April 6, 2010
Spring is an interesting time of year. For most folks it means a break from school or warmer weather. For us, it means work…and this year there’s lots of it. Things got off to a great start with the opening of the newest Skycoaster, at Wet’n’Wild Water World in Australia. Outside of that we have been setting steel all over the continental United States. In Georgia, the “Dare Devil Dive” Euro-Fighter went up quickly. We got on site in late February, the lift base was set the first week of March and less than four weeks later the last piece of track was tied in. The tower for the StarFlyer in St. Louis is standing, while the tower base at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is wedged in yards-upon-yards of concrete and they are getting more pieces as we speak. To top it off, the Slingshot at Coney Island is up and ready to run.
The Georgia Euro-Fighter was a more difficult installation than it would appear. The ride’s staging area was down in the parking lot near Batman and we had only a small lay-down area, so there was not a lot of room to maneuver. We tried to balance bringing enough steel up to the site to keep us busy, but not so much that we took away our small amount of available space. We started with the lift tower, station, and brakes because that was where the vast majority of the electrical and controls work had to be done. After that our team worked in sections to bring all the track sections together and it fit like a glove, definitely one of the best fits for a final piece of track that we have seen. As you can see at http://bit.ly/e2zS7c (look just to the right of the yellow B&M coaster) there was not a lot of maneuverability in the area, especially when we had a large crane to move around a muddy site. However, the park had some fantastic steel guys and they had the steel up in a little more than a month, an amazing feat for over 1,900 feet of track.