Ramp Designer

If you meet a skateboarder over forty, you’re probably looking at a reasonably accomplished amateur carpenter. Ramp building was always a DIY sport, and most of us learned it the way you learn anything with optimism and plywood. A friend lamented that he had no idea what his dream ramp would cost, and that seemed like a solvable problem.

The Ramp Designer is a lightweight CAD-ish tool for the classic radius-transition ramp: set the height, radius, width, and flat, and it renders a live 3D model and a complete materials list, down to the screw count, so you can budget a build before buying a single sheet. The math underneath, arc geometry meeting real lumber dimensions, is written up in the Lab. I’ve used it to spec my own mini ramp rebuild, which is also the build that taught me what an elliptical radius does to a transition.