Start of The Journey

5/29/2014

Hello world. Yes, I know this is strange, but I have an uncanny obsession with roller coasters.  So much so I am determined to build the most accurate working replica of a wooden coaster.  And I will do this in my basement.  Each day I will blog about my thinking, sketches, progress and lessons learned.  Hopefully this journey will inspire you to take on the challenge as I did with much less frustration.

Tonight I decided, yes, yes I am going to pursue this dream.  In the past I have dabbed around with creating a working model but was not successful.  I'll display some photos in a future post. Simply put, I lost interest and the project stopped, but the dream inside is still alive and healthy.

From what I can recall from memory, the hardest part of creating the working model was understanding the physics behind the beast.  At that moment in time, I believe I was just entering high-school and was barley equipped with the knowledge of basic algebra and far from the laws of motion and structural engineering I now competently understand.  Looking back upon my first attempt, I’m quite impressed with my young naive mind. But it was a failure because I did not have the knowledge to make it work. 

Blah blah blah, ok let’s get this dream started,

The first step of creating this model is to lay out a track design that has the potential to successfully roll completely around the track.   And for this task we will use, you guessed it, math!  But, before we do the math we need to choose a scale at which to design.  In other words, how small do we want this model to be?  Scale is of concern.  Too small and construction will be tedious, the cars may not have enough inherent momentum to roll and the model would look boring.  Too large and; well who wouldn't want a full size coaster is their basement.   Seriously too large and it’s just not practical. 

I came across this YouTube video and became extremely jealous of the owner and builder of this awesome model.

He used a 1/32 scale.  Because I love plagiarizing  (how do you think I got through school folks) I will use this as a base scale for my model.  Unfortunately limited information is available about the Colorado Avalanche model on the internet.  Determining piece sizes, the way the chain works, what the cars look like, what is used for the wheels and many other details are unknown.  All we know is this guy did it, and I am way smarter than that dude.

Tonight I also began dabbing with determining relative scale of construction timber used for wooden coaster construction.  Whether it’s a security issue, proprietary information or simply not knowing where to ask, I expect finding full construction documents of a modern wooden coaster to be difficult.  Therefore, I need to improvise.  I found some photos of a wooden coaster under construction on the internet.  Using MicroStation V8i I imported them in as a raster image.  Basically, these photos acted as a background for me to draw on in computer space which is infinitely scale-able.  As this foreshadows, I was able to determine relative sizing of members by scaling and sketching over this simple photo.  

A scouring of coaster enthusiast forums has turned up the most common track gauge width, i.e. the spacing between rails is 48 inches.  That seems about right. I’ll use it.

We want to build a model. So scaling this down to 1/32 scale gives us smaller workable pieces. Now, what wood should I use for construction? Balsa, it’s light and sturdy.

Tomorrow I will work a bit more on layout and design. Later.