Full Blown Roller Coaster

I joked about creating a lift hill so the little kids could feel like they are on a real ride. But usually when I joke about things, I end up doing it. I drew it up on the computer first since this was a little more tricky than just dragging it up. I need it to be pulled from the back end so when it gets to the top, it releases and rolls down by itself. Again, a little tricky because it also follows a center rail as well. So I notched out two small strips and built supports up from under the track. Those supports are pulled by a winch from the top.

I don't log how much time I work on this project. Usually Sept & Oct I start working on it. And even then mostly when I go to the garage to listen to the Cubs on the radio since I don't get them on t.v. This took about four Cubs games to figure out and build.

We first tested with a stuffed animal. When that worked, we had Evan climb in. It lifted him no problem. I'm next once I build more supports and connect it to the rest of the track. Pictured below is our first go at it with Curious George. The ramp under it is now gone and replaced with a different lift system that hugs the track but you can see the general idea.

Curious George was freaking out.

8ft 2x6's support the slots underneath.

Side shot of testing the lift hill

First sketch of trying to figure out the lift

Imagineering New Props

Annie and Evan constructing some new props for this year. Evan is building a coffin that a little skeleton will be trying to get out of. Annie does a lot of the painting and artwork for the ride.

We want the haunts to be friendly.

Annie's friend helping out.

Evan building a coffin prop.

Testing the Track

Gravity speed test number one. The helmet was for effect. It intentionally goes very very slow but didn't want Mom shutting the project down for breaking safety rules.

I took a video the day we starting breaking it down. Below is a link to a video of Evan pushing Annie down the track right before we took the rest of it apart. There was no end pieces so we had to catch Annie before she fell off the track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe6cezp-QzU

Pop Up Creature

Annie doing some touch up work on the pop up creature. We made him from a little two dollar ghoul head I bought from Walgreens. I connected some pvc to slide up and down and power it with my shop vac. It's very funny and works pretty much like the ones in the real ride.

Here is a video of how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE9bHp3CZ7c

Creating the Sets

Sets are very easy and cheap to make - furring strips, cardboard and little hinges. These pics show how they are put together. Hinged, so they fold and stand by themselves and collapse when being stored.

Wait Time is 5 Minutes ...

Thinking no one would show up, we joked about there being a line to get on the ride. During peak trick-or-treating hours, there was indeed a line. One little guy cried because he had to leave and go trick-or-treating. Mission accomplished.

Overview of the ride exit

Attraction in My Garage

I originally started making a circle track. But time was running out and I only had time to build about 3/4 of the track before Halloween. Since I built it in 4 ft. sections (it's modular - like a giant wooden Thomas the Train set) I was able to flip pieces around to create any shape, so I made a curvy shape for the vehicle to wind down. My goal this year is to complete the whole track.

No Room for My Car

Here is the vehicle after some paint and details. It's perched high atop the track. Notice I had to leave space for us to at least pull one car in the garage. You can see the black painted cardboard in the middle. Those are the fronts of some of the set pieces. They are just 3 dollar cardboard boxes from Home Depot broken down.

"As long as I can pull my van in." – Mom

Building the Ride Vehicle

This was another point in the project that my wife questioned what I was doing. Adding a lap bar certainly wasn't necessary but I saw a photo on the web of the Mystic Manor (Hong Kong Disneyland's Haunted Mansion) ride vehicle prototype being built the same way and I thought it was very cool how they used simple pvc in their mock up. I'll post it below. Lowering the lap bar made it seem pretty authentic to the little kids who boarded the ride on Halloween.

Por Favor Mantengase ...

Annie is acting just a wee bit here. The goal was to keep it moving as slow as possible without stopping. Here is where I started building up the sides of the vehicle.

Ride Vehicle Engineering

I needed a rectangle cart to follow a curved track which isn't easy. I took the "fixed" castors and put them in the dead center so it could do a 180 on a dime if it needed to. Then I made two little wheel boxes that mounted to small lazy susan trays (6 dollars each - very limited budget here) and those could independently follow the center rail.

Old School Single Rail

Here was the last "test" track that eventually became how I made the whole thing. It needed sharp turns because of the smaller space I was working in. The back wheels didn't follow the front exactly so the single rail platform style, like Disneyland's Alice in Wonderland ride, is how this ended up.

Alice track from DL.

Close But Not Quite

The next step was figuring out turns. This thing would have to make turns, so I dug out an old heat gun I had used once for stripping paint. I heated the pvc and was able to bend it. Once it cools again, it's rock solid. This was now upgraded to 2" pvc and I added a guide rail as I was still trying to figure out how to realistically get this thing to work. I would only work on this once a month or so for a few hours so progress wasn't too fast. It was after this piece of test track that my wife started questioning what I was doing.

Modified Track Design

January 4th, 2012. We moved to a new house and the garage is huge. Gigantic. The previous owner even put a heater in it so I thought about evolving the little ride into a ride through haunted house. The was the next step in the track thinking that it would have to be stronger to support a couple of little kids, or a mom and a kid, so I started looking at some of the track designs on a trip to Disney. This kind of mimics the design of Rock 'n' Roller Coaster with the third support underneath. The track on RRC at Hollywood Studios is probably the biggest, beefiest track I've seen in person.

I Should Build a Roller Coaster

This is the earliest pic I could find of this project - August 19th, 2011.I saw some of the first pvc backyard roller coasters kids were making on YouTube and thought they were extremely cool. I made this little test track from scraps I already had in the garage. This project started out as a backyard coaster ride for my kids back at my old house. We had a much bigger yard in the old house.