Storage shed ramps are a part of life that people don’t think about until they need to use them. Sort of like a bath but not as serious. Not being able to use the toilet has certain catastrophic implications, while not being able to use a shed ramp means taking the lawnmower to the garage, where its biggest crime will be competing with the car for valuable storage space.
Shed ramps are built with edge stirrups from the shed wall below the door, down to the floor. These boards are called stringers. I don’t know why they are called stringers, they just are. I know the rope isn’t very strong, surely not strong enough to hold a lawn mower, so it doesn’t come from the rope. But when you put a board on its edge and use it to support a ramp or stair, it’s called a stringer. Anyway, after running the stringers from the shed floor level to the ground level and then placing deck boards over them, you will have a shed ramp. It’s that easy. The only hard part is calculating the slope of the shed ramp and the resulting cuts in the wooden stringers.
A good shed ramp has the perfect slope. Not so steep that you have to check and see if you’re pushing the mower off a cliff and not so shallow that you stick out into the yard enough to set up lawn chairs and have a barbecue. The perfect slope is about 3 inches in height for every foot of travel. What this means is that the floor of a shed that is 12 inches off the ground would have a ramp that is 4 feet long. Of course this slope is purely personal. I’ve had good luck with that and so I’m preaching it as the “law of shed ramp slope”. So, after you determine the slope of your shed ramp, you can start figuring out how to cut all those angles so that the ramp stringers sit flat on the ground and so that the top of the stringers sits flush against the ground. shed. wall.
The trick to getting these cuts right is to have someone else do the math for you, and then use their knowledge to build your ramp. Using a graph that has all the slopes of the ramps solved for is one of the easiest ways to get a shed ram with a perfect slope. Simply calculate the floor to floor height and then follow the diagram to learn the lengths of the stringer cutouts. Then mark the cuts on your 2×6 board and cut.
After cutting the first stringer, you should test it by placing it against the shed wall and checking the cuts to see if they lay flat on the ground and against the shed wall. Remember to make sure the ground where the rail of the shed ramp touches the ground is flat and level, otherwise the ramp will not sit flat on the ground. Once you’re happy with the first rung of the ramp, you’ll take it and trace its outline onto the other rungs and then cut them.
Once the ramp stringers are cut, you are ready to screw them to the ledger board that will hold the stringers to the shed wall. They are bolted before everything is attached to the shed wall so the connection between the stringer and the stringers is stronger than if you bolted them to the stringer after the stringer is attached to the shed wall. Once the stringer and stringers are screwed in, you are ready to use 3″ long lag screws to screw the stringer board to the shed wall. Use 1 lag screw approximately every 12″ starting 4″ from the end of the stringer. This will give you 4 bolts on a 4′ wide shed ramp.
The final step is to lay the deck boards. I would recommend using the 2×6 lumber for the decking boards, such as a patio deck. Simply attach them to the stringers with 2-3 inch long screws in each stringer. Deck boards should be spaced with at least 1/8″ of space between boards so water can run down the ramp and also allow boards to expand and contract with the weather.
When all the deck boards are installed, you are ready to use your new shed ramp. Simple as it is, there’s a certain satisfaction in rolling your mower down a ramp you built. I would recommend trying the ramp only a few times because getting the mower in and out of the shed more than 4 times in a day constitutes a need to go to the bathroom.
