Heeeyho Readers! More updates from my mountain bike park!
Sometimes we ought to plan less and act more.
The Deming cycle is reminiscent from my engineering studies; the PDCA (plan, do, check and act) method is a great way to move forward with ideas for the bikepark project. However, often times I spend too much time on the planning phase without moving forward. That's when planing while doing — and hoping that it works — gets my butt going.
This time I wanted to build a wooden berm. It consists of a raised bank to help going faster around turns on a bicycle trail, but, instead of using dirt, I opted for wooden planks. Wood is easier to assemble/disassemble to move around and test stuff. It's also easier to maintain.
We had three wooden pallets that I cut in half to make six. A great start, although not the most solid type of wood. Let's say it's enough to test the concept until I'm able to build something more definitive.
The secret to define the radius is to find the entry and exit tangents. Imagine that the trail comes from the bottom of the above picture and continues to the right of the top corner. Confusing to explain, I know.
After deciding the basic layout, it was time to raise the pallets to see how it looks.
The pallets are laying on tree logs here. It's time to add some support posts to fix the structure in place. Back to the pile of scrap wood.
Remember the Deming cycle? This is the step I was losing a lot of time planing before finally giving up and jumping to the do. If there was something to change, I'd check later.
A bunch of wooden stakes seemed enough to support the pallets. The idea is to hammer them into the ground and nail to the pallets. Badabim, badaboom. No idea if it works.
Gotta give kudos to my dad who helped me in this endeavor. Without his help I'd have set fire to the thing. {Kidding}.
The hardest part was leveling everything and holding the pallets in place to nail. All the rest just sets in place naturally. Adjust here, more there. Nail, hammer stakes, dig, etc. Going with the flow and imagination is a bless.
It took a good chunk of the afternoon to make the thing. How should we name this turn? It's not the most aesthetic wooden berm you'll see, but for a first starter is quite something.
Keep in mind that I won't carry bombastic speeds through here. I don't think this berm can hold a lot of G force. The idea is to create some level of support to go around the bend faster (better than turning on the level ground, get it?).
With the plan and do phases out of the way, it's time to proceed to the check {without killing myself}. First try was... meh. I didn't know the right speed and ended up going too slow, resulting in a rear wheel slip. Faster!
Second try was awesome! The grip was great and the wheels/tires felt solid. It's almost as... let's say, the more speed one carry, the better it feels. This first experience taught us a lot about berm building, opening the opportunity for a bigger one in the future. I already imagine a beast twice the width and height.
Check out the video down below to see how it works {sort of}.
Peace.
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~Love ya all,
Disclaimer: The author of this post is a convict broke backpacker, who has travelled more than 10.000 km hitchhiking and more than 5.000 km cycling. Following him may cause severe problems of wanderlust and inquietud. You've been warned.
Wow! Building your own mountainbike trail is so cool!
Nice project!
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💪💪 we don't have a lot of public trails here, so the way ia building my one xD
Ah it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to enjoy some nice mountain biking! We used to go and build stuff in the back of a trail and hop around it was a lot of fun. One day though I went over the handle bars and that was brutal. Nothing broken but definitely scared me lol. I even got it on my GoPro which was great!
Looks like a nice berm for sure. The dirt ones are okay but indeed a lot to maintain as they slough off. A wood one looks like a great idea!
Over the bars gotta be the scariest of the crashes 🤢 worse than washing out on a turn. You gotta pjt that on youtube xD
This berm worked great, but a bigger one would be definitely faster and safer (i don't want to fly over this one)
LOL I don't know if the footage survived. Sadly it was my old GoPro and for whatever reason leaving the SD card in the camera corrupted the things I had on there. I was pretty fucking pissed man! I had a bunch of cool photos on there, some awesome videos snowboarding in deep ass snow and what I'm most upset about is I had a few videos of my old car that I absolutely loved. It was this fast little car that had a beautiful loud sound to it. The damn footage all got corrupted and it's jumbled up now. Damn shame lol. I'm not bitter or anything... hahaha
Yeah I'm sure a bigger one would be better but it's good to start somewhere!
Damn! I know the feeling. I also lost a bunch of photos and a collection of 10.000+ classic rock and blues songs when my old pc toasted. It took that much pain to buy a backup hd. See, that's a modern day problem.. we don't print photos anymore or record videos on tape (that generally last for ever).
Thank you 👊