So yesterday afternoon BigStu and I had a meeting with our boss, Wayne, and , Steve,the bloke weve been talking to from Gravity.
Wayne basically told us we have £9,500 to build the block from start to finish including all of the costs. Now for those of you that think that this is alot of money you mistaken. This has to include a concrete foundation, equipment, labour, transport, raw materials and so on. Therefore this IS NOT alot of money and can everyone please stop telling me that they can build it for cheaper, cause we all know youd build a peice of shit.
Right, now the original block idea was based on the 'T-block' at meanwhile 2 (royal oak) which gravity built, and we wanted to stick with that and sort of had to as that is what the YOF (youth oppertunity fund) gave us the money to build. Now that dosnt mean it has to be identicle. Which was a plus because im going to put my hand up and say the dimensions were all out, but what can I say when your sleep deprived and studying for your end of year exams numbers all sort of blur into one. SO we went down to the park to measure up other ramps to get an idea of decent dimensions. The manual pad at the bottom of the design is going to be roughly the same height as the halfpipe (from floor to manny pad) but a slight bit lower, only by about 4cm. And the top ledge was going to be about the height of the side of the mini-quater but we decided to make it a bit lower so that the other side was easier to skate, and thus came up with the same height as the south bank block leaving it about 25cm heigher than the manny pad.
This is so the whole peice is easier to skate and opening up more lines.
Here is the really interesting news though. Both end of the manual pad are going to be banked slighly to they are wallie-able AND one end of the high wall is going to be wallie-able. So there are loads more lines available.
The original placement has had to change. In the original proposal the manny pad was going face out towards the park and the high wall was going to be infront of the bench, but now its going to be the other way around so the manny pad is going to face the bench.
This is for one main reason. When the park was originally built there was no drainage put in AND the park slopes towards the car park. This means that where we had originally planned to put the T-block would be in standing water. Which could either damage it or at least means its going to take ages to dry. By leaving it facing the other way it means the water can run off from the long ledge and leave the manny pad mostly dry and cause minimal damage. There is also a chance a drainage gap might run through the middle of the block for improved drainage.
With all projects like this putting a massive solid block of concrete any where needs careful consideration as to what the ground underneath is like. And the likely hood is that GBH, the people who built that park originally, are a bunch of tight cunts and have made a half arse job of tha tarmac (hench why we always get puddles gathering and there is no drainage). All this means is that a soild survey needs to be done of what we have to build on as we can in no way build straight onto tarmac other wise it would only last long enough for charlie to front shove off it.
If the soils shit a bigger foundation needs to be layed thus costing more £££ if its good no cut backs.
as you can in this photo im not making it up, from the right you can see all the water coming from the other side of the park and settling right where we want to put the block.
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This is the design with the ammended dimensions. and showing the wallie-able areas. The steepness is going to be like that of 'Summer town' park in Oxford.
for those of you with no-so-good peepers you can see a full size A4 version of this by clicking the 'Ammended design' link on the top right.
Well basically in the next week or so Steve is going to draw up our plans properly whilst we wait for out boss Wayne to get soil surveys and park plans etc. and considering the council write up EVERYTHING and the park was built about 10 years ago we can sort of expect it to be a pretty hard job to find all the paper work so we are hoping to wait about a week/2 weeks to get to the next stage.
phew! thanks for reading make sure youve read it a few times before you pluck up the courage to ask a stupid question.
J-BEAR
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