Check out this short video from OC Ramps. It starts out predictable enough for a while and then manages to get really interesting. Fun!

John Egertson enjoyed these photos, and it led him to send in this week’s Shot of the Week. I loved that post about the ramp out in the desert made of old signs and poached lumber. Got me thinking of two great ramps we road back in the day… The “wooden wave” was a sketchy, shaky thing built on a public sidewalk by the Duke Street / Telegraph Road overpass in Alexandria, VA. It was built entirely from scraps of lumber found here and there by my friend Dave Alexander. The photo attached is Dave, probably around 1980, taken from up on the overpass. You can see the ramp is not a classic beauty, but it was way fun. The top piece of ply was over vert. It lasted a week or two before someone torched it. Wooden Wave really was ridiculous. It truly was 16 feet tall as painted on there, and over vertical. You can see that Dave painted on some faux tiles and then after that decided to stick another piece of ply up there to make it taller. Despite the photo, Dave Alexander, his brother Mike and myself all got close to the top of that…

This week’s Shot of the Week features Larry Martin circa ’88 or ’89 out in the Mojave desert. There were better “skate shots” to pick from his batch, but I wanted to showcase the ramp and not necessarily the action or the photo. Here’s a little more on the subject from Larry: I built this ramp on poached land in the Mojave desert near Lancaster, Ca. around 88… I had moved there with my wife after living in Ventura/Fillmore Ca. all my life. There wasn’t many ramps in the Antelope Valley at that time. The Palmdale one from the “Great Desert Ramp Battle” was toast. So, I made some new street/ditch skater friends and enlisted them in my idea to just build a halfpipe in the desert for anyone/evryone, and hopefully the police would leave us alone. They did, and we had it for about a year/half before the High School party crowd ruined it. We cut the templates with a jig, but the rest was all done without power tools. The wood of course was scavenged. This was during the savings and loan scandal, and huge housing projects were closed everywhere in the valley. Signs were just the easiest,…

Near as I can tell, Tashkeel is like a health club for artists living the United Arab Emirates. I don’t mean an actual health club, but like a health club. You know, pay your dues and and you get to go the art club and use the facilities to make art. Pay some extra money and you get to take some fancy classes. What’s up for workshops now? Skateboarding. We’re all artists, every time we step on a board. What’s the skate terrain equivalent of one a Tippy the Turtle art test? Whatever the rationale, the end result looks fun. Check it out after the jump. – Thanks to Boy Ipoh for the tip. ( Note, Boy is going to arm wrestle Matthijs for the King of Tips belt.)

Check out these pics of a ramp compound found on Rampbook, aka Negative Ion. This behemoth is made from the carcasses of no less than 11 other Colorado ramps, a few of which have been shown on S&A before. Check it out and noodle around Negative Ion a little, there’s all kinds of good stuff squirreled away there.

Help get the Grover miniramp together. Grover is looking for help tomorrow, Saturday, October 3, 2009 at 3:00. Bring your cordless drill and ramp building know-how. Grover will provide malt beverages.

You know a scene is pretty healthy if there are not one, but two private warehouse skate situations. Joining the Hiawatha is something called OTC. The Old Timer’s Club has about 16 guys, all with families and a median age of 34. They’ve been working on getting this thing going since last spring, and now the coping has just been welded on. In case you are wondering (because I was…) : We had a pipe bending company come in and measure it, then we welded it. It took some doing, some massaging, but it was pretty close to perfect from the factory. So add the OTC to the Hiawatha and something called the the root beer barrel (?), as well as the public facility known as 3rd Lair. It looks like some guys will have their winters covered in Minneapolis. Construction photos up on Flickr. Plus two new ones after the jump. – Thanks to Luke Leonard for the pics. ( I hope they don’t kick you out now…)

One man’s discarded toy is the best thing that ever happened to another little kid. MC origianlly had plans to have some sort of mega session with people over at his place skating the new bowl and the old miniramp, but he got over that idea sometime shortly after the coping was set. The more deck he poured, the more irrelevant the miniramp became. Now it’s leaving the H.O.M.O.S. compound and relocating to GVK headquarters. We had a lot of fun on that miniramp, and I’m sure it will be a lot of fun a t Grover’s house when it gets reincarnated, provided it doesn’t get reincarnated as a stack of rotting wood that never got assembled in his back yard.

Actually, I don’t think Kevin was a reader until after I profiled his garage minibowl, but I’m claiming it anyway. Check out the build and a video of the bowl in action after the jump. Where’s it at, where’s it at? A small town in Quebec. I’ll let him divulge if he wants.

Reader Bill Morgan sent in some pics of his DIY project. It started as a quarterpipe painted to look like concrete. It sits in his rather short driveway, but there’s a hell of a lip where the driveway meets street. So what’s a skater to do? How about poring a nice little micro transition to make the approach work without having to ollie it? And while you’re at it, why not put some thin set on the rough patch of street? You’ve go to be in good with your neighbors to get away with that!