Slashdot Mirror
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.
Judging by the rust on that thing, I'd say this guy's life expectancy is somewhere around (now + 4 rides).
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
... this guy wins a Darwin Award ?
...
What a way to go though
- sigs are for wimps.
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!
What!!! Have you guys NO sense of adventure??? You have to die sometime... May as well have fun doing it...
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
Somehow I don't see this as being safe. Not because of the materials used for construction, but simply because a few winters of negligence will make this sucker rust right through. If I was this guy's neightbor, I'd probably ride this thing a few times, but only during the first few weeks, and definitely not after a year.
The big difference between his ride and coaster parks that make the parks safer? They have mandatory ride inspections every morning before opening. Plus I believe they are also required to do a full inch-by-inch examination at least once a year. Probably before opening in the spring.
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
I saw page 1.
I saw page 2.
I clicked on the link to page 3 and got this:
This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade". Thank you, 0catch.com
Another one bites the dust from the Slashdot effect...
/. 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... however there are copyright issues with that im sure...
Perhaps
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
And I was SURE that his roller coaster was going to be the first thing to go down. Oh well.
I posted to
This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade".
I can just see it now:
"You've currently run out of track for this roller coaster. You may purchase new track by screaming bloody murder at the top of your lungs."
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
One thing I was wondering about this - how heavy is the cart? It looks like 75% of the weight is the passenger. In larger coasters, you have an enormous amount of steel in the vehicle, so the number/size of passengers doesn't make much difference.
This guy has carefully designed the coaster so that you have just enough momentum to reach the bottom of the lift and hook on to the chain, so you don't have to ever get off and push.
I would think that if (god forbid) a small child were to ride, the difference in friction and wind resistance would leave him with quite a bit of velocity still at the end of the ride. If the vehicle were heavier, it wouldn't make much difference right?
It's probably not Kosher but I was able to snag some of the images and mirror them. You can find them here.
First -
Download Scream Machines (http://screammachinesgame.com) or No Limits (You have to buy it, http://nolimitscoaster.com)
Then visit my site, and find over 2000 coasters created by other people.
TODO: Something witty here...
Denial Of Service and/or Displayed On Slashdot?
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
Ummmm...first off I'm the guy you all have slashdotted. Secondly I saw it go through the entire circuit several times. It's a 20 foot drop followed by a 10 foor loop followed by a small hill that's about 5 feet high then a downward helix to the lift. It works. I'm a coaster enthusiast and I've built several coasters using coaster design programs (No Limits is the most realistic - www.nolimitscoaster.com) and I built an exact replica of it and it worked there as well. This is not a hoax! Paul B. Drabek Raven_Rider@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.'
This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade".
;)
I don't know what Hitchhiker book Douglas Adams wrote it in - but there was this floating party that literally floated above a planet, causing all sorts of havoc. Whenever it needs supplies, the party would raid some poor country, take all their booze, then float away.
Slashdot is so like that. Its a floating party that hijacks poor websites, kills them, then moves on to other unsuspecting fools
To that - I can only say -
Drinks on the house
Who knows what deal you have with your ISP about over the top charges, you're much better off just asking someone to host it as its much easier to hand over bandwidth than cash, at least for me. It seems a bit disingenuous to ask for money instead of bandwidth.
Well, I'm really interested in seeing where this goes. Will slashdotters pay up? Can the slashdot effect work in reverse?
I'm also interested if anyone has ever attempted legal action for slashdot-like effects. Its bound to come up.
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.
Although you'll have a tough time finding someone to pay for more bandwidth, I've seen several people who have offered to temporarily host copies of your site. If you take someone up on that offer, it would at least resolve your short-term crunch. Pay for a little more bandwidth, but have your main site redirect people to the mirror.
As for people taking your site down in April, I wouldn't worry about it. Slashdotters don't have that kind of an attention span. After a week, this article will have been forgotten.
Those who do return in April are probably genuinely interested in coasters and your site, so don't be too quick to dismiss them.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Dear Slashdot; I'd like to say thank you to everyone who contributed to helping me purchase more bandwidth for my site. That bandwidth (5 Gigs) has been all used up so the site will be down until the hubub dies down unless someone else feels like contributing. There are a couple of mirrors up and I sent off a copy of the pages to another person to create a better mirror with all of the pictures. Hopefuly that will be up later so you all can see the coaster. I am flattered with all the attention and I'm over my frustration of last night when the site initially went down. Like many people online my site is an extension of myself and with it down it's like a part of me is not functioning but I'm learning to deal with it. I'll make sure the new mirror is up later tonight for the Blue Flash pictures and I'll have a link posted to it as soon as it's up. I'm going to be speaking to John (the coaster builder) tonight and I'll let him know what everyone thinks. Please check out the pictures at the mirrors and if you are interested in coasters please revisit my site (www.negative-g.net) sometime in the future but not all at once. Thanks Paul B. Drabek Raven_Rider@negative-g.net