How is a woodie designed?

This has come up in my thoughts often. Is every single piece of timber drawn up or is it more of cut/bolt etc to fit? Say the builders just follow the track guide path?

I'd go nuts drawing up every piece that goes into a woodie, let alone working out how the whole thing goes together. Maybe it's because I'm looking at the whole thing from just my perspective. After all, a team of people is involved.

I would imagine that the software that they use, or even write themselves, automates the process of putting up bents and adjusts for the elevation of the track. I doubt very much it's that much extra work.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com, Sillynonsense.com
7/27: Subdivision Cam becomes party cam at the year's hottest Ohio luau!

I've also wondered the same thing. I think they model the whole assembly in autocad or some other CAD software, and then designate a part number to each peice of wood. Then the construction workers can use the drawings as a map. That's one hefty drawing though!

Im sure they can even run a mock trial run of a train over it and it shows where the stress points will give out. My fiance' has a program on her comp of building a brige that shows a trial run. Shes just finishing up college for auto CADD.

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Drive It Like You Stole It!

Ride It Like You Own It!

Yeah, now there are CAD programs and stuff to help layout everything and take into account most forces ect.

They will even go so far as to give exact speeds, Postive and negative G's, Bodily forces exerted and so on and so on.

Now think about this, LeMarcus Thompson, John Miller and many other designers did it without such programs! It is done by figuring a system of gains and losses and in all cases you will have more losses than gains. Therefore all ROLLERCOASTERS must end at some point when their energy is used up. The trick was to have enough energy left to end while still giving thrills and make it to the station.

John Miller and Herb Schmeck would keep energy flowing through turns but John Allen in most cases did not use turns as speed portions of rides.

That is one reason I call some coasters, Non Coasters. A coaster must work from gravity. A coaster like FOF is launched to it's highest point and uses gravity for the rest simular to a lift hill but V2 and S:UE are launched the whole ride to work.

Chuck, who will not argue his weird views of the hobby.

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Charles Nungester
Lesourdsville Lake, The great American amusement park opens the season June 6th Thurs-Sun every week. Park phone is (513)539-2193

You can do a decent job of tracking coaster speeds and forces in Excel is you want to. Therefore it's easily doable by hand, if tedious.

I suspect more goes into support placement than is generally thought, though.

One hard thing about figuring out speed if the factor of friction. There's no one formua to figure out how it will have effect on the train, because friction changes from time to time. This is where computers help a LOT.

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Kara owes me two cookies. hmmmmm cookies.

If you watch the show The Making of a Rollercoaster, which was on the Discovery Channel last year, you can see how Lightning Racer at Hershey Park was made. All the way from all the number crunching in the very beginning to the actual coaster construction.

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Mike "Viper" Semtak

Yeah viper, that was one huge ass spreadsheet, reminds me of my systems class

Yes, it's pretty obvious there are two kinds of minds in the coaster design world. The first kind has a magnificent gift for abstracting the picture of the structure into pure numbers. He uses those spreadsheets. Every column is one foot or one yard along the track. Coming down the vertical column for each foot or yard is a series of numbers indicating speed, lateral Gs, vertical Gs, stress, etc. Those guys can scan across a given line and see the speed gradually slowing, or the coefficient of friction increasing, or whatever. Then basically the wooden beams are the expression of whatever force they calculate.

I certainly am not one of those guys. I need the visual image, not the numbers.

The second kind of mind deals in the actual blueprint. He uses vectors and other devices from Physics classes to set up where the beams need to be, what angle they need to take, how they need to be anchored, etc. I have an acquaintance who sits around fiddling with these designs. He'll lean back and squint at the drawing from one angle or another, and add a diagonal beam transferring a portion of the load to an adjacent down beam.

Once they finish, then the two guys have to reconcile their spreadsheet with their blueprint. They usually have to make some adjustments, with one serving as a correction on the other.

Finally the two guys usually visit the construction site to deal with variables in the real environment they didn't anticipate.

It would be a fascinating way to spend the workweek.