Garden ramp build

[Mad Ax 11491]

UPDATE: This project is now underway, pics and details below

Short Version

Has anyone built any ramps suitable for monster trucks (up to and including Clod / SMT10 size)?  What materials did you use?  Any advice / pitfalls / notes on ramp size, length, angle, radius etc?  Anything else to add?

Long Version

Earlier this year I mapped out a rallycross track incorporating lawn, patio and path, but the turf is too rough for 1.9" rallycross wheels - even with the mower on the lowest setting, they just get stuck on the grass.  I can sort of run my buggies, but they're not ideal - the path is a bit narrow for something that fast and if the front wheels lift (which they regularly do) it's easy to go offline and catch a wheel on a 6" fencepost.  Plus the 90 degree left-hander which I call Garage Door, which is at the top of Fosseway (the main straight along the path) is narrow and bordered on one side by a brick wall and the other by the support timber for the climbing frame.  The only vehicles that can really make the most of the track are the G6-01 (which has just the right amount of speed in its current guise and is pretty tough with its balloon wheels and soft-as-cheese servo saver) and the XV-01T (which is as narrow as a rally car, has enough clearance for the grass and just goes exactly where I point it).

But earlier today I had a genius brainwave: I've easily got enough space for a monster truck course, especially if I make it a single lane run-and-reverse course with a cone at each end to go around.  But driving monster trucks up and down the grass is boring without jumps.

So - I thought I'd have a go at making some ramps.  I've got loads of plywood and timber lying around from various DIY projects, I doubt I'll need to spend a single penny besides possibly some paint (we've got lakes of half-empty household emulsion but not sure if I've got anything suitable for weatherproofing plywood).  Actually my first thought was to buy some plastic skate ramps, but even the cheapest ones aren't that cheap and anything that keeps me busy on a Sunday is a Good Thing because it stops me tearing my hair out or buzzing through all my RC projects faster than I can afford to replace them.

I've looked up some how-tos about building skate ramps, and the same construction techniques should apply here - although arguably it doesn't need to be as sturdy, as even a full-alloy mod clod doesn't weigh as much as a child on a skateboard and certainly doesn't concentrate as much force into its tyre contact patch.  So I need to think about materials and strength, and I've considered storage - nothing is going to last long if it's left out on the grass so I'll have to fabricate some brackets to hang them on the garage wall in the dry when I'm done bashing, but I also need to think about size.

I've made some ad-hoc ramps before by setting a sheet of ply against some toolboxes or other heavy stackable item, but usually after 3 jumps the ramp moves or falls over.  So I want something more permanent.  I've also found it hard to always hit my ramps accurately, as I don't have much run-up space - when shooting Durandal before I'd fixed the front caster angle problem, I took about 20 takes of the same jump before I hit the ramp square-on and launched the truck without it falling off the side.  I think I've got to be looking up to 1 metre width and maybe the same in length.

I guess traction was an issue too so maybe I need to think about covering the ramp with something grippy, although maybe not abrasive like sandpaper as I don't want to ruin my shells if I turn over on the approach.

I also want to think about a kick-up ramp.  Not sure if that's the right word, but so far I've only made ramps with a flat sheet of ply.  I've got some thinner material that will bend, so I'm thinking about the radius.  Too much and I guess I'll be looking at broken axles, too little and it will be boring.  I'm not really sure what sort of size and radius I should be looking at.  While proper skate parks might be good inspiration for Traxxas or Arrma bashers, that's going to be way too aggressive for Clod, SMT and TLT-axle rigs.

So - who has some ideas on size, radius, materials, paint, grippy surface, or anything else that might be of use?

I was going to post this in the monster truck section but there's no reason why this doesn't apply to buggies too - actually on modern 3D tracks I jump my buggies way faster and harder than I'd ever dare jump a Clod, so I'm sure my race cars will come out to play once the track is made.

There's a possibility that I'll change the title of this thread and use it to document progress once I get started  

[Busdriver 6679]

Good post will watch with interest 

[Badcrumble 4432]

I'm along for the ride in this thread.

My wife gave me the idea to do exactly this in the summer after my son and I watched a YouTube video similar to this - 

Hopefully that video gives a sense of scale for the obstacles.

I've got to say that it was quite tricky getting either of the Hornet or the Dual Hunter up the bike ramp we got recently but it was pretty damp and slippy.

I'll have to measure it - I've got to nip out to the garage later.

A slower running monster truck might fare better - we weren't holding back!

As for grippy surface on the ramp, would some of this work or would it be too abrasive?

https://www.toolstation.com/black-anti-slip-tape/p97962

Or anti-slip paint

https://www.toolstation.com/plastikote-anti-slip-spray-paint-400ml/p80464

The sandpits look quite easy to build - note the interior slope for easy exit (though we have el kid's 'turtle' pit that we can use).

[markbt73 6283]

I've never done more than stack up a couple of cinder blocks and lean a piece of plywood against them. Crude, but effective, and lets you play with the angle until you get it right.

The only other time I've had a purpose-made ramp, it was made for me. Waay back when I was 13 or 14, driving my first Grasshopper around a dirt baseball infield at the school grounds. The groundskeepers were out doing some work, and one of them saw me and waved to me. He held up a finger as if to say "wait a minute," then hopped in a tractor with a shovel on the front and drove over to where I was. I thought he was going to chase me off, but instead he lowered the blade of the shovel and scraped up a foot-high berm right next to the pitcher's mound. "There ya go," he shouted over the tractor's engine, "Now you got a jump."

I spent the rest of that battery pack jumping the Grasshopper over that berm, and after the battery dumped, the groundskepper gave me a thumbs-up, drove the tractor back over, and smoothed the dirt out again. It was just about the coolest thing anyone had done for me up to that point, and I don't know why I suddenly remembered it now. I haven't thought about that in years...

[Hobgoblin 1068]

That's an excellent memory, thank you for sharing!

We used to have a lot of perforated steel sheets at my old job, they were screwed over the windows as it was an abandoned lot before we moved in and put glass back in the frames. We bent them into speedbump shapes which was great for gentle jumps, I used to whack my stadium blitzer over them with ease. We also bent them into really steep ramps for doing stupid stuff like wall climbing up the billboards...
 

 

[mud4fun 1697]

We were looking for some lightweight ramps for our buggies without success. Odd really, you'd think there would be somebody making them. The closest we got was BMX ramps but they were too steep and too narrow.

I knocked up some wooden ones for the garden but they are heavy (MDF sheet on timber frame). We need some that we easily carry in one hand (car in other hand) the mile or so down to the local rec ground so ideally foldable plastic with a lightweight alloy frame.

We also found the ramps need to be at least 3-4 feet wide so we can more easily hit them at speed when standing some distance away. The garden ramps were initially too narrow and a slight misjudged approach and we kept sliding off the edge. 

I did find a YouTube video of a bolt together 'off the shelf' ramp kit. It looked good, had mesh surfaces on a box section steel frame and was quite wide. Just too heavy to carry any distance though. I will try and find the link. It was also a bit too high really for our buggies, think it was 18".

We prefer 8-10" high with a gentle slope, maybe 20-30 degrees as the buggies launch nicely and generally land on the wheels so damage is minimised. The BMX style ramps tend to launch the buggies into space with corresponding impact damage when returning to earth....

 

 

[Badcrumble 4432]

Rough measurements of our little ramp pictured above.

[Cephas 551]

I use one of these got it for £10, does a good job.

[Mad Ax 11491]

Awesome, thanks peeps - I love the videos

The retro clod class obstacles look great - the sandpit would be fun to make but a pain to store, I really like the little wall at the start (that must be pegged into the ground to stop it falling over), actually that obstacle is kinda similar to a piece of 2x4 that stretches across part of the lawn - it's the bottom brace for the climbing frame.  On Sunday I was launching Durandal off it, and that's when I figured I needed more jumps.  I could easily incorporate that into a little there-and-back-again track if I could put something cool on the path.

I suppose it's telling that the retro clod class doesn't use those big ramps  

[Badcrumble 4432]

This is the video that we watched the other day, from the same source as the first vid.

https://youtu.be/F25DsEJFOXs

I wonder what the 'packets' are at the beginning of the run? 

This circuit also has a small jump as well as a peaked up-and-down ramp.

I'm thinking you could put some trellis flat for a kind of hopscotch grid or that half log lawn edging (though that isn't that wife is is far more expensive than it should be!) as a bumpy road. I've a few paving slabs I could make into steps too.

Sorry, getting off-topic with other obstacles. I ought to do my own thread!

 

[Wooders28 5149]

I work with MDF ,so used alot of 6mm 8x4 sheets of MDF ,with 25mm mdf frames ,building ramps for the club racing indoors. They needed to be hard wearing,  and be able to withstand marshalls standing on them, so there's a fair bit of weight (the table top section required 4 people to lift, even after the framework was drilled with 100mm holes! ).

Kickers are more fun imo, we added them to increase lap times (the car goes higher , not distance), I think I made them 4:1 (4 foot long, 1 foot high), but the last foot is a steeper gradient, to kick the car into the air, it sometimes means the nose is high in the air, and you need to dab on the brakes. 

I glued carpet to the ramps for grip, old carpet tiles worked well. 

Testing the Optima Mid project - 

 

For back garden bashing, if you used wood, you'd need to paint it to try and water proof it. I thought of using 2 or 3 of the skateboard ramps (They where 3 for 2 at Argos) and screwing a sheet of perspex / Lexan across the lot of them, screwing some cheap carpet on too, for grip (or astro, if you wanted it to blend in with the grass) 

[Re-Bugged 12064]

A Monster Truck would probably barely feel it but I just used a bit of 3mm MDF roughly 16”x20” (it was an old picture frame backing I had laying around) and screwed a 2”x1” batten to it. 5min job.

All cars jump differently so may be worth playing around with a few prototypes before hand.

This one works fine for cars 😉

[Mad Ax 11491]

Awesome, thanks  

@Wooders28 your big kicker ramps look perfect - I wouldn't want to jump a solid axle monster as far as that but the trucks move a lot slower than the buggies, so it probably balances out.

I'd make from ply so I can go thinner and lighter on the material (and I'm pretty sure I already have some).  Mine won't need to support the weight of a full-grown human, which is just as well because I've had a year of lockdown anxiety, little exercise and comfort-eating.  As for weather proofing, I'll have to find a durable paint but they will be stored in the workshop when not in use.  I've got some spare ceiling space that I'll grab purely for this purpose before somebody else comes up with a way to fill it :p 

I loved the video above of the wall ramp - my garden runs straight into the garage wall, if there weren't windows in it I could easily set up something like that (although it's another thing to have to store)

Some great ideas for smaller obstacles there, more than just ramps adds more of a challenge.  The edge of the path is lined with pebbles (there were loads buried in the garden when we dug it up to re-turf it) - I could build a sandbox and fill it with pebbles  

[Mad Ax 11491]

This video shows just how high and far you can go with a plain kicker ramp, if you've got enough speed.  There's no way my solid-axle monsters would survive that kind of jumping for long, but I won't get that kind of speed in my area either, so I think it should work well if I build my ramps like this.

I'll probably build a basic flat ramp to start, then build a kicker to the same dimensions that I can put against it, so I can do two-way runs to maximise track length in the available space.  I've even remembered I have some offcuts of office carpet that were left over from doing my studio, which should be OK for traction in the dry (it's unlikely I'll be running much in the rain anyway).

It's possible I'll get started with the build on Sunday...

[Badcrumble 4432]

Love it! 

Bit worried about the breakage at the end  - I'm kinda wishing I'd bought a Clod instead of a TXT-2 given the lack of parts...

Not sure I have enough run up / landing area for a kicker like that and with a 6 / year old (7 in the summer) driving, I think something a little less high / long is in order!

Looking forward to seeing yours though....

[Biz73 603]

https://tboneracing.net/collections/new-products/products/mini-t-jump

[Mad Ax 11491]

OK - so the project began today with my grabbing my supplies of wood and working out I didn't have quite what I wanted, so I took a quick journey to the hardware store to pick up some 9mm ply.  Two sheets of 600 x 1200 game me plenty.  Actually technically 1 sheet would have been fine, but I kind of made a mistake early on and wasted some, so it's lucky I bought two sheets.  It's not a huge deal as I can use the leftover bits to make some more cool obstacles for my garden monster truck course.

I already had some fibreboard in 1040 x 740 size which I could use for ramp tops - 740mm width is wide enough to hit easily with a full-size monster and 1040mm long makes the angle about right.  I went out for an early practice run with some bare 12mm ply and the big box that my router is stored in, and worked out that 280mm is just about high enough for a good launch.  So I had some basic dimensions to start from.

Anyway - pics!

Here is some wood:

Here is some smaller wood with other wood screwed to it:

Here is a finished half-wood:

Here are two half-woods stuck together with an intermediate wood

In this photo the joining braces are visible.  I went with some spare plank here to help resist any twisting forces.

[Mad Ax 11491]

I tried to take some photos on my own, so I was driving one-handed.  Also my regular camera (an Olympus TG-3) decided to stop reading memory cards half-way through the workshop session, so I had to switch to the backup, which is an Olympus TG-5 with a scratched lens and creeping water damage under the LCD.  In theory it's a newer version of the same camera but in practice it doesn't seem to be as good as rapid-frame footage, notably the TG-3 sounds like a hummingbird in a hurry on its fastest shooting mode and the TG-5 just sort of ticks along like it's on a merry stroll.  Well, anyway, here's my attempt at a mid-air capture.

[Mad Ax 11491]

So, that's one ramp successfully made.  I still had some spare wood so while all the power tools were out I figured I should go ahead and make kicker for some more vertical airtime.

Kicker side panel was basically marked by eye in what looked like the right sort of shape, then cut with a saw of jigs.

I went with a slightly different approach for this one, as I knew I would need a lot of cross pieces to force the ramp top to curve, and I figured they'd provide enough rigidity.

Top panel screwed down onto the cross pieces

[Mad Ax 11491]

Both ramps have the same height (not allowing for inconsistencies in the turf).  This means I can run a two-way lane on the garden to maximise track size.  Same length too, so they can be stacked for storage.

[Mad Ax 11491]

Now back to taking pics with the compromised camera, this time Durandal gets some hangtime

[mud4fun 1697]

They look great @Mad Ax, well done. I especially like the kicker and the fact they are reasonably wide ramps so easier to hit at speed 

 

 

[Mad Ax 11491]

So - how do the ramps perform?

Just fine.  The flat ramp is great for distance, the TXT and the TLT hybrid both get a couple of metres easily and come down nose heavy - both trucks need some throttle input to keep the front up, but then it's a delicate balance to come down neutral and not put strain through the transmission.  I could get loads more speed with a run-up but that's probably asking for trouble, so I'll keep my courses close.  There's enough width to get square on without falling off the edge.  Traction is obviously low on bare ply, but I still have carpet to add.

The kicker is brilliant - it converts lateral to altitude better than a pair of wings.  Even at low speed, both rigs get launched well up into the air but they always come down flat without any throttle input, which is nice.  If the truck comes down on the ramps then the fibreboard probably absorbs more force than ply, it doesn't deform when the trucks hit it and it doesn't weigh much.

So - next weekend will be about tidying up and countersinking all the screws, putting on some paint and adding some carpet, then making some brackets to hang it all from a convenient storage location.

[Mad Ax 11491]

Bit of a while since my last update, and not that much to add - I did go around and tidy up all the screws, but haven't had the weather to use the ramps nor to paint and carpet them.  Sunday is supposed to be a dry day and we're expecting 15 degree temps which will feel like midsummer after several days of ice last week.

I did find time to make some storage for my ramps, which was always going to by the hardest thing about ramp ownership.  I had planned to suspend them from a mezzanine level but they were just too heavy to get into place without help, and I don't want something that's going to be awkward otherwise they'll never get used.

So - I bought some rope and a pulley, found some spare cleats and rescued a hammock that had been used to store old rags.  Now they're suspended just above head height in a dead area of the workshop roof.  The tie-off point is on my mezzanine storage level where I keep my cars.

[Mad Ax 11491]

We had a little unexpected mini-heatwave this weekend - up to 14* C down in the southwest and fairly still after last week's winds, which were strong enough to take the felt off my shed roof (to be fair, taking the felt off the roof with the supplied tacks holding it on was a bit like taking the skin off the top of rice pudding, so it wasn't really that bad).  So on Saturday morning I dressed the child up in old clothes, apron and urban camo bandana (we'll make a biker out of her yet), gave her a paintbrush and pointed her towards the ramps.

Unfortunately I couldn't quite persuade her to point her eyes in the direction of the camera

Sunday morning was dry and bright so I got out early and finished the job

I wasn't going to paint the undersides but the child put so much paint on this was the only way to use it up.

I dug out my cheap office carpet to stick on, but couldn't find any carpet adhesive, so that's on hold for another day.  However I did make the most of the dry weather and jumped the SMT10, Blitzer Beetle and TXT-1, and finished the day with a ruined Power HD servo (see TXT-1 thread!)