Question about ALL B&Ms

How does B&M quite some of their coasters down. Scream at SFMM is very very loud but Medusa at SFMW is so quiet you could talk to the person next to you during the ride. How come B&M doesn't make more of the quiet versions?

It all depends on if the park wants the ride to be quiet.If they want quiet they fill the supports with sand to reduce noise.

I have heard sand and gravel being used. Talon @ DP is an example of the quiet ones.

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-Rob
A.C.E. member since 1990
Posting @ Coasterbuzz since 2000
E.C.C. member since 2002

Filling a ride's support with sand to make it more quiet is a costly procedure and it is only done if the park has restrictions from the city concerning noise. Parks don't just do it for the hell of it. If it isn't necessary, then it isn't carried out.

Exactly. In fact, I'm glad they don't fill them all, I love the roar. One of my favorite sounds!!

But I wonder if that affects the smoothness of the ride? Medusa at SFMW is one of the smoothest and most perfectly engineered coasters that I've ever ridden. On top of that it is incredibly quiet. I found it to be the perfect finale to our west coast tour.

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Kevin Stone
NoLimits Roller Coaster Simulator
http://www.nolimitscoaster.de

The sand also would make the ride incredibly heavy! That would require a subsequent increase (perhaps substantial) in the support structure. The filling with sand probably adds almost a million to the cost of the ride (just a barely educated guess).

I too love that roar, I think its distinctly "coaster". The only noise I like more is the scream of an Impulse being launched.

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Brett
Resident Launch Whore

Could this be a solution to the vibration problem?
It would sound logical that if the supports are "lighter", they are more easily moved by the shockwaves the train produces as it travels by.
Maybe this could be one of the reasons of the vibrations sensed on some of the newer B&Ms.
Maybe the ones that vibrate simply have a non-solid support structure.

I've always wondered where the sand is. Is it in the supports or the spine of the rails or both or all or where?

Kraken is also eerily quiet.

I also heard IoA made Hulk especially loud to give it the "hulk transformation" roar. Anyone know anything about this and whether they just left whatever noise was already being produced or actually changed something.

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Be polite and ignore the idiots. - rollergator
"It's not a Toomer" - Arnold Schwartzenkoph
"Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know." -Jeff

kRaXLeRidAh said:
Filling a ride's support with sand to make it more quiet is a costly procedure and it is only done if the park has restrictions from the city concerning noise. Parks don't just do it for the hell of it. If it isn't necessary, then it isn't carried out.

Park do do it for the hell of it. IOA put loose rocks in Hulk it to make it loader(like apolloandy said). And they put petemos(sp?) in the track and supports of DD to make it feel like you are rideing a dragon. Very quite.

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If Jimmy cracked corn and no one cared...
Why is there a song about him?

LOL, feel like I'm riding a Dragon? If anything, I thought Dragons would be loud, what with all the fire breathing and screaming and stuff. :)

Joe, who thinks there are *way too many* "coasterdudes" on this site!

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You suck big time.
*** This post was edited by Legendary 8/28/2003 6:20:20 PM ***

I don't know about the rest of the quiet ones but kraken is quiet so it doesn't disturb the animals nearby.

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I hope they kill that iron yuppie. Thinks he's so big. The great homer simspon

At one point, Top Gun at Carowinds could easily be heard all the way from the employee parking lot, which is located on the opposite side of the park from Top Gun. This season (maybe last season??) I noticed that the ride runs like ten times quieter than what it used to. It actually took me a while to get used to this. I was thinking that they maybe replaced the wheels on the trains or something. I don't know.

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-Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?-

The B&M roar can get obnoxious. A good example is Mantis. Loud and irritating. Raptor has the perfect roar.

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SFNE Central- Online Six Flags New England Resource

I love that roar, it just fits in with the B&M style, along with some other coasters out there. I like it at SFSTL, you can always know when Batman or Mr. Freeze is running.

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If practice makes perfect but noone is perfect, then why practice.

Boz said:
I love that roar, it just fits in with the B&M style, along with some other coasters out there. I like it at SFSTL, you can always know when Batman or Mr. Freeze is running.
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If practice makes perfect but noone is perfect, then why practice.

I was just going to say that. Raptors roar is great but Mantis' screeching and groaning just get on my nerves. I hate waiting in line for it because it is so loud.

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"Do what you believe in and believe in what you do," Jeffrey E. McCants

ApolloAndy said:
I've always wondered where the sand is. Is it in the supports or the spine of the rails or both or all or where?

I am pretty sure that the box beam of the spine is filled, as that enormous hollow steel tube would be where the noise would come from and not the actual track. I don't think that B&M track is much thicker than track on an Arrow or Intamin, and those coasters don't roar like B&Ms do.

Since coasters like SFMM's Flashback and Goliath use track similar to that on B&Ms, do they roar as well?

I like the B&M roar... most of the time. Sometimes it can be pretty painful... have you ever waited in line for SFGAdv's Medusa as a train enters the Zero-G roll? The sound is deafening!

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-Rob
A.C.E. member since 1990
Posting @ Coasterbuzz since 2000
E.C.C. member since 2002

Deafening? Maybe I'm just going hard of hearing, but I thought Medusa was rather quiet for a B&M. I concur that it would be in the spine, but I think that superman brought up a good point about a possible solution to the vibrations. Most Vekomas and Arrows, while headbanging rough are not buzz/humming rough, does the track for those two companies have a solid spine? I believe it does - and if you made a list of the B&M sitdowns (inverts don't seem to carry this vibration) that are sound-deadened, I think you'll find a pretty coincidental matchup to those that get vibration complaints. Combine that with the location of the vibrators on non-grassy plains surfaces, and I think you have a logical solution to the rattling problem (the coasters I used to test this theory were Medusa West, Scream and B:KF 2nd half)

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Brett
Resident Launch Whore

While sand in the supports will quiet a coaster, the B&M "roar" comes from the type of wheels used and the suspension arrangement. A B&M coaster can be just as quiet as any other--it's just their thing to make a coaster roar. Personally, I find it annoying, especially when you must work in the area of one....

I'm not sure if an Arrow/Vekoma spine would vibrate as much as a B&M spine. I'm not an expert here, so this is going to be kind of hard for me to explain, but try and stay with me and maybe this will make sense:

If you have flat piece of metal with no curve in it, it is going to vibrate a lot, as it is very flexible in its flat state. By joining two pieces of flat metal together at a right angle, you increase the strength of the two pieces of metal. If you join three or four pieces to form a 'U' or a square, it is even stronger. And while it has less tendency to flex, a square beam, such as B&M spine, is still comprises of four, uncurved metal surfaces that still vibrate between the right angles. A circular tube, on the other hand, contains no flat surface, and is probably less likely to vibrate, or at least vibrates at a lower frequency.

I don't know if that made sense, as it is more of an guess on my part rather than they stating of actual fact, but it seems to me that a bunch of flat metal surfaces would make more noise than one single circular surface.

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-Rob
A.C.E. member since 1990
Posting @ Coasterbuzz since 2000
E.C.C. member since 2002
*** This post was edited by Rob Ascough 9/3/2003 3:26:22 PM ***