I’m not much use with designing trails, but have roped in 2 or 3 blokes from work who are more than up for helping out. And a friend of a friends dad owns a digger rental company, and can get us decent rates if it came to it…

Banana – We will be using a MTB track building specialist digger driver, not a general digger man. The most important thing to me is to make sure the trails flow with a nice rhythm. This is best done at the build time.

dusterbenny – I will let you know when we need man power. There may be a small delay while we go through the funding applications.

WCA – I’m southampton based part of the time and while i lack even the most basic skillz to perform on a pump track i would be very happy to volunteer some time to help with any manual labour.

haven’t read the thread so appologies if any of this has already been mentioned but if I was designing a downhill pump track I’d design it to require no pedalling at all (for good riders) or braking, basically have the first pump bumps/berms leading into doubles, tables etc. that get progressively larger, keep the gradient mellow using turns to control speed for example, and at the end of a big line an uphill facing berm into a 270deg berm back round to the next line to control speed. clever use of whoops/pump bumps to gain speed from rather than just gravity will allow you to build a longer more interesting track for the height/gradient of your hill too, also some straights need to have 2 lines IMO ie. a beginner line and a pro line. you’ll need a good rider and builder to do this well.

GW – I have been reading Pump Track Nation which describes how to build such trails. I have been fiddling with the design so the trails go more laterally across the hill rather than down the trail like the last two designs (look back a page for pictures).

I am trying to get 2, maybe three, trails with various lines. This will allow one to be more advanced than the other. I see the advanced one being a battle between your brain saying hit the brakes and your mind saying I can ride this. You will need to brake occasionally, or not pump so hard.

Unfortunately fotopic is down at the moment so I can’t post my latest ideas.