Building & Riding the Backyard Pucker Pad!

This straightaway comes before the penis jump in the rock garden. It is a gap in a relentless attack of bike park technical features. Our plan is to keep adding to this lineup until it's packed with features from top to bottom, so for starters, this gap needs. To be full of something, the last feature we built into Roto-Rooter was the whale tail, which consists of a lip, a wooden whale tail and a ground landing, it's the club sandwich version of a double with something really interesting in the medium I want to do. Something similar here, but instead of a whale tail in the middle, we're going to build a wooden lily pad that you can jump over to clear the space.

This will require a little more space, so we'll start by pruning the rhododendrons. and widening the corridor it doesn't rain much and I'm under the trees so I'm going to continue like we did in the whale tail we'll work backwards and build a landing first I have no idea if working backwards is the established method for

building

doubles, but I find it much easier to visualize a feature when the landing is already in place, things are moving very well, but several times I have needed to grab all my camera gear and run in, which means running the steamroller could be a little messy that didn't work at all this will be one of those projects that is limited by the weather while we stay optimistic and wait for the sun to do its job I will build the wooden lily pad that is the centerpiece of our feature it is a structure simple made of three ten-foot boards, two-by-eights, and a few four-foot boards laid crosswise for a club sandwich feature like this. 10 feet long is the minimum I would want to make as a centerpiece since it is just under double that. length of a trail bike giving you enough time to land on it, preload it and jump off the other side.

For comparison, the whale tail is 16 feet long and feels pretty fast talking about the whale tail for the that we are using it. estimate the design of our new feature, since we know that the whale tail works, we can use it as a rough guide for the angle and height of our platform, but I have never built anything like this before and there is always the very scary possibility of that won't work, it's funny, 10 feet sure seems a lot bigger when it's wide, watch out for the gutter, oh god, it's okay, we gotta move, oh, we're here, yeah, how sweet, right here, there, oh Oh my god, that sucks, guys.

We are in uncharted territory. I have to take this thing, mount it on some poles in the ground, and set it at the right angle to ship it. I don't really know what that angle is, so I have to guess, I just have to look. Strap it on and find out, We're going to get on and off this thing like a frog on a lily pad, except it's a lot scarier, We're

building

a

pucker

deck at the Whistler Mountain Bike Park, There are several dirt structures very similar to this one and we rode Uno at Dirt Merchant is the only experience I can turn to to figure this out.

We already know how high the end needs to be since we have a landing, but calculating the height of the starting point will take a lot of guesswork, so everything is in order. place, but the thing moves quite a bit, so we're going to have to hold it down and then once we hold it down, it should be super solid with our landing pad and full gather, all we need is a lip, I need to make this a smooth and pleasant transition. that ends here and allows us to jump towards the lily leaf the lip will be very small and very soft it is designed to keep you straight and fast so that you land right in the middle of the lily leaf I thought it would be fun to build a dirt lip for a change and I quickly remembered why we usually build everything with wood that doesn't work at all.

Once this edge dries it will be hard as concrete but until then I need a trick to make it work don't you think we're going to have a problem with them splitting well you want to stay on the right one okay go up a little , this one is definitely drier, yes, come up, yes, there you go. yeah, I'll probably keep working oh yeah, this is going to be fine, accessing a feature for the first time is usually stressful, but this time it's worse. I have never built a lily pad in the top box or whatever you call this and the The only example I have written is on the opposite end of this continent.

I don't think I was fast enough, no, no, to make things even more difficult. All this rain has affected the trails, so until we fix them, we will be. Using the Kevin jump landing to gain speed, it'll be close, my friend, even if I have enough speed there, I'm going to lose speed going up. I haven't really thought about that, I actually think trying to do a pedal stroke. you have to put the pedal on this, it's not that, okay, rub, no problem and you landed perfectly in the transition, in fact now that I can personally vouch for the

pucker

ed pad it should be safe to let Alex have a chance. but dialing your focus on a feature like this is absolutely essential.

I see what you're saying about not being able to get much speed. Hit this berm as hard and soft as you can and turn the crank. Oh, we're dead. Wow, you were going fast enough, I thought okay, I might as well do it and I said, "Wait, don't do it if you get mad, you're a good man, oh damn, that was such a good email, I don't know what." I don't know what just happened, although if there's one thing Alex got out of the airbag, it was practicing the rescue. It's amazing how far a little experience will take you, so I didn't jump on it, I tried to just get on the back wheel.

I fit in and took all my speed, I guess that's what happens. The headphones are a little loose with the jump. I could almost tell that Alex was ready to put it all together. At first we were landing on the pucker pad and then jumping in two separate moves, but the more reps you get on this, the more fluid it becomes, the best part about pucker pad is that there's a ton of stuff before and after, but it needs a lot of work not to mention Kevin hasn't put together anything we've built since the spring. that's a great excuse for us to bring in more dirt, hit it with the shovel a little, make this line perfect and destroy it from start to finish.

If you want to join us for that massive day of digging and

riding

session, be sure to subscribe and watch. how we create the rest of these features, check out the Burn Peak playlist at the end of this video. Thanks for joining me today and I'll see you next time.