How To Make A Snowboard Jump

WARNING: The following instructions must be used with common sense and reasonable safety measures to avoid personal injuries - reasonable safety should always come first, but if you'd like more information, please visit http://www.videojug.com/terms/terms.

Hi, my name is Ali McMorland. I built a park for Hemel Ski Centre, I built a park for FBB and put on events through FBB, and I work as a snowboard coach on a Friday at the Hemel Snow Centre, of which this is where we are today, and I'm going to teach you today how to build a jump. Okay, so the fundamentals to building a jump.

To make it easier on yourselves you want to find a place that's got a nice landing already. If you were to go out to, say, a hill, you'd want to find a place that had maybe a little bit of flat but then had a nice landing, so that you could build a kicker at the front of the flat, so you'd get the flat and then land on your landing that is already there. The next thing you want to work out is whether you're building a height jump or whether you're building a distance jump.

The difference is a distance jump is for distance, so that's to give you length and to shoot you over a bigger distance, so you'd want less of a whip on the kicker, which I'll show you later, what a whip is. The other one is a height jump, which is designed to not throw you far but to throw you up, so that's going to be really whippy, and that's just literally going to throw you up and then again back down on your landing. Okay, here we have a kicker that was made earlier today.

The fundamentals of this kicker is that it is a distance kicker, not a height kicker, so it's not got very much whip on it. The whip is normally found at the top here, and basically this hasn't got much whip so it's pretty flat and it sends you far. Whereas, a whippy kicker would then obviously come up like this, and then the higher you want to go the more of a whip you put on.

To build this type of jump you want to get a load of snow together, and literally you want to just pat it down. Once it's in, once you've got enough snow to meet this sort of height you want to get your shovel. You want to get your shovel and literally you want to pat and drag, which is to apply pressure from the top and drag all of the way to the bottom.

This gives you the shape of the kicker itself, obviously with this you can adjust that by putting on more snow or taking snow off, if you want to give it a bit of a whip put snow at the top. But fundamentally it is pat and drag to make this solid. If you want to make your kicker, if you're doing it indoors and your snow doesn't really stick too great together, you want to put water on the kicker itself, which is what's happened here.

If you come in closer you can see that this is pretty much solid ice right now and this has basically been put on maybe half of an hour, an hour ago, and it only takes about thirty minutes, forty-five minutes for your kicker to be nice and ready to go. Obviously, test your jump and hope everything goes well. And that's how you build a snowboard jump.