Winter Ride refurbishment

Winter is often a very busy time at Garmendale as our engineering teams descend on the parks and attractions across Europe and the World to begin major ride refurbishment programmes. It’s always one of our favourite times too as it generally brings in some of our most interesting and challenging work and when we arrive on site, we never quite know what we will find.

Dragon Falls – Chessington

One of our favourites was The Dragon Falls at Chessington which is a log flume style ride, where we replaced most of the water trough and all of the spines underneath that supported it. Much of this needed to be dug out by hand and it was hard, dirty work. We loved almost every minute of it.

Rush – Thorpe Park

Another favourite was Rush at Thorpe Park. Possibly one of the tallest rides we worked on (and for me, one of the scariest) and our work was in upgrading and improving the ride to reduce maintenance and increase longevity and smoothness.

Boat ride refurbishment

Boats have been incredibly popular and over the years we have done literally hundreds of them. We normally get in as early as possible, lift them, transport them back to our UK Works and then refurb them on site.

Boats and more boats

The advantage of being able to lift them and refurbish the boats back at our factory is nearly always speed. We can set them up in ideal conditions and the team fly through the work. A full refurb and upgrade can often be within a month or so after arrival on site.

Arms, Booms and Drive Plates

With any big ride (and lots of the smaller ones too) there is always work to be done. With the improvements in bearings and lubricants, we can often refurb a ride and make it even better than new.

The benefits of a refurb

Once we’ve finished the refurb, the ride will run better, last longer and need less ongoing maintenance, so the initial outlay is repaid many, many times over in years of lower running costs.