Thursday 12 May 2016

cressendo al fine...

What a hectic, tiring but rewarding couple of days this has been - the Chair-o-planes is finally completed and ready for delivery.

Yesterday was the operational testing day for the adips certification... i.e., proof that it's safe.   Sorry the photos are a bit blury in parts but the ride had to be running.  Without the cert, the ride cannot be installed and used.  Luckily, all was fine... well when I say all, I'm ignoring a little glitch with the computer that runs the slow down process - it turned out not to be up to the job in hand so I had to head over to Boston to collect a couple of resistors to wire in to the main control unit - on full load (48 x 75 kg people) it now slows down properly... only a 5 hour journey after a long day!


The chap in the photo is the man who legally signs it off as safe.  As you can see, we'd loaded it up with 3x25kg bags of gravel per seat (which is shortly to become part of our drive and garden paths) and spun it on full speed.

No word of a lie, my heart was in my mouth...  3.6 tonnes of gravel swinging round at 12rpm may not sound much, but trust me - the wind noise it created was quite impressive.

Prior to the load test, we did a lighting test... and I'm pleased to say that out of the 384 lights I wired in, only 1 was a duffer... and I rectified that today when we took it down.

That's the sad part about things being so close to the wire - when a ride is finished, we never get the tinkering time we'd like to "play" with the thing.  

We got some volunteers together *read  forced the workers to have a go* and it seemed to go down quite well - I'd been on the 1st run as "crash test dummy" before we loaded it up - it creaked a bit but bedded down ok and I survived... in hindsight, perhaps a load of gravel first might have been a better idea.




After I took this video, I got into the cherry picker and took a birds eye view of it here:




We're currently dismantling it and piling it onto pallets ready to take down to Dreamland in Margate on Monday.  I'm taking a van with all the art work carefully wrapped in blankets separately.  

All in all, we've done a good job and despite the hostile Estonian (he's buggering off back home in a couple of weeks thank goodness and I'm going to make sure, we NEVER have him back again) we're all pleased to see it completed and looking so good.   Dreamland will be very pleased with it I'm sure.

Sorry I've ignored "the boat" lately - there just hasn't been any time or waking hours to think/do anything about it...thanks for bearing with me though - I'm trying to arrange a visit to the builder for Saturday the 21st so will hopefully be able to report back positively then.

With luck, I'll also be able to take a few days back the week after next  to rest, before we get stuck in to the next ride that we are supposed to have ready in July...  oh well - it'll soon be Autumn.

Until next time....

No comments: