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.