 8X2 serves as a medium to screw the pallets between, as you can see in some the photo’s. Cheap, effective, wonderful.
Coping
My Dad, who is quite technically minded, good with tangible problems etc, thought that we could make coping out of drain piping… no joke, 2 inch (estimate for you yanks) plastic drain piping!! So of course he goes and buys the right length, only for me to turn around and ask… “You’re not serious are you?” Having explained the error of his ways, we made our way to a local scrap heap. Guernsey used to be Europes largest exporter of both tomato’s and freesias, and as such there were once a large number of greenhouses on the island, as these days people would rather fly their fruit and vegetables in from the middle east in refrigerated aircraft… Crazy stuff. Luckily for me, this means there’s quite a lot of metal coping going cheap, from memory I think it was about £12 for the coping on my ramp. You can obviously go and get it cut specially, but if you can get it second hand from scrap and cut it yourself all the better.
Tools and Fixings
Put simply, the best tools you can bring to the party are a nailgun, and a screwgun. A nailgun because you’re going to have a good couple of hundred nails to hammer in to build the skeleton, and a screwgun because you can not, and I repeat, CAN NOT, use nails for the actual plywood skin. Screws are obviously better than nails even for putting together the skeleton, but if you think you’ve got time to screw all that together, you’re kidding yourself, get a gas powered nailgun. As for your screw gun, if you use nails on the plywood you’ll experience numerous issues, not least of all plywood popping up, or worse, the nails themselves popping up and destroying you when you fall on them. If you use nails, as the ply moves with use and age they’ll start to pop up, nails simply aren’t the right fixers. Other tools you’re going to need will include a jigsaw and a circular saw, i’d also recommend a chalk line/laser level.
As far as fixings go, its pretty simple don’t use fixings that are too big or too small, make sure none of your screws stand proud above the ply, and you’re set. The only irregular fixing I used for my ramp is a product called Gripfill. Gripfill is an adhesive putty, which I used for securing my coping, its by far the easiest way of doing it as it involves no metal drilling and bolting what so ever, and Gripfill will not move, I swear by it. There are all sorts of other adhesive products you could use, just ask at your local builders merchants or hardware store.
In Closing…
Now, down to why i’m writing this pretty much useless article. My ramp, is dead. Many ribs cracked over the course of time, a couple of supports for the top platform were knocked out (most hilariously by a drunken friend on a ride on lawn mower), and the great British weather has taken its toll as well. It has now been cut down and burnt as fire wood, sadly. So please, let the images and videos on this page be an inspiration, if you’re thinking about building your own ramp, or helping your scene grow in any way, don’t just keep thinking and dreaming about it, get out there and do it. You don’t have to go as all out as I did building a ramp, just a single piece of ply wood learnt up against a wall can provide hours of entertainment. Don’t just bitch that you have nowhere to skate, learn to skate what you’ve got, and make what you need.
For the love of god, make best use of what you’ve got while its still there and you’ve still got the time to use it, when I think about long days spent skating my ramp, alone and with friends, during my teen years, i’m reminded of a freedom I feel’s been lost in my later years. Once you have a full time job and other time critical commitments it gets really hard to find time to skate, so make the most of it while your body is able and you have the time.
Much love SB-C, much love. For those that care, this is what happened at the end… Sad times, sad times.
