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Day 8

So finally we get things figured out and got the camera and our usual close knit crew together, minus Shane. The biggest surprise this morning is Jarred is bald! I swear I’m starting to worry about that kid. An we ran out of Monsters! We buzzed through 12 cases in 6 months! Anyways starting around 9am Saturday morning we started building the last structural pieces for the mini mega ramp.

Promoting the recycling and reusing of wood throughout the project we found an old but still solid ¾ in piece of ply to use for our siding, it was actually 4 inches shorter and a 1ft less in width compared to there normal 4x8 foot dimensions. But it was just enough for us to cut out the 6 strips that we needed to build the runway after the landing bank and shorted us 1ft in length from the 24ft mark that we made.

So now were waiting. We will most likely paint and treat any exposed pieces of wood left and just wait till something happens with the rollin of the Scoff Project. Cause as of now the ramp is kicked off the hill and it may come to be that we will have to build our own levee, on our property to finally finish this project. This of course will put us over out budget so if any of you are psyched to see this little monster get finished, please helps us out and send us a small donation via Paypal. We promise to list you in the DVD on the credits as one of our close supporters.

There’s a new development in the project. Someone has come forward with a proposition that might greatly help getting the mini mega ramp back up at its 16ft rollin height. Not sure if it will go through though. If you would like to help us out and be a part of The Scoff Project: please leave a donation for us. We would greatly appreciate it and put your name in the credits of the DVD for helping support us. Thank you!

The Meeting

What can I say, Jason had the meeting today at 11am. Got all dressed up, wore the slacks, dress shirt, and tie with a pair of patent shoes. Looking his best to show that he means business and that he was serious about coming up with a solution so the ramp could at least have 2 days on the levee for the “test runs” and “jump day”. Trying to work and show the points that the ramp was not hurting the instructional integrity of the hill and that they would be free from liability issues. Even that, were doing this to help Grind for Life the non-profit organization were working with.

After much talk and discussion it seemed like they were listening and might be swayed to allow us those 2 days, but no. It wasn’t going to happen, the liability they said on there end is well establish with a 20million dollar insurance plan, but they didn’t want to risk it. (I was just informed a few days later the largest sum of money for a lawsuit case involving skateboarding was only $80,000) That and that they are having to go through a new process of checking the levees and determine there strength for a new certification process they have to go through. So a double “no” on it now; Jason tried his hardest in the best terms to try to work something out, but it didn’t help. He even used the line “Think about the children!” haha Everyone laughed but that was it, just a friendly way to break the end of the meeting.

As of now we have decided to absolutely continue on with the building of the Scoff Project. This set back will not deter us from canceling all the hard work and sweat we have put into this along with our fantastic sponsors been with us throughout the process; it will be finished!

So a few days later we weren’t able to get our builders to come out and help tare down the ramp. We use to have camera man problems now were having builder problems not showing up and its causing more delays. Besides the point I’m very greatfull for all they’re help and the city actually volunteered four of there own workers to help break down the ramp. As you see in the photo above we complete broke down the ramp and shoved it inside the gap and scooted the ramp back 2ft also. The apparent rule is nothing is allowed to be built on the levee or within 20ft of it. So we’re all sorta bummed at the moment, hopefully things will go better tomorrow as Jason has his meeting with the Fresno Metropolitan Water Control Districts supervisor.

So one random afternoon Jason was outside working on his car and a city water district truck comes up the driveway. A man comes out and asks him “Is that your ramp back there?” Jason answered “Yes” hoping the man was going to admire it and want him to build a ramp for his kid.

“Well its not supposed to be on the levee, your going to have to take it down” Jason just froze and tried to work things out and give a viable argument to keep the ramp on the levee or just allow 2 days for it to be there. One for the tests runs and two for actual “Jump Day.” The man said he would call his supervisor and get back to me but as of now the ramp has to be removed ASAP from the levee.

This is giving us some set backs which we don’t need for the project, Jason has schedule a meeting on Wednesday to meet up with Jerry Lakeman the supervisor/ director for this levee along with their lawyer. Hopefully everything works out in the end.

Ok so another wacked day at The Scoff Project. We got things planned out and ready. We were to get the camera man here with the VX2000 around noon. An after working a bit on doing some prep work painting a few sheets of ply then screwing it down against the ramp. Our camera guy came and dropped off the camera and said he couldn’t film because he had to take his mother to the hospital, alright good reason, no problem right? We always have at least 3 people building so we will just have one builder switch now. Well, right before that our camera guy got here, Dillan left around 11:30am for some business. Leaving just Scoffman and Jarred with no one to switch over to filming. 

So no filming got done that day. We didn’t even bother brining the camera out really. Just finished screwing in a the last of 3 sheets of ply and custom fit the transition (on the way down to the ground from the levee)

Day 7
            Alright so now it seems like were getting back in our groove again! We started the day late and again had a new camera man from our friends over at WatchDoIt.com. They brought in a nice HD camera and Jason gave him the layout of the film. Then we stuffed some donuts down and were off building. The previous build day we cut all the wood needed for the landing bank. Its dimensions were to be 8’ wide, 6’ high, and 16’ long.
           
Everything started off alright; the recycled 4x4s that we were using for the base of the bank and the support beams were a bit old and had some rather large cracks. We just needed some longer screws to take care of that problem though. Scoffman was constantly running back and forth to the shed with the blueprints to the bank to make sure all the height of the transitions were correct before they were screwed into place. Jarred Dahl and Shane Mooney were there and built the majority of the bank while Scoffman was making sure the ramp was right to the inch.

            Then out of nowhere, Brendan Dane popped into the scene about halfway through the building of the bank to come and help us. He’s some guy we found sleeping underneath the ramp one day. Rather nice fellow really. He helped out for a good 30 minutes before he wandered off the property looking for a rabbit to eat for dinner. (Not really. But a man named Brendan did help out on the project for a little bit.)
           
Nearing noon, we closed out with our filmer and finished up filming for the day (the filmer had to leave according to his clock). The ramp was done except for the last few inches which had to be a rollin. We spent another 30 minutes after the filmer left and made the pieces, installed them, and added cross braces to the bank to secure it.. Then with just 4 of us, Jason’s brother John Huewe came out to help move the ramp. It was a pain to move a football field away, but at least we won’t have to move it again. We’ll cover what we did after the filmer left, at the beginning of the next build day, so no one misses out. Almost done!

Day 6

Finally! After a long wait and some delays with our filmer we were able to grab one of our friends filmer from WachDoIt.com to help film for a short period today.
We were beginning construction on the landing bank today and were running 2 saws through the same outlet at once to make up for the short amount of time that we had to build with. So no more than 5 mins into cutting the circuit breakers blew out!  We flipped all the switches and that didn’t help, we decided to swap outlets and one of the saws started working then. But after halfway cutting a 16ft piece of a 8x4 in half Scoffman blew out the extension cord.
Just one incident after another, needless to say nothing much happened in the 3hrs we had that day except we got all the wood cut for the bank and all that needs to be done is to assemble it and build the runway.

The majority of the build group got together plus one to help paint the ramp. Scoffman’s next door neighbor Joe gave us a 5 gallon bucket of outdoor primer paint for wood to us. Thanks Joe! So for 5hrs we just painted the ramp and got the majority of the structure all painted.

This day wasn’t an official build day but instead a photo shoot day for the ramp. We assembled it back together and added the sheets of ply on top of the ramp and whole runway. It looked like it was finished!! Then out came the camera we were taking photos for one of the articles in LINE UP MAGAZINE about the project. You should be able to see it in there next upcoming mag. To be released soon in February or March.

After the shoot we again broke everything down and took off the sheets of ply. We haven’t treated wood yet and couldn’t leave it out in the elements.

Day 5

So today we started around noon and planned on finishing the structure for the ramp. Dillan was back again and Moonman had work to do again. We only had to build 1 more piece. So we took the runway we built last night and set it up like we did with the rest of them. Custom measured and cut struts with braces to stabilize it.  We were almost out of wood, and had to look for some good scrap wood that we could salvage. We ended up taking apart one of our regular 2ft launch ramps we had laying around and using the 2x4s in that.

While Jarred and Dillan were working on cutting some more wood, I had to go grab some paper and pencil and sketch out the rollin. I had to facture a lot of things into it. The ramp was at 15ft so I needed to find the correct angle and then let it rise until it got to the 16ft marker that we were going for.  I finally got the plans the plans back to our workshop area and starting tracing out the transition for the roll out deck. A little less than an hour later we started building it and carried it out to do the finally assembly on the ramp. Again once it was bolted in place the struts hammered in and braces attached, it was done. Finally, were done with the structure and the sun was setting, pretty good weekend I must say, we got a lot done.

But it was still not quite over. Haha We had to break it all down now and disassemble it off the levee. Since were not allowed to build anything on it, we had to make it detachable and we ended up taking the top 3 pieces down in about 15mins. Now wiped and ready to take a shower all of us head off with a Monster in hand. Not for Shinoda though, he was getting light headed after smoking and drinking 4 monsters throughout the day. Yikes! Must have felt pretty good! Next time we’ll be working on building the landing bank and hopefully finish this before the end of the year.

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’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’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.

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’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 ¾ 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’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’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
-Scoffman

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.

Day 1

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. Unfortanley 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 Dane, 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.

Back on Track
Were back on track and are starting to see things move again. The monster is awaking. Monster Energy becomes an official sponsor for the THE SCOFF PROJECT documentary film today, draft plans are drawn out for the ramp and wood is bought among other prep begins. 1st days of building is set for October 5.

Release of the Scoff Project Teaser
Scoff released its first teaser of the Scoff Project. Showing a glimpse of what happened on our first test run and Rob falling off the ramp. Received over 200 hits its first week. See it here at www.youtube.com/skatescoff along side other Scoff videos.

A Storm hits the Scoff Project

It's been a long time since we updated you on THE SCOFF PROJECT lately. Well here's the down low on what has been happening.

After the first test run Rob hairline fractured 2 of his ribs, badly bruise his back bone. The next day he couldn't bend over to pick up his cell, and went to the hospital. His back is much better now, but still a month later is still recovering from the fall. You can see the trailer of that day on our new website. View it or Download to see it over and over again!

Anyways since then it’s been hard to get a team of people to bring down the tranny for the ramp, disassemble it, and bring it back to our construction area. We've covered it in tarps, but the runways and roll-in have remained exposed to the elements. Tomorrow we will finally be able to at least dissemble it to rebuild it and hopefully get another test in before mid April.

See the tranny at 8ft was built more like a quarter pipe at that height. So we will have to bring it back and mellow it back out. We will be enlisting the help of our friends at   to give us a heads up on what the radius should be.

But lately, as in fact 2 nights ago a storm came out and sent down 2/3rds of rain with rushing winds of 25mph or more came throughout the night. But the high winds continued through out the day knocking 300yr old trees down among others. It even got a hold of the roll-in for the ramp.

See the tranny usually sits on top of the run to keep it off the levy so neighbors and water officials can pass by. And it usual sits snug on top of the run, well not tonight. I woke up that morning to see it halfway down the levy and blown over!

After it finished raining I trekked out to check on it and make sure that it was alright and not broken. I was glad to find that it was fine, from what I could tell, just wet and dirty. All I need to do is pull it back up the hill and were good again. That was one crazy day.

 

1st Test Run
Alright so Saturday the 20th was the first test run of the Scoff Project. Rob signed the waiver agreement and we were off to the location. He scoped it out pumped it so he could get a feel for it and we went inside to watch a skate video and pump him up. It was time that we brought out the mattress pads for him to land on. 
After that I can't say much, we will be keeping the project somewhat hush during filming and documenting it. Let’s say though if it was a 6ft launch ramp it would be perfect but at 8ft it was more like a mellowed out quarterpipe.
Here’s the only teaser we can give you guys right now.

 

It’s Finished!

Its DONE! The Scoff Project is finally finished. After building it over a period of 3 weeks its done. The last day of assembling the ramp was the hardest. Mainly because the roll-in (which is 12ft long) ran into some problems and we had to make sure it connected just right with the track.


The roll-in under construction

I even manage to loose control of it while moving it and slide half way down the hill. None the less I got quite a few slivers, scraps and sore neck to boot. Well here you go the final photos of the finished ramp.


Along side the ramp from ontop the levy

Full view of the Scoff Project

The roll-in view, 13ft high

Expected test runs will happen this Saturday.
Rob Troche a Clovis local and friend of mine will be the brave soul to first launch from the ramp to FLAT! Yes you heard it, to flat! Why him and not me you ask...Well he has better health insurance. lol We are launching to flat to determine how large the gap is and then build the landing bank in that position for a true big air maneuver. Once the ramp is fully finished we will schedule a date and take the ramp apart and rebuild it all in hopefully one day. The whole day will be recorded and edited for the upcoming video(THE SCOFF PROJECT - Building a Monster), the next months will be used to capture footage of local and visiting skaters performing their own insane stunts and bails.

 

The Birth of the Scoff Project

We came up with an idea, “Wouldn’t it be great to build the largest skate ramp in town?” and since that crazy idea entered our minds we’ve set out on a mission. First we needed wood to build a ramp of such size, well we don’t have to much money to spare so we gather wood from our super-intendent friend that we made over the weekend. Who practically provided us with all the plywood we needed to build this project and then some. We were going to build a 8ft launch ramp with a rollin of 13-15ft and 2-3ft wide. We estimate you will hit the bottom between 20-30mph and be shot at least 12ft high into the air.
We are planning on making a documentary of the building of a mini-mega ramp and show everything that all went into the thought and design behind it.

 

 So let the construction begin...


Just about to lay the ply

We would build the sections of the ramp and haul them out to the back where we had a levy to support roll-in. The walk was about 2 acres or just about 1 football field in length.

Top view of the ramp, with the first part of the runway attached

Soon after building the next 2 runway pieces we realized that they would be to skinny and needed to widen them incase of speed wobbles became an issue. We don’t want people getting thrown down the levy slamming into the ground. We want them getting thrown up the ramp! A week later we did widen the runway another 2ft and started work on the roll-in.

Side view of the ramp w/ the skinny runway

Now the roll-in was probably the trickiest and hardest part of this whole project, cause of it having to custom fit to the top/side of the levy and still remains level.

Roll-in under construction

We had to custom build every piece of ply to fit the levy the best and still go flush with the rest of the run. That was  a very difficult. When we finally got it built there was a small problem with it getting flush with the rest of the run and it started to rain and freeze over night. So we had to bring the whole 12ft long roll-in back to the house to be rebuilt and worked on. After the freeze was easing off we took the tarp off the ramp and went back to work.
We got all the pieces assembled and connected, then we worked on making sure the roll-in was flowing with the rest of the run. 2 days later its finished. And we built this with only $30 so far!! Next month we will overlap it with Masonite.

 

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