If there is a ridiculous backyard setup in a BMX or mountain bike edit, there is a good chance Jordan Bonifacio has had his hands on it.
Bonifacio runs Rydan Ramp Company from a small town called Salford, just south of Ingersoll off the 401. On paper, he should already be busy enough. His “real job” is building intricate architectural models for the biggest wind tunnel testing company in the world.
“My full time real job I guess you could call it is I basically build architectural models all day long and test them in a wind tunnel,” he says. “Those are fun projects to work on. I love that job actually. It’s pretty fun.”
On any given week he might be working on an eight-metre model of a suspension bridge, then driving across the province to shape someone’s dream backyard ramp.
“The ramp buildling has been almost good enough to make it full time,” he says. “But it’s hard to stretch it out over the long term, you know.”
From Cox Trails to Rydan Ramp Company
Rydan Ramp Company started the way a lot of good things in BMX and mountain biking do: messing around with friends, building whatever you can out of whatever you can find.
“I basically just started doing ramps for fun,” Bonifacio says. “It was always just with the homies and building little things here and there. Then I started getting offers to do backyard ramps and it just came to the point where people were willing to pay for the ramps.”
What started as side projects with friends escalated quickly. A call to help finish the ill-fated Epic Bike Park in Ottawa pushed him to make things “legit” with a proper business. From there, word of mouth took over.
“Since then it’s just been crazy amount of backyard parks and indoor skate parks and random ramps here and there,” he says. “The word of mouth just travels.”
The pros call when it gets serious
Bonifacio does not love name-dropping, but his client list reads like an X Games start sheet.
“There’s a lot of the big backyard ramps that you see kind of on the internet that are just epic builds,” he says. “I’ve had a lot to do with with planning and building them.”
Mike Varga was one of his first big customers.
“Varga has been my original pro customer,” Bonifacio says. “We built his ramp ten years ago originally. And since then, pretty much every year I’ve gone back to his house once or twice a year and we do something different. His property is wild.”
He has worked on Pat Casey’s…
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