I need help building skateboard decks and or ramps. If anyone has built a deck
before, that would be really, good, but if anyone even knows how to bend the
wood or anything that would help. I keep breaking mine, and at $40 or $50
each, it really adds up. As far as ramps, i need tips on anything to do with
halfpipes, pyramids, ideas for funboxes, quarter pipes, maybe even launch
ramps i guess.i'm not a master carpenter, but i am willing to experiment a
little, so nothing too complicated here.

13 responses total.

You should probably do curved surfaces by building up layers of thin plywood,
with lots of glue (and pressure while drying).  

For skateboard decks themselves, I suppose you could put on a couple layers
of fiberglass to strengthen them.

When I was a kid, some of my neighbors used to build skateboard ramps by
making a wooden frame with the rough shape they wanted, and then attaching
a normal thickness sheet of plywood which had been bent after getting it very
wet.

Back, decades ago, when I fooled some with skateboard decks I simply cut
them out of 3/4" plywood.  Better plywood has more and thinner plys.  I
bet one could make a pretty decent deck out of alternating layers of thin
plywood and fiberglass pressed into shape using a form and sandbags to make
the layers conform to the form...  Boundless possibilities... ;-)

Yes, wood is a lot easier to bend after it has been soaked in water or
steamed.  I don't think I would bend entire sheets of cheap plywood around
complex shapes, however, pieces cut and bent to form complex shapes could
work out pretty well.  It would be a complex, time consuming task.  Be sure
to use plenty of water proof adhesive and lots of deck screws to hold it
together.

the traditional thing to use is 7  one quarter inch cross plays of I think
maple. The deck shouldn't need to be held together by anything but glue, the
only thing the screws are for is to hold the trucks to the deck. The main
thing i needed to know was how to bend them and how to stick them together.
the skateboard iosn't just a shape. there needs to be a lot of spring in the
tail and nose so that I can jump high. This sounds like it's going to be WAY
too hard for me, maybe I'll take a field trip to a skateboard factory
sometime. What someone told me is that the more pressure you use when
compresing the board together, thestronger it will be and it will have more
snapping power in the tail to do ollies. I don't have any idea what tools i
would even want to use. I think i'll just stick to making ramps, but i'll try
a deck at least once.

did i say quarter inch ply? i think it's really one eighth or one sixteenth.
the total size of my current deck(which has a crack all the way through the
bottom layer) is maybe a little under one half inch, but most decks are a
little bigger.

Sounds like the factories are probably the best way to go there.  I 
imagine ramps are something you can do much cheaper on your own, though. 
One thing that hasn't been too clear in this discussion is what a "deck" 
is.  I take it to be the main piece of the skateboard, while the "ramps" 
are what you want to skate on, right?

the deck is the wooden part. the trucks are the metal part that serves as the
axle and there are several parts to the truck. the axle part is called the
hanger. the base part is called the base. the hanger and base are held
together by a screw called the kingpin and a nut. around the kingpin in
between the base and hanger is a bushing. it keeps the board from turning too
sharply. I know that's way more information than anyone wanted, but i'm bored.
yes, the ramps are what i want to skate on. there is a skatepark in my town,
but i don't like the people there. anyway, who wants to pay money to have a
place to skate?

Does anyone know the history of skateboards?  I recall in my distant childhood
something made out of wooden crates with the wheels from roller skates affixed
to the bottom, in which people rolled down hill in races.  Are these ancestors
of skateboards?  Roller skates went over shoes and you had skate keys to
adjust them with.

Right, Sindi.  When Steve was a kid his neighbors made skateboard ramps.  When
I was a kid they didn't *have* skateboards - possibly they existed somewhere,
but not where I was.  (But in those days roller rinks *did* have skates built
onto shoes.  The ones most kids owned were the clamp-on kind you describe.)

My second paragraph, up there in #3, was about ramps, not decks.  I wasn't
clear on that.  I would think that springy deck would be made of very many
layers of a springy wood laminated in such a way as to give the deck desired
characteristics.  It would take a lot of fooling around to figure out what
works for you and what doesn't.

When I was a kids, back in the 60's, we had skateboards the resembled current
skate boards.  The one significant improvement made since those days is in
the wheels.  The skate boards of the 60's had very hard plastic wheels that
did not grip at all.  They would simply slide out of under you in the mildest
turn.  When Polyurathane appeared all that changed and skate board technology
took off.  Those old wheels got to be known as "rocks", but me and my brothers
spent many an hour zooming, straight line, down the neighborhood hill with
numb feet from the buzz transmitted from the road, through the rocks and into
our feet.  The trucks of those days resembled roller skate trucks with long
axles and sealed bearings in the wheels were unheard of, though they did have
ball bearings with cones to adjust them for wear.

I tried skateboarding once.  I was at a friend's birthday party when I was
12, and he had just gotten a new skateboard for his birthday.  I skateboarded
around in the parking lot of his apartment complex for a while, but it didn't
go all that fast on the flat surface and I got bored pretty quickly.  Then
I started taking it part way up a hill and then skating down the hill.  That
was much more fun, and as I got the hang of various speeds I kept going
farther and farther up the hill, so that I could build up more and more speed
on my way down.  Eventually I tried taking the skateboard all the way up to
the top of the hill, and skating back down.  On my first try, I got part way
down, started to lose control, and ended up in the grass.  On my second try
I wasn't quite so lucky.  I made it almost to the bottom of this fairly long
hill, built up a lot of speed, and then ended up on my face, on the cement.
That was the end of my skateboarding.

  Be glad you got that far. My mother was from the "You can't do that; you'll
poke your eye out" disipline. Even looking at a skateboard was enough to get
the speech from her. It is probably good that I didn't learn to skateboard.
I was, and still am a pretty big klutz.

I built a skate ramp for my brother over this past summer.

First we made the basic frame.  Took a piece of 3/4 inch plywood, and 
cut it to the curve of the ramp.  Put 1 joist at the back bottom corner, 
then put joists along the curve at (I believe) an 8 inch interval.  The 
joists were held in place with 2" screws. (2 on each side for a total of 
4 per joist).

Once we had all the joists in place, we started putting the covering on. 
 I put a line of glue along each joist, then put a piece of 1/4 inch 
plywood down over it.  The 1/4 inch plywood is thin enough that you can 
bend it without watering it too much.  In addition to the glue, I also 
screwed the plywood down.  We put down 2 more 1/4 inch plywood boards 
(total of 3/4 inch thick).  For the "Lip" at the bottom front, we used a 
piece of sheet metal that we had found somewhere.

It ended up looking something like this:  (The ramp is curved but I 
couldn't show that very well using just text)


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