![]() For my cart, it ended up having 24 wheels to account for all that. But if you’re making a track that goes up and down and left and right, it takes a lot more. If you made a track that just went left and right, without any hills, you’d need wheels that go left and right, like a car. Weirdly enough, it was the cart that gave him the most problems: “If you made just a straight track, with hills going up and down, you’d only need wheels that would articulate up and down. While the track took three months to plan, Sales says that it only took about two months to build, and consists of just PVC pipe and wood. He also started with the end of the track first, which he says was important because then he could make the hills larger as he went, as opposed to doing the bigger, more difficult hills first. Like, if you drop something 10 feet, you can calculate how far it will go, and there’s also g-force calculation for spinning things around in a curve, and since my coaster wasn’t a loop, you never put the end of the track any lower than the start because then you can’t fall off the end.” It was still largely trial-and-error, though, as Sales says that he’d build about 10 feet of track, see how it worked, then build another 10 feet, and so on. To build a roller coaster, Sales explains that it takes a knowledge of physics and algebra, but that, “the formulas are really easy. ![]() Years later, when he was the father of two young children, Sales poured his curiosity into a project to entertain them. He credits an influential high-school physics teacher with his career path as an engineer and says that whenever he’d visit an amusement park, he’d wonder how something worked, and from there, wondered if he himself could build something like it. Sales tells me that “curiosity, physics and problem-solving” was his motivation for his backyard project. Bruce Sales, California - The Speed Weasel And now that we’re all facing a summer in lockdown, these seemingly kooky hobbyists are looking like prescient geniuses who are better prepared to cope with a summer at home than just about anyone else. ![]() No, they decided to bring the experience home by building their own backyard roller coaster or, in some cases, an entire backyard amusement park. And we would have wrapped up the day with the huge Neighborhood Parade.īut even my love of theme parks pales in comparison to these guys, who weren’t content to visit a park only once in a while. My wife, daughter and I are season-pass holders at Sesame Place, and by this point in the year, we likely would have already been there two or three times to ride Captain Cookie’s High C’s Adventure and Oscar’s Rotten Rusty Rockets. In 1915, for example, Coney Island’s Rough Riders roller coaster-so named for President Teddy Roosevelt’s calvary during the Spanish-American Civil War- killed three people when a car went off the track 30 feet in the air.As a guy who loves Disney World, Six Flags and just about any other kind of theme park, it looks like this summer is shaping up to be a bit lacking. and abroad: A roller coaster collision in Spain that injured 33, another gondola accident in which a teenager fell 25 feet at a Six Flags in New York state, and two water ride accidents-one in California and one in the U.K.-that injured a 10-year-old and killed an 11-year-old.Īmusement park rides debuted in the late 19th century, and accidents on them have been documented since at least the early 20th century. As Kevin Lui noted in Time, there have already been at least four serious amusement park accidents since May of 2017, both in the U.S. Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) described it as “the worst tragedy in the history of the fair,” and called for all of the rides to be shut down while authorities investigate them. But on July 26, 2017, a whole row of the gondola fell off and two seatbelts malfunctioned, sending people into a freefall, according to The Washington Post. The pendulum ride was supposed to give passengers a thrill by swinging them in a circle on a gondola on the Columbus fairgrounds. ![]() Most recently, an Ohio State Fair attraction known as the Fire Ball malfunctioned, killing one rider and injuring seven others. Yet for almost as long, these rides have led to accidents that are scarily dangerous. For over a century, roller coasters and other amusement park rides have provided thrills by walking the line between scary and fun.
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