November 17, 2007

DAY 4
Alright Day 4, we got a new camera guy today. Jeff Shinoda, is his name and the Sony VX2000 is his game. We started as usual early in the morning around 8am, the winter cold is just finally starting to settle in and for us is was pretty dam cold about 48 degrees! Needless to say we all had our hoodies and beanies on.

We started off by cutting some more side pieces for the runway up the levee. This was our first day without Shane Mooney, one of our main builders and luckily Jarred was able to get one of his friends Dillan to come help. After we built the 2 pieces of the runway we had to assemble them at the perfect angle and mount them in place. This is the hardest part of any of our building days to date, reason why is that we had to custom fit the whole runway to the
levee, which is no easy task.

Once the first piece was set at the correct angle (Jarred and Dillan are holding it in place) I marked the connecting 2x4s drilled holes through them and mounted bolts to connect the two. Then propping the back of the piece up, we measured the length of 2x4' (TM)s needed to for the first supports and then for the back supports. After mounting those we started making our braces. We really needed these braces for stability purposes, with the runway 5ft above
the ground it would be shaking without them.

It was very interesting today, both Jarred and I had injured ankles. Jarred' (TM)s foot was in cast from breaking a part of his foot, and I had a severely strained ankle that had been recovering for the past 2 weeks. So both of us were
limping across the set and trying to climb up the levee and hopping on one foot down the levee to finish building the ramp. Haha We finished the second piece soon after and mounted it to the levy, we were ready to call it a day, but had to finish building one more runway piece to help prep for tomorrow.

October 19, 2007

Day 3
So
this time around on Day 3 we had a few problems. One was rain, it had
rained earlier that night, and was expected to rain the morning of
also. So we decided to move a lot of everything inside the shed. Second
was we were missing our skill saw that weekend cause a buddy of mine
decided to take it without mentioning it to me. It was for a good cause
though.
So with that being said the day started out well. Luckily
it didn' (TM)t rain that day but was extremely windy, and we were joking if
the shed was to blow away what would happen. We planned on building the
flat bottom and the initial tranny up the side of the levy this day.
Shane and Jarred started building the flat bottom for the ramp, most of
the templates were precut a few days before to make sure the day went
by smoothly. We started using recycled 2x4s on the flat and after
building the 8ft section and a 4ft to be attached to it we had to cut
an angled piece for the 1st transition uphill. This is where we ran
into problems.
We found out we no longer had the skill saw (what we
had used to previously cut the transitions). I search frantically
throughout the garage and found nothing but the original hand saw! Heck
no I thought to myself, but we had no other choice. After cutting a few
inches with the handsaw I quite and went looking once more and found my
Ryobi Reciprocating saw, mostly used to cut plastic and metal tubes and
sheets, this seemed to be out best chance to get by the day and it
worked! For the moment, after cutting through and finishing of the
first template, not only was it not cutting straight but torturing my
hand with its constant vibration. I stopped and we knew it wouldn' (TM)t be
any good to use. We wasted a perfectly good sheet of wood.
All of
us brainstormed for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do next
and came up with using some of our precut templates for the flat runs
uphill. We were reluctant but its what we had to do. After making a few
measurements and adjusting for the correct angle, the pieces were cut
and nailed together forming the wedge. We moved all the pieces into
there perspective places and called it a day fairly early. That plus
Shane' (TM)s girlfriend lost the cat and he had to go help her find it. Hope
you found it Shane!
In the meantime we will have to level the
ground and drill holes in the end 2x4s for each section so we can bolt
them together making a nice tight fit and hold between each section.
That and start building the runway uphill, the hardest part of this
whole project. To view a small clip from this day among other video
updates please visit our Youtube channel at www.youtube.com/skatescoff

For all of you wondering how this project got started its a long story and you can catch all the prior history to it on the Scoff website at www.scoffskateboarding.com/theproject.html
But since we started this new build last year i will start it from there, on....

October 5, 2007

Day
1 at the Scoff Project was beautiful and at 8am in the morning the sun was beaming out with a light breeze and it seemed like it will be the perfect day. Unfortunately it wasn't very perfect. Shane Mooney, part of the building crew dropped by on time, but our filmer wasn't there.We called to find out what happened and apparently he couldn' t make it and never got a hold of us. So then for the rest of the day we frantically called friends to grab another filmer for the rest of the day. We managed to get one by the end of the day, and picked up Jarred Dahl, the last of our building crew. But time was already spent and the sun was setting.

The 3 of us just started some prep, and pre-cut one of the transition sides and a few 2x4s before we called it a day.
Tomorrow we will start building the ramp.


October 6, 2007

Day 2
On
Day 2 we started filming and building around 9am. Everyone had there opening cans of Monster to start the day and the smell of sawdust filled the air. Finished the transitions of the ramp we continue to layout and build the base of it, then start nailing the studs in. We were moving at a fairly smooth speed. The tranny was coming together nicely with a few exceptions that we later took care of. Jarred the youngest in the building crew noticed a good amount of bees that came from nowhere. He is allergic to them and very afraid of being stung by one so he was dancing around trying to escape them. Jason eventually got him a can of hornet n wasp killer so he could defend himself.

The tranny was about 90% done now and looked beautiful, the transition, and curvature of the ramp was very smooth. We used a 24ft radius to get the angle and the ramp itself is 8ft high and 18ft long. So before we finished it and put the final 4x4 supports in and cross braces. We picked up the ramp and moved it about a football field away (2 acres)
to where it will be used and attached to the rest of the runway. After finishing the last of the transition we sat back and just relaxed looking at it thinking how nar it was. We joked around thinking Mexicans trying to get into the US illegally might use mega ramps to launch over the border, or how you only see ramps of this size in the X-Games or carnivals with clowns jumping off them. Haha

All in all we did well today and plan to begin again next Friday and Saturday of October. We will hopefully finish the flat bottom, initial tranny to the levy and about half of the runway. Until then.