Blogs
Cloud Buster – Part one
This was a very fun project for a new ride at a local theme park. It’s a drop tower and we proposed the name Cloud Buster. All of the other rides feature a cartoon character and for this one we came up with the idea of a porcupine shooting his shotgun at the clouds. The porcupine’s name is Buster
Whoa, go, whistle and ring controls
Each evening and some time on weekends I sneak back out to the shop to work on my personal project – the little rail truck for the Persnickety and Doodle Railway. Progress has been rapid of late but there’s a whole lot of pieces to fabricate and then weld in place. Cables need to be hooked up and tested, fastened permanently in place and then adjusted to work perfectly. There have been a LOT of pieces of sheet metal and plate to cut for this project. In the picture below there are more than seventy different plasma cut pieces of steel visible.
IAAPA EXPO trade show booth almost ready
We’ve had our trade show booth for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions EXPO in our show for a number of weeks now. Each time we have a few spare minutes we work on it. Our goal is to have it finished in plenty of time for the show – without having to burn the midnight oil or have to do a rush job getting ready. The show is too big an investment and far too important to do that.
Ten Tips for Tooling with Precision Board
With its roots in Aerospace, Precision Board Tooling Board is specifically engineered to meet the demands of a broad range of tooling and tool making applications. Both PBLT Tooling Board (for low temperature applications up to 200 F) and PBHT Tooling Board (for high...
Using EnRoute to create working files and presentation art
We use EnRoute in all kinds of ways to help us in our work. In doing so we create accurate scale renderings for presentations and at the same time create the vectors we need for our plasma cutting and CNC routing. This saves a whole to of time at the design stage of our projects. Currently we have a project going through the design stage that is a good example
What can’t you build?
Even though our shop has limited metal working tools there is little we can’t accomplish with a little head scratching and ingenuity. I had great fun figuring out how to design, cut and fit the many pieces together to craft the little passenger rail car. In this case I didn’t even need a sketch but instead designed as I went, imagining how it would all fit together. Once the vector drawings were done I sent the files to the MultiCam for cutting. The lower sections were cut from 1/4″ steel plate and the top seat riser was done from 1/10″ thick steel plate
Re-thionking the passenger car
With the little rail truck now substantially complete and running it is time to turn my attention to other pieces of the railroad. The truck has room for a driver and one small passenger but when we have company that is not nearly enough capacity. The truck needed to pull a vehicle that could carry more passengers. We had previously built an ore car which seated four passengers but this was long before we had our MultiCam CNC plasma cutter
Re-thinking the passenger car
With the little rail truck now substantially complete and running it is time to turn my attention to other pieces of the railroad. The truck has room for a driver and one small passenger but when we have company that is not nearly enough capacity. The truck needed to pull a vehicle that could carry more passengers. We had previously built an ore car which seated four passengers but this was long before we had our MultiCam CNC plasma cutter.
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