First Impressions: Blair Line's Wood Loading Ramp - Updated!

This is a description of Blair Line’s Laser Cut Kit of a Wood Loading Ramp. This kit is about as simple and straight forward as you can get! It includes a single sheet of instructions, two inscribed ramp surfaces and a wood sheet containing 10 pieces for the frame of the ramp. All of these are in pairs which are glued back-to-back to form the supporting frame for the ramp.

The footprint for the ramp is 3 inches by 3/4 inch.

Here is a link to the Blair Line page for this item: http://www.blairline.com/ramp/ I obtained mine from FiferHobby and while it is not a part of their normal inventory Mike ordered it for me.

The kit comes in a clear plastic sleeve which includes a stiff piece of cardboard backing for protection. Once the kit has been built this piece of cardboard is available for a number of other purposes!

This appears to be a very good kit for first time laser-cut kit builders! It is simple and straight forward and doesn’t have a lot of small, hard to handle pieces. Yet at the same time, it does require care! If you mess up the alignment of the base of the ramp the surface pieces are not going to fit correctly. And there is not much to guide you except your eye!

It also doesn’t require painting (unless, of course, you want to paint it). The natural wood finish with a little black wash for good measure would look just fine! And that is what I plan on doing!

This blog entry will be updated once I have finished building the kit or if I come across something that negates any of the comments I have made above.

Updated October 6 2008

The ramp has now been completed and a picture is included here. It was a little more tricky to build than I had originally expected but the reason is probably that I deviated from the instructions and ran into something that is not mentioned anywhere!

I'll let you know when my web site is updated with all the details!