Really good and sensible advice, Roy. I already told homey I wanted nothing
to do with building his ramps out of 3" channel. I also advised him to
forget building them 8' long, to make them 11' long. - GWE

RoyJ wrote:

Problem is that skid steers have really quirky loading factors when you
are trying to go down a ramp in tight quarters. In this case, you would
need to figure the full load on the downward axle, the majority of that
load on one side when you correct a bit, a bit momentum hit when you try
and stop coming down the ramp, and then some factor of safety.

As for weight, if you used 4" with 2"x 3/16"x12" crosspieces, it's
still going to weigh around 12 pounds per foot or 100 pounds MINIMUM for
an 8' section.

best thing to do is see what some of the other ramps are like. This
whole calculation is so dependent on the situation that trial pieces
will be necessary to get the best balance between weight and strength.



Grant Erwin wrote:

Bugs wrote:

The loading on this type of ramp is not uniform. It is a moving
concentrated load. Whole different [design] ballgame.



Not really. You start out figuring the uniform load (or looking it up
in a table), then you divide your max allowable load by 2 to translate
it to the worst case (load concentrated midspan) then you add your
fudge factor for dynamic loading (i.e. moving). The tables all list
uniform load, that's why I asked for that spec. Your statement is
completely correct, of course. - GWE