The Mini-ramp

A friend of mine recently dug up some old photos of when we built a mini-ramp in my back garden. A mini-ramp is basically a much smaller and shallower version of the vert ramps that you see in competitions. They're great for learning basic tricks, as well as getting used to the transition from flat ground to steep ramp.

3 of us each shelled out £100($162) towards this beauty and it lasted us about 2-3 years. Aged between 12-16 at the time, it was a lot of money and a rather large commitment. We also had to get permission from my dad. He was on holiday at the time, so I rang and asked him if we could build it. He quite happily agreed (he skated in his youth too), but was totally shocked when he came home as he wasn't expecting a ramp as big and as well-made as this.

The 'vertebrae' of the ramp, made from 2x4s.

After 2 days and spending approximately 24 hours total working on it, all of the woodwork was done. This was great going, but we still needed the metal coping as the icing on the cake.

There was a construction site about a mile up the road where they were building some new flats. I suggested we head up there to see if they could spare us a scaffolding pole. Turns out that they were really nice guys and they gave us a 12ft pole!

We walked into town and took the pole to the nearest Jewsons, which is a building merchant company, to see if we could get the pole cut there. One of the men behind the counter said he'd pop outside and cut it for free! People can be so damn awesome sometimes. He used a diamond-tipped circular saw to slice the scaffold pole in half and we walked home with our two 6ft coping rails!

I then drilled holes in the rails so we could screw them securely into the wood and voila:

That's all well and good to be able to skate on it in the daytime, but we didn't want to stop just because the sun was going down...

Nightlight!

We actually made a load of ramps and rails and various obstacles over the course of our skating lifetime. Here's a kicker that we made with some scrap wood, and a rail that my dad welded from the legs of a classroom table:

Nostalgia can be a bitch sometimes.