The back side has a little wall to bang against. It gets a lot of support beneath the plys. It has to be super smooth and take a lot of pointed load on the surface without failing. The skate ramp is a pretty known quantity and something that I have a lot of experience with (as discussed). This is where most ramps completely fail. It also has to be made as sturdy as possible. It needs to be made as smooth at possible to disrupt the rider the least as they set up for launch. This is one of the most critical parts of a jump ramp or street ramp. What they do share is the large amount of attention put in at the toe. I drew up a small skate jump ramp and bike ramp. This weekend, I documented some of what I learned back in the day and some of what I know now. I had ramps coming at me from all directions. A friend of mine needed a ramp for his 5 year old kid to develop bike jump skills on, and another grom in the area is all about dirt jumping. It’s bad enough to have a dinky little pad to flip on. Recently, a ‘new’ parking lot area has been allotted to the skateboarders where I live in Fairfax and that had me thinking about little ramps. Below an early photo of Maximus before it was fully built out, 1992? This was cool stuff and a big part of my teens and early 20s. The internet and public parks changed things. I didn’t know it at the time but things would never be like this again. I was just one of the crew from time to time. I ended up doing the steel coping work for the bowls. Jeffery and Frank were the leads as they were carpenters and had built a ton of other ramps. We had to pay rent for it.so we charged people to skate. It was inside a warehouse in the middle of the projects in Cambridge and right across the street from the legendary C-Bowl.
#Freestyle dirt bike jump ramp how to
How to have a skatepark when nobody wanted you to have one. A precursor to the Burnside project and on another coast. In time, the Maximus Skatepark era began and in time, a bunch of us worked together to build one of the coolest skateparks of that era and in the Northeast. Brian is on the deck bent over because of the low ceiling. Below a tiny backside air on the little elliptical quarter pipe in the Maximus basement in Arlington. It also gave us a hub to meet up and ideas started swirling. It gave us a basement that initially had two terrible ramps to ride in the winter. Maximus was discovered in the late eighties. I had a couple on hand after a while, for gap jumps.
#Freestyle dirt bike jump ramp full
You could hit these things at top speed and full power. I’d make a new ramp and we’d drag it around to places to hit it big. Below at some street contest in Jamaica Plain in 1987, not my ramps.Īs the eighties progressed and the jump ramp era ensued, I perfected the craft. I’d keep an eye out for what worked and what didn’t. This meant big road trips, also, to the real big spots and contests. Once I got a driver’s license, I’d drive to all kinds of strange places after school and weekends to talk my way into a session in someone’s back yard. Of course, the network of Boston spots and skaters turned me on to half pipes and others people that were building their own stuff. I can’t remember if I drew it before making it but it was a serious learning project to do alone at 14 years old. I made it happen…with a 3.5 transition to vert. I was young and I didn’t know any better. It is also probably the hardest type of ramp to construct. It sounds good but it’s a bit useless and really terrible for opening up any progression. You can jump it at different takeoff angles all the way to leaping off the vert corner. These seemed like the hot thing back then. The first that I made was a quarter pipe wave style ramp. I started building my own small ramps soon after that. While we didn’t do much correctly, The ramps worked and we were able to learn how we could have done it better. We built a 6 foot quarter pipe and a big wedge ramp. They were handy folk who did a lot of work on sailboats and other projects. His dad was helping Mike build the ramps and I got to help for some of it. Mike was an excellent bike rider and always impressed me with the wheelies he’d do down the road. Somebody has to pick up the tools and build the world.Īt 14 years old (1984) in Lexington, MA, my friend, Mike Mills who was into BMX racing wanted some ramps in his driveway to learn ‘freestyle’. If you wanted something cool to ride, you needed to trespass or build your own. In the early eighties, the new boom in skateboarding and my young teenage years were a perfect storm setting me on a course that influences me today. 1986)Ī child of the 1970s, I grew up playing on cheap plastic skateboards.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away….
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