Custom Coasters

Does anybody know of any parks that design and build their own coasters? *** This post was edited by Twistamaniac on 12/4/2000. ***

John Wardley of Alton Towers helped design Nemesis.

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Coasters - The Ultimate Creation!

PKI did the original Beast in house, for the most aort, and SFGAm built Viper in house.

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Everybody calm down, the coasters do not open for another fifteen minutes.

I believe Silver Dollar City also does a lot of in-house stuff. I'm pretty sure they are also doing some of this with Wildfire.

MambaMatt

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Top Steel - Mamba
Top Wood - The Boss

They do they're own theming Matt, but I don't know about rides

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Randy Hutchinson
You build it, I'll ride it

There are varying degrees of involvement that any park has with the design of a ride. Millennium Force's layout was the result of collaboration between their planning and design people and Werner Stengel, while the actual track (and I assume all of the "hard" math) was Intamin's design. Son of Beast had all kinds of people involved, including the park.

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Jeff
Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com

Most Coaster Manufacturers will build any coaster to what a park wants thats their job. If say a park had a novel idea of a new type of coaster I am sure almost any company would design it and then build it. I believe this was the way that Universal invented the idea of the Hulk and callaborated with B&M(Who at the time when IOA was in planning was easily the best Manufacturer) and the company wich installed the Launch.

However I am sure that when a park does this They have to pay for the extra R&D that goes with designing a new ride. This is how Vekoma is able to sell 50 Boomerangs and at least 20 SLC's because the only real research that is done is topography and deciding what color they are going to paint it.
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#1 Steel-Incredible Hulk
#1 Wood--Timber Wolf

Leonard Adams did the build on the Twister at Knoebels, under the supervision of Dick himself. Leonard does have his own company, doing retracking, rebuilding, and such, but this was his first big project.

The fact that the Knoebels have a lumber yard on site - well I do not know what kind of lumber they sell, but they do have lots of carpenters.
And somebody had to work that crazy lift hill scheme. Leonard now has ads in trade magazines, so maybe he will get some more work.

And technically, Kennywood is capable of doing all of that, since they did the Thunderbolt in house in 67-68. Just a lot of labor involved nowadays.

Great story behind the Thunderbolt, about Kennywood looking for somebody to re-work the ride, and then someone finally suggested Vettel, who was aching to get to work.

I'm pretty sure Kennywood's CEO, Henry Henninger, had a big part in the design of the Steel Phantom. I remember hearing stories of him waking up one morning and proclaiming, "I've got it! Go through the Thunderbolt!"

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How dare you vanquish the Steel Phantom without his consent? Fear the Phantom's Revenge.