General Amusement Industry Thread
I never said it was a bad rough, I didn't mind either of them, they just both vibrate and shuffle way more than a brand new ride with modern trains should. I worry that they'll get even rougher as time goes on, to the point of unbearableness, due to the train destroying the track in a similar way to PTCs.
Honestly, I think all GravityKraft does is do what the parks were doing before, which is go out and hire the people to build the ride. I don't think they actually have a crew like GCI does. They hire the people, and then send one of their engineers out to oversee the project.
To me, track work is probably the most important element to a wooden roller coaster being smooth. The bogie POV of Mine Blower was mentioned. That ride has poor track work. If you look at that POV, watch the train go up the lift hill. The reason the bogie system bounces back and forth is because the the lift track isn't straight. When GCI builds a coaster, they build one side of the track first, then measure across to build the other side of the track so it's precisely built to what it supposed to be. Gravity Group rides are more old school, where they lay the track and then make the cuts kinda of eyeballing it. If someone's doing the track work, and they don't have a whole lot of experience, it's probably not going to be very good. In Mind Blower's case, you look at how quickly they got that ride up, that seems to tell me that the whole thing was rushed.
While were on the subject of track work. I find it interesting that Holiday World is using suggestions from The Gravity Group to make track improvements to The Voyage this off-season while using track building techniques they learned from GCI during The Legend's refurb to lay the new track.
ZeroGravity55 posted on February 10th, 2018
I find it interesting that Holiday World is using suggestions from The Gravity Group to make track improvements to The Voyage this off-season while using track building techniques they learned from GCI during The Legend's refurb to lay the new track.
Best of both worlds haha. I love that they care so much about keeping their woodies in the best possible shape.
Too bad all parks don't treat their wooden coasters this well.
What annoys me is that the biggest chains, Six Flags and Cedar Point, who you'd think would have the most money, seem to care the least about spending that money to properly service their wooden coasters. Meanwhile you have much smaller, independent parks like Holiday World, Kennywood, and Knoebels going to pains to keep their woodies smooth as glass and as filled with airtime as they were on their opening days.
Corporate stinginess?
The wooden coasters in those smaller parks are more important to the park, a bigger investment relative to the rest. They're often an afterthought or just not very significant in the bigger parks. Why spend your budget fixing up an old wooden coaster that's not much of a draw based on ride experience or stats when you can buy something new and shiny, or fix up infrastructure like pathways where more people will notice or otherwise appreciate the difference? Not saying it's right or wrong, it just is what it is.
That makes sense, although I strongly disagree with that business tactic. Secondary to the park's success or not, I'd rather see classic coasters maintained properly by the industry juggernauts instead of being left to become shaky, painful messes. In my opinion as a non-businessman, the money involved would be 100% worth it.
I was utterly blown away riding Jack Rabbit for the first time a couple of years ago. I didn't even think it possible for such an old ride to run so smoothly and deliver so much airtime. I suppose my frustration comes from the juxtaposition between that experience and the lost potential of the lackluster wooden coasters at so many larger parks. I find myself sympathizing with the poor machines after disembarking - it's not their fault they beat me to a pulp and landed themselves at the bottom of my personal coaster rankings. In another world, things could've been different between us.
I think I'm getting too into this hobby.
I was going through my pics and found a bunch of photos I took during a behind-the-scenes tour of Nitro at the Riding of the Bull Event in 2016. Yeah, kinda late, but I figured I would share them with y'all. I put together a video of the best pics if anyone is interested. Some good photos of unusual supports and angles you don't often see. If anyone is interested, I can share the images for download.
Does anyone know how they possibly maintain the innumerable screws on large wooden coasters? I know track checks are performed daily, but what's the procedure for inspecting every little connection?
I know in some places they will put a little line of paint over the connection so that they can easily tell if it has moved if the seal in the paint is broken in any way. I'm not sure this is done on all wooden coasters but I've definitely seen it in a few places.
Sounds more tedious than clean up crews at large stadiums.
Wooden coasters generally use massive nails I believe, and the sheer number of them is probably partially for redundacy, so one broken one won't make a huge difference. This, presumably, allows for checks to be slightly less thorough, only looking for major issues.
I see, I figured redundancy was a key component in reducing the amount of required maintenance.
In this video you can see that Efteling check and tighten every single screw on Joris en de Draak once a year. I assume all parks do the same...
To my knowledge (not a definite source, but I am an engineering consultant in a related field):
There's a difference between the daily checks that parks perform and the less frequent (annual or less) checks. I think Norwegian Coasterfan is getting at that point. To my knowledge, the primary focus of the daily check is to make sure the nails that hold the rail to the wood have not lifted and pound in any that have. I'm sure they keep a look out of other things as well, but I think that is the primary purpose as the rail receives the most abuse and lifted nails can do a lot of damage to the train and riders if left unchecked. It doesn't include inspection of the entire support structure like an annual maintenance check would.
intim305 posted on March 3rd, 2018
I know in some places they will put a little line of paint over the connection so that they can easily tell if it has moved if the seal in the paint is broken in any way. I'm not sure this is done on all wooden coasters but I've definitely seen it in a few places.
To my knowledge, the paint isn't so much to check for bolt slippage but to check for bold pre-tension. The amount of tensile force in a bolt is specified in a design to make the stresses in the joint behave properly. A common way to ensure enough pre-load is on the bold is to finger tighten the bolt, paint or scratch a line across the bolt and nut, and then turn the nut a particular amount of turns based on the necessary pre-load and the bolt geometry. It can be a cheaper alternative than giving every worker a sensitive torque wrench that they accidentally break and have to replace every month...
iSatnav posted on March 4th, 2018
Wooden coasters generally use massive nails I believe, and the sheer number of them is probably partially for redundacy, so one broken one won't make a huge difference. This, presumably, allows for checks to be slightly less thorough, only looking for major issues.
Generally, structural redundancy isn't for something like this. Structures are designed to withstand a particular load (the design load). This load is statistically calculated and then a safety factor is applied to help account for "unknowns" such as property variation or reasonably unforeseeable loads. This is really where structural redundancy lies. Structures are not then designed with additional redundancy such that part of the structure may fail and still bear the design loads. Generally you just barely handle design loads and that's it. If part of the structure fails and design loads can't be handled, that's a serious problem.
For Lagoon's Wooden Coaster it gets a check by the park carpenters everyday, followed by the mechanic crew both walk the entire track checking everything out. Lagoon is very through in its safety checks.
Question/Discussion
B&M are considered only coaster 'designers' with manufacturing/fabrication for their rides being handled 3rd party. In the US this is by Clermont Steel Fabricators, yet who its it in Europe? CoasterForce has an article saying that their 'European rides are constructed in Switzerland by G-Tec, formerly Giovanola.' However I cant find any reference to a suitable company by this name?
This may sound like a random question. Background is i'm building an ontology for coaster terminology and I was describing the difference between a designer and manufacturer. Was trying to think of a good example but then got sidetracked by this! This seemed like a good place to ask.
Unfortunately I also don't know for sure who manufactures the tracks for B&M in Europe, I read Giponni somewhere, at least they have B&M track style coaster pictures on their website. Somewhere it was claimed that B&M is actually an engineering office. I guess they also do the layout design and stuff, but that's not necessarily the case and maybe you should also consider this for your ontology. There might be also more than one manufacturer involved, one for tracks and one for supports for example.
I'm pretty sure that B&M contracts Clermont for all of their track and supports now seeing that all recent B&M's ship from the US.
^ Yep. There was recently track for fenix and I believe Valkyria at clermont
All of B&M's track is manufactured at Clermont
GTec doesn't exist anymore. They were right by Bolliger&Mabillard, in the Switzerland city of Monthey:
Yellow square is the B&M office building (still is today), and orange circle is the former manufacturing plant of Giovanola/GTec.
Aside from the track, they also have sub-contractors for the trains, seat foam, wheels, chain-lift, sensors, PLC...
EDIT An article and a video of Clermont Steel, interesting to watch.
Oh right thats interesting, seems strange to ship from the states to Europe but I suppose having different manufactures would lead to slight variance in rides.?
@bestdani For my ontology its not defined at to design and manufacturer involvement, it was only for a uni assignment.
@KingRCT3 That video is an interesting insight, thanks for sharing!
Well, often companies have different manufactures, so I don't know why they chose to keep only Clermont.
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Unrelated, but this behind-the-scene of a ride safety video (namely Space Mountain Mission II) is really interesting:
It's incredible how far they go for like 2 seconds of footage.
@JAKool I didn't think Mindblower rode bad at all. Albeit it was fairly rough, it almost felt to me how Boulder Dash was where the roughness of it just adds to the overall intense pacing of the layout*. To me it wasn't much of a uncomfortable roughness, but more of a "this is out of control" roughness. I feel like MB is one of those rides where if it was completely smooth then it would be much less interesting. It has that old, almost unsafe feel of a wooden coaster with some crazy ass elements and good airtime, and that's what made it so enjoyable for me.
*Referring to when I last rode BD which was back in 2014.