27 Sep With theme park engineering, It’s the little details that make rides safer
With our background in theme park engineering, we have talked a lot in the past about the lengths we go to in order to ensure a theme park ride is designed and built right. Because, as a business, we grew up maintaining rides first, we understand the impact skimping on a detail can make to an engineer in the field and the long-term simplicity of maintenance for a ride. If you make something harder to do, it’s always likely to be the job that is put off if time is tight. Cutting corners in maintenance, or in the initial build itself, can cause failure and failure in theme parks, costs lives.
If you make something harder to do, it’s always likely to be the job that is put off if time is tight. Cutting corners in maintenance, or in the initial build itself, will eventually cause failure and failure in theme parks, could cost lives.
So in this post, we will show you how a set of gates emerge from our workshop and then at the end, highlight one of the details in the build process that for us, sums up our fascination with the little things, that make all the big differences.
To make a set of gates, we start with lengths of tubular steel – they come from a certified supplier
The lengths are cut and shaped and jigged up onto a bench before being tack welded
Before all of the welding takes place
There is literally miles of welding and every inch has to be consistently perfect
Soon you have a complete new set of gates ready for powder coating, chroming or finishing in whatever way the brief requires. As you can see, some of these are going to be fully polished. The welding has to be 100% top notch in this case as it is completely on view.
There are lots of brackets to be fabricated too. These are laser cut from the digital drawings
But it’s the hand finishing and concentration on getting the little details right that counts. Every part is checked and hand finished and then trial fitted to ensure it’s perfect. You can see in this image that there is an area marked up for countersinking. This is again done by hand.
A few minutes on the countersinker and trial fitting of the part
And you have a beautiful finished part that will last for years and years. This one is now ready for final polishing.