We spent the day fabricating giant steel pallets and then mounting the themed posts to them in preparation for the last shipment for the NEB's Fun World Bowling alley project. We'll be loading the semi trailer on Wednesday and sending them off Thursday. In two weeks Peter and I will fly to Oshawa for a few days of site work to wrap up this phase of the project. It has been both challenging and fun. We can hardly wait to see all of the pieces assembled, as it was far too large to do in our work space. There are approximately five thousand square feet of dimensional theme work in this phase of the project.
Success at last
I've been working on the design for the little rail truck for months. I've settled on two designs but once I started fabrication things didn't look nearly as good as I had imagined. Each time it was back to the drawing board. The difficulty is the small wheel sets I have on hand. They are the most expensive part of a train build and I need to work with what I have. I decided to do up a C-cab truck steamer and finished the design last night.
This morning as I walked out to the shop for some playtime the perfect solution came to me in a flash. The little model T with the side car would look great with two sets of tandem wheels. I would shorten the hood area and open it up to the cab to provide a little more leg room. Then I would hide the single cylinder gas powered motor under a box which would sit on the rear deck of the truck. I whipped up a scaled sketch to prove the concept and then struck up the plasma cutter and grinder to take the previous attempt apart. Once I had the previous version of the truck in pieces I cut a little more steel and started welding everything back together once more. In a couple of hours I had it all tacked together again and the results made me smile.
Pieces of Eight
Building a theme park involves hundreds of people and many creative teams from around the world. Three of the rides were manufactured in Italy. Each of these was an 'off the shelf ride' which was cosmetically modified to fit into the theme of our park. The spinning coaster called 'Pieces of Eight' was changed two ways. One of the loops of the figure eight track was enlarged to provide a larger safety envelope inside. This allowed us to place the Crow's Nest (A spinning drop tower ride) inside the spinning coaster envelope. The second modification was to create custom bodies on the cars to better fit the ride into our story. We were careful to not change the dimensions of the cars, seats nor mechanical components in any way so as to not require total and very expensive ride engineering and certification.
I first did a sketch of a broken barrel based on the dimensions of the normal cars. This was sent to Italy along with a prototype of the 'Piece of Eight' (an oversized gold medallion) As the talented Italian sculptures worked on the prototype car they sent us pictures. These we marked up with notes to guide the needed changes. Once the ride was finished we looked things over and sent our approval. Everything was then crated up and shipped to the Caribbean. This past week the forty foot containers were emptied at long last and the assembly of the ride began. We got our first peek at the completed cars aside from the photos we had seen previously. They looked great!
