A way of laying out a berm
I’ve been struggling to figure out how you work out the right radius for a berm for ages now. But today, I think I’ve figured out the basics of laying out a berm using the measurement of the corner across the apex.
- Layout the tracks, coming into and out of where you want the corner. Make sure that your guide lines cross so you know the area you’ll be working in.
- Measure a straight line across the inner apex of the corner and all the way out to the start of the corner and the finish of the corner. We’ll call this ‘a’.
- Join up the two points where the incoming and outgoing track cross to give us a guide line that intersects the inner and outer apex’s. Then divide ‘a’ by two. We’ll call this ‘b’. Take the length of ‘b’ from the start of the corner to where is meets the apex line.
- Where ‘b’ meets the apex guideline is the centre point around which we’ll layout the berm and ‘b’ is the radius for it.
It needs some real world testing but the immediate advantages of laying out a berm using this method are that the curve of the berm is constant rather than changing through the corner and forcing the rider to adjust their course, and that it is fairly simple to do with just a length of rope and a stake.