Free halfpipe ramp plans shows how to build a skateboard ramp and are halfpipe instructions.
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How to build a skateboard halfpipe in 11 hours. Myself and retiree skateboard enthusiast Rob Maggi went over to a friends house to put up a halfpipe for him. I haven’t built a halfpipe from scratch in many years so Rob was on point on this one. The ramp was to be 5 feet tall by 12 feet wide with a 7 foot transition which is pretty mellow but you can still blast airs out of it.

1^st you start off by cutting out your transition template and after you have that cut you build 5 more as you want a sturdy ramp and we wanted a center support transition at the 6 foot mark which is right in the middle.

To make the transition you figure out how thick of plywood you want to use which was ¾ inch in our case and you basically have to lay out 2 pieces of ¾ inch ply nice and flat, go up 3.5 inches to allow for the 2x4 flat bottom base. (Note: The 2x4 base isn’t actually 4 inches tall it is 3.5 inches in any home depot). This is a common mistake, people measure from the bottom and don’t allow for the flat and end up having to wedge up the transitions to make it match up which in turn weakens your ramp. So we measured up 3.5 inches up to allow for the flat and took a string and measured out the 7 foot radius that was going to be our template. This can be done with a string and marker and is pretty simply as seen in the pictures. The template is done on a 4x8 piece of plywood so to get it to 5 feet tall you need to cut into a second  4x8 piece of plywood. Once this is done you also have the start of the deck as well. We followed our original template and made a total of six of them. Once we did that we had to use scrap to screw the two pieces of wood together to complete the template. Once all the transition templates were built we got started on the flat bottom.

We decided to go with a 12 foot wide by 13 foot long flat bottom made up of 2x4’s and got all those in place and assembled. Once the flat was done we were able to start mounting our 6 transition sections to the flat bottom and the basic skeleton was done. We then started putting in some 2x6’s for our ribbing to stabilize our skeleton. Allot of people use a combination of nails and screws but if you ever want to take this sucker apart and move it you are better off spending the extra time and using screws. (Note: Make sure you have both a powered drill and a few cordless drills with batteries charging as driving 2.5 inch screws sucks up some juice for sure!) As you can see from the pictures we were working on rocks so we had to push them up underneath the flat bottom to get it all stable and in place. Once that was done we screwed the transitions into the flat bottom and we really started to cruise.

Its not all gravy after that, you need to make sure you allow enough room for the coping to meet you sheeting as well as the deck so this is a good time to cut out a place in the transitions so the coping has a place to rest. We went ahead and used galvanized 2.5 inch steel coping instead of regular steel coping so that it doesn’t rust. The coping was pretty pricy and only came in 21 foot lengths so we needed two 21’ pieces of galvanized steel coping which ran about $100 each. For the wood on the decks we used ¾  plywood which was supported by 4x4’s and for the surface we used 2 layers of ½ inch plywood and topped it off with a layer of 1/8 masonite.

We started off by putting the first layer of ½ ply down first and this one needs to sink into studs for stability so you might have to double up on some of your 2x6 ribs to make this happen. Once you get closer to the coping and make your last cut, you can screw in your coping and but up your first layer of ½ inch ply to your ¾ inch deck. We got lucky and had a drill press to drill out the coping and you use a bigger hole on the top of the coping to fit the screw threw, and a smaller hole for it to sink into you 2x6 support. Once we had run our first layer of ½ inch ply, set our coping and screwed in our deck we were about 7 hours into the project.

The hard part was now done and we had to apply the second sheet of ½ inch ply. It’s not as important to sink the screws into the studs on the second layer so you can use shorter screws. The second layer of ply is offset from the first layer to provide stability so you will need to make some cuts and this part requires a lot of screws so hopefully you can gather about 5 people to do this but we had 3. Once we put in another 400 or so screw for layer 2 it was time to put on masonite. Normally you would have to use a countersink so that the final layer doesn’t have screws sticking up but with 1/8 inch masonite you can just preset your drill and automatically countersink everything. We had about 32 screws in every piece of masonite which also provided stability and a few hours later we had a perfect mini with no kinks and it was stable enough to support my fat ass at 235 pounds.