The road to launching the planets most portable extreme sports ramp

ANTRIM, Northern Ireland - July 27, 2018 - PRLog -- It's been quite a few years since Phil McIntosh, the inventor of Jumpack first had his lightbulb moment, but he remembers the moment vividly.

He recalled the moment and the subsequent events that lead to the development of one of the most innovative products to hit extreme sports since the GoPro camera. Phil recalled, "it was during a holiday to a small village in Ireland when I was sitting with my kids in a park, I noticed three young BMX'ers struggling to carry a make-shift ramp comprising of a huge board piled with bricks from a house to the park". "As I watched them struggle to move this collection of objects, I remembered doing the same thing with my friends in the 70's and 80's and I couldn't believe that this was still the only option for people after all these years".

Phil, who is an ex BMX and Mountain Bike Champion has over 35 years' experience hitting ramps and had a clear vision of what he needed to create. "It needed to be many things" he told us, "strong, lightweight, suitable for all disciplines including bikes, Skate, Scooters, Snowboards, in fact anyone that enjoyed getting air". "But most of all it needed to be truly portable". "There were ramps in the marketplace that claimed to be 'portable' but they were really heavy, like 30kg's", "so it was portable if you owned a van!" "Most of these guys use their bike or skateboard as their primary mode of transport, so portable for me means they can transport it on their person as they ride or skate".

One Sunday morning Phil decided to sit down and put his ideas to paper, to try and illustrate the vision of the ramp that he held in his mind. Later that day he retired to his garage to start destroying household items to salvage the raw materials he needed to build the very first prototype. Jumpack was conceived. Now that he had a physical model of the product, a team of industrial designers in the US got to work on realizing the product.

It was around this time that Phil was given a recommendation for a company in China called RP Prototype, owned and managed by a native of Australia called Matt Gairns. "Within months, we had a prototype that actually looked like the product I had in my imagination". This was a huge step forward in the development of Jumpack as they now had a prototype they could test. Having a physical product that was representative of the original idea helped to identify issues that could not have foreseen with a basic unusable model. They discovered that one of the biggest problems with a lightweight ramp is that it moved when you hit it. "This was a major problem", Phil told us. "I realized that it was the weight of a wooden ramp that kept it in place while in use, but I had removed all of that weight to make it portable". "I ended up incorporating two custom suspension struts which are built-in to the leg mechanisms that actually absorb most of the energy generated by the rider hitting the ramp". "Once we tested this design, we knew we had it cracked, we knew we had a winning product".

In 2016 Jumpack was invited to compete in Northern Ireland's premier invention competition 'INVENT 2016', a process which took approximately 7 months. But in November of that year, Jumpack not only won their category (Engineering), but were crowned overall Champions of the entire competition! (Invent 2016 News Link http://www.catalyst-inc.org/news/jumpack-wins-invent-2016 )

Jumpack was then entered in a UK wide competition called Pitch @ Palace 6.0, organized and arranged by HRH the Duke of York. After a series of presentations at Hillsborough Castle and Harwell Campus, the Science & Innovation campus for the world famous Oxford University, Jumpack was selected as one of only 12 companies from over 400 entries to present at St James Palace in London to over 300 esteemed guests and members of the Royal family and meet HRH Queen Elizabeth II! "This was such an amazing experience, to actually have the opportunity to tell The Queen about the Jumpack project, I still have to pinch myself when I think about it". Jumpack even received an invitation to The White House in the US following the Pitch @ Palace success! More recently Jumpack was featured by the BBC in a series promoting new innovative products being developed in the UK. (Link to BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p048lm8g) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6G7JXUw9oE)



Not only is Jumpack completely portable, it is also designed to be deployed like a transformer! Although it boasts over 80 moving parts, it doesn't require assembly at location but simply 'unfolds' from its custom backpack into a ramp in around 10 seconds! This means you can't leave parts behind when it's time to move to the next location, a genuine achievement in terms of design and innovation. It's also modular, so multiple ramps can be connected to make even larger ramps! It even comes with its own GoPro attachment, so you can capture all your action.

Jumpack has already caught the attention of some of the world's biggest extreme sports stars including Tony Hawk, Chad Kagy, and Simon Tabron who have provided some amazingly positive feedback on this extremely unique product. There have also been several world-famous riders that have already offered to represent the Jumpack brand as ambassadors, some of them have already posted some incredible footage of the ramp in action. (Spencer Foresman at Woodward https://youtu.be/wMF6nj9bWkQ)

Jumpack is now available at www.jumpack.com