Day 3: Starting Uphill

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’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