Building A Rollercoaster

I did some weight testing with bags of concrete of 60 lbs each. I placed four of them on the rollercoaster car frame to get a static load up to 240 lbs (109 kg). I also got started on a longer piece of track so that I can test the dynamic load. Next week I'll get to finishing the piece of track, and stress testing that as well. I'm also looking into how to do curved pieces of track, but I'm going to hold off on that until everything else is ready.

 I did it, I finally did it! I finally finished a piece of test track and put my cart on it. It was the most gratifying part of this whole project so far to fit the cart on and slide it around. I even sat on it, and wiggled a little bit. I'm happy to report that it held my weight and did not break. The supports and the rollercoaster frame felt really solid. We're really starting to go places with this project! The next step is to do some stress testing; finding the near-breaking point of both the track and the cart (I don't want to sabotage all my hard work completely).

 Sorry for not posting last week, I completely forgot! So to make up for that, I'll make a post today about what I did last week. Last week was exciting! I finally got everything in the right place. It's not all screwed down just yet, but still! I didn't really get to get a sense of how it rolled, so I guess I'll find out some time this week when I go in again. Apart from working on my 'coaster,  I also helped another student learn some of the basics about Blender.

 Things are going a lot slower than I would like, but I still think I'm on track to finish a section of track and definitely the rollercoaster car. I'm coming in to work on my project about once a week, and in the meantime, I'm working on creating a scale CAD model in the Fusion 360 software. This week I spent most of my time in the FabLab attaching the wheel hubs to the main frame, and getting everything to pivot correctly.