Fire wipes out Spectrum Manufacturing, an amusement equipment maker
Posted Friday, March 4, 2005 8:47 AM | Contributed by supermandl
A Salt Lake City TV station reports that Spectrum Manufacturing, in Cache County, Utah, was wiped out by fire. The report says burned roller coaster cars were found in debris.
I wonder how this is going to hit costs for new rides. I wonder how extensively this will impact the manufacturers. Does anyone know if this company was small, or it served a significant set of the major ride players?
It won't financially impact a ride project, per se, seeing as how I'm sure the place was insured, but it could certainly delay the opening of a ride or limit is capacity, initially.
Beginning to sound VERY likely that some/most of the IJ:ST cars might've been lost...
If so, I would imagine that Paramount would have to do some *scrambling* to even get the rides open, regardless of capacity (which would undoubtedly suffer bigtime considering the capacity of each "train")...
I'm sure that Premier will or already has found a solution. I would think that they will just have to contract it to another company to build the cars. PKI doesn't open until April 8th which is alot of time (at least with a lot of over time) and PCW doesn't open until may 1st. I don't think you can expect 3 trains each ride at first though. I guess in this sitution it's a good thing that Premier contracts everything out.
While PKI opens in early April, IJST was not supposed to open until May 19th anyway. So hopefully they can get at least one train built and ready by then. Although one train will have horrendous capacity at twelve people per cycle, it will be better than the ride not opening at all. And the news articel said that the cars were being sent to an amusement park in Ohio. So are Wonderland`s trains already built, yet to even be started or being built by a different manufacturer?
According to the articles, those trains were already built and "ready to be shipped out", so it's conceivable that Wonderland's trains were built and shipped somewhere else already, and these were the trains for PKI that hadn't been shipped yet.
The thing that bothers me is that the one article said that workers were looking at the roller coaster trains to see if they could salvage any parts. Perhaps I'm erring on the side of caution, but I wouldn't want to ride a roller coaster if even part of the train had been through a massive fire, much less the whole train. The heat and chemicals could do who knows what to the steel, and it doesn't seem very safe.
I've heard (from people who may or may not know anything) that each park currently has 1 train, and that the other 4 from the project were lost. This wouldn't be too great of a loss, as something will probably go wrong anyways limiting them to 1 train operation :)
You are correct that the heat can damage steel, but there are criteria for determining is steel is reusable after a fire. A lot depends on the type of steel and what it is used for. The frame of a coaster car is a lot less critical than and axle.
Six weeks to find a new manufacturer and build new cars is going to be pretty difficult. Probably, not only the cars were destroyed, but also the tooling for making the parts. You not only have to build new cars, you also have to make new molds, jigs, etc. for making the parts.
