![]() We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Deavan adds. “We were just bored, sitting in Aidan’s backyard on a trampoline, and we started saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a roller coaster in our backyard?’ So we went on YouTube and were looking at people who built backyard roller coasters and got to work on it the next day,” Nejedlo says. Nejedlo and Aidan Deavan, Wisconsin - The Power Velocity Coasterīack in high school, Nejedlo and his friend Deavan did much the same as Sales did, but with far less planning and experience. And while his family isn’t riding The Speed Weasel anymore, it is at least keeping another family entertained this summer. Sales says that he chose this friend specifically because of their skill set, and their ability to keep it safe and maintained. Unfortunately, a year ago, Sales moved, so he had to sell off The Speed Weasel (a name he struggled to remember), but he says that it went to a good home, where a friend of his with a mechanical and woodworking background took it in. If anything, my wife might have been more upset about what this might cost, so I kept track of all that and, altogether, it cost me less than $1,000.” She was a bit nervous, but I showed her how it works and she trusts me. As for his wife, Sales says, “She was already used to me doing crazy things around the house. ![]() The track was intended for his kids, but Sales says that he rode the coaster himself many times before he put his kids on it, and that he outfitted the cart with a baby seat to strap them in. And it took five or six iterations of the cart to figure that out.” For my cart, it ended up having 24 wheels to account for all that. But if you’re making a track that goes up and down and left and right, it takes a lot more. If you made a track that just went left and right, without any hills, you’d need wheels that go left and right, like a car. Weirdly enough, it was the cart that gave him the most problems: “If you made just a straight track, with hills going up and down, you’d only need wheels that would articulate up and down. While the track took three months to plan, Sales says that it only took about two months to build, and consists of just PVC pipe and wood. He also started with the end of the track first, which he says was important because then he could make the hills larger as he went, as opposed to doing the bigger, more difficult hills first. Like, if you drop something 10 feet, you can calculate how far it will go, and there’s also g-force calculation for spinning things around in a curve, and since my coaster wasn’t a loop, you never put the end of the track any lower than the start because then you can’t fall off the end.” It was still largely trial-and-error, though, as Sales says that he’d build about 10 feet of track, see how it worked, then build another 10 feet, and so on. To build a roller coaster, Sales explains that it takes a knowledge of physics and algebra, but that, “the formulas are really easy. Years later, when he was the father of two young children, Sales poured his curiosity into a project to entertain them. He credits an influential high-school physics teacher with his career path as an engineer and says that whenever he’d visit an amusement park, he’d wonder how something worked, and from there, wondered if he himself could build something like it. Sales tells me that “curiosity, physics and problem-solving” was his motivation for his backyard project. Bruce Sales, California - The Speed Weasel And now that we’re all facing a summer in lockdown, these seemingly kooky hobbyists are looking like prescient geniuses who are better prepared to cope with a summer at home than just about anyone else. No, they decided to bring the experience home by building their own backyard roller coaster or, in some cases, an entire backyard amusement park. And we would have wrapped up the day with the huge Neighborhood Parade.īut even my love of theme parks pales in comparison to these guys, who weren’t content to visit a park only once in a while. My wife, daughter and I are season-pass holders at Sesame Place, and by this point in the year, we likely would have already been there two or three times to ride Captain Cookie’s High C’s Adventure and Oscar’s Rotten Rusty Rockets. As a guy who loves Disney World, Six Flags and just about any other kind of theme park, it looks like this summer is shaping up to be a bit lacking.
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