Werner Stengel Book

A 240 page book titled "Roller Coaster:The Roller Coaster Designer Werner Stengel" is now available for preorder on Amazon. It appears to be available in April this year so I decided to go ahead and order mine tonight. Thought some of you might be interested in it as well.

Anyone care to offer other coaster book recommendations?

Sounds like an interesting book... definitely a man that deserves something written about him. 240 pages... sounds like I'll need to dedicate a good part of a weekend to that one!

The book was actually a guide to an exhibition which honoured Stengels work in the "German technical Museum" in Munich a few years ago.

It was going for up to 100 € on ebay in recent times. It is a very nice source of information (most of which i translated in topics in this forum ;))

I didn´t know that it was coming out in an english translation, though.

is it supposed to be a good read, or just technical garble?

^ It covers Stengels whole career from birth to today ;)

It starts with a bio, covers his school and university years and explains how he (by chance!) got involved with Schwarzkopf. Otherwise he would be building bridges today.

There is some technical stuff which details the innovations and progressions which lead to the modern high speed coasters which Schwarzkopf could never have built without Stengel. The technical stuff is never excessive and very easy to understand (aided by sketches and photos).

The book covers, among other things, Schwarzkopfs financial problems in the early eighties, the Mindbender accident (as a direct result of the bankruptcy), invention of the heartline and the spline curve, MF and Mr Freeze, inversion design and a some sketches of unbuilt rides.

It is a nice book - but you will find out that Mr Stengel is as well quite a boring engineer who is working away in a dull house in a suburb of Munich. Not the glamorous, diamond encrusted, Coaster-Liberace some people would like him to be (me!)

Those would have been some pretty sick bridges! ;)