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Build Your Own Roller Coaster
Usquebaugh submitted this link to a guy who built his own roller coaster. The guy builds grain elevators for a living and - let me take a wild, city-slicker guess - they probably use some sort of rail system for transporting grain, so.... Update: 03/14 14:29 GMT by M : We overran the bandwidth limit on his webpage - sorry buddy! From the comments below I see a mirror and another mirror.
CHeck out Lugnet.com .Someone recently just made an all-Lego roller coaster, using monorail(or is it train?) parts and it does everything. Loop de loops, the works. Often passengers fall out, but it works. Motors control everything!
Actually rails aren't used to transport grain at all. We use augers to do that task. An auger is basically a sheet metal tub with a long stationary screw inside it. The bottom end is placed on one location where the grain is poured into. The screw inside rotates slowly and pulls the grain up the tub to the top where it just spills out into the top of a silo.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
uhm, obvously you're a city-slicker computer guy :)
the rust you see is called 'flash rust'. Once you've welded any two pieces of steel together you grind down the welds to a nice flat surface. well that's if you want it to look nice, or it's part of some crazy redneck homebrew roller-coaster. Once the steel has been ground nice and flat, it's very prone to 'flash' rusting, where a very very thin layer of rust forms over the exposed parts. See, most steel is painted or coated or has already had it's surface treated in some way. even the heat from the steel's fabrication process can 'cure' the outter layer of steel to slow (not stop, but slow) rust a little. But newly ground steel loves to soak up O2 and rust, esp. if you are using water to cool the welds so the whole frame doesn't warp from heat.
This article reminds me of one of my favorite jokes ever:
What's the last thing a redneck says before he dies?
Hey, everyone, watch this!
(I'm a bit of a redneck, and as such, I relise that most rednecks laugh at redneck humor. Please laugh too, and don't worry about my being offensive)
And once it moves from the Elevator to the flour mill (a good number are built side by side for a very good reason :-) and passes through cleaning and tempering, it all starts moving through pneumatic blowlines.
And for longer distance moving under the elevators, ya got drag conveyors to move it, and elevator legs to move it upwards.
Nice to meet someone else who's been stuck doing Industrial Automation for Grain Elevators :-) (I've done *WAY* too many of them!)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
It's probably not Kosher but I was able to snag some of the images and mirror them. You can find them here.
Hey Everyone; I'm the webmaster of the site you all just slashdotted. I thought I'd come on here and answer some of the questions. First off the guy who built the coaster was tired of waiting in line at parks like Six Flags so he decided to build his own so he wouldn't have to. He builds grain elevators and is a welder so he accquired enough parts to build the coaster and it was actually pretty solid. He's had a few problems with that style track (very simmilar to track made by Arrow Dynamics) so his next coaster is going to use a different design which should take care of roughness and stress on the structure. I was unable to ride it because there was some problems with the lift and the fact that it was 30 degrees out but my son Bond rode the second half which consisted of a downward helix(he loved it). The car is custom welded and the seat is from a catepillar tractor with a thick seat belt. Unfortunately as most of you know my site is now down for the rest of the month and my regular visitors have nowhere to go. Since you guys knocked out the site, I wonder if you'd be willing to help me get it back up and running? My paypal account is under my e-mail which is Raven_Rider@negative-g.net and if you want to contribute I'll buy more bandwidth so you all can see. Also if you have any questions I can be reached at the e-mail listed above and I'll be more than happy to answer them. Sincerely Paul B. Drabek Raven_Rider@negative-g.net Negative G Roller Coasters and Amusement Parks www.Negative-G.Net
Got this from someone else's mirror.. i tried to get the actuall page, but mozilla cache's funny and I lost the pictures.
Kenny
I think you're talking about metal storm...
Their website is here.
it's an electronic round ignition system that lets them stack lots of rounds in each barrel and lots of barrels together and then fire them in a way it won't just all blow up.
but the effect isn't all that different from a claymore mine.
I'm pretty sure they advertise a potential 1,000,000 rounds a minute (as opposed to your seconds), and have built "proof of concept" but not the actual 1,000,000 round a minute "guns".
Not to demean metal storm's work, or the other points you made, just wanted to clear it up a little.
They certainly are Australian.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Perhaps /. could come up with some sort of caching system so the sites that are overwhemed could be accessed at least in the form they were in when it was posted
Sorry if you don't believe me. Anyone can check me out online. I own the domain for www.negative-g.net which is the site you all slashdotted and I'm also a regular poster on Rec.roller-coaster and have been so since 1996. Go check me out there. I'm just getting pissed that you people took my site down and some are now talking about taking it down in April which is when I'll have a bunch of updates from parks that I'm going to then so it'll be another month before my regular visitors can get to my site.
In this case: mg = mv^2 / r
The equations for centripetal acceleration and conservation of energy show that for a frictionless track, the initial height above the top of the loop must be exactly half the radius of the loop to achieve zero-G.
So for this track, with 20ft. drop and a 5ft. diameter loop, you have height = 2 * loop_radius, so you have 4 times the energy needed to achieve zero-G for a fricionless track.
Even if the coaster looses 75% of it's energy due to friction by the time it reaches the loop's apex, the rider will still feel zero-G and the coaster will work.
The amount of energy dissipated due to non-rigidity of the track is hard to calculate, but isn't of necessity that huge. If the wheels this is suspended on are well lubricated I don't see why this wouldn't work quite well.
Just in case you want to do the math...