How This Guy Built a Roller Coaster In His Backyard | WIRED

there are people who like roller coasters there are people who love roller coasters and then there are people like real pendulum all I need is a little bit of encouragement to say yes to a crazy idea my name is will pebble and I built a roller coaster in my backyard well of course he did I built a roller coaster on my backyard because once upon a time when my son was 10 years old we came home from vacation and he asked me wouldn't it be great if we had a roller coaster in the yard and it took me five seconds to know for absolute certain that it would be great to figure out the first time we wanted to build a roller coaster there wasn't a whole lot of information about it okay there were a couple of videos online that we could look at the companies that build these don't really like to share their secrets and so a lot of what we did we had to kind of learn as we went I'm trained a little bit as an engineer I'm trained a little bit as a carpenter as a builder I've learned how to weld I know some stuff but really we had to figure this out through trial and error and and while we were doing that we had to make sure that it all stayed perfectly safe the whole way the trick to having your roller coaster turn out the way you hope it will is you do the math you figure out what are the laws of physics that are going to govern this thing and how do I make those calculations and understand what the coaster is going to do before you ever put a shovel in the ground before you ever bend a piece of steel in total he's built five coasters the first one I built in my backyard and it was made out of PVC in wood about a hundred and eighty feet of track the second roller coaster I built in my front yard because there was already a roller coaster in the backyard the third rollercoaster I built for the Maker Faire in San Francisco because I wanted to show my roller coaster to more people than would fit in my yard the fourth roller coaster I built at a friend's house because his kid wanted a roller coaster and we were friends and this is the fifth roller coaster the goal boss that I tried to improve on everything we had done before and I feel like we've almost gotten ourselves here the latest is a stomachs whirling stretch of Steel right out the back door of his Northern California home a lot of people would put a swimming pool in the yard like this just a lot of people most people would I didn't want that I didn't think that that would be particularly engaging I didn't think my kids would learn a whole lot from that and and look I have a roller coaster there are no tickets no lines just strapped into the homemade cart inch up the hill and then fly through the turns the way the coaster works right now is you get in you go on the chain lift it takes about 30 or 40 seconds to get from the bottom of the hill to the top of the hill so it's a pretty slow lift hill what that does and we could speed it up but we didn't but what what that does is it gives you time to kind of review your choices and think about what you've done because you look down at the thing and it doesn't look like any roller coaster that you've ever ridden before it's like oh my god who built this thing are you sure this is safe by the time you get to the top you're just like you're you just you know this was a terrible idea and I have the exact same feeling so you get that for about 30 seconds and then a couple of seconds when you just crest the hill you're like oh okay and then just like a nice gentle and then you do this you just like drop off the edge of the earth into this dive and inside of a couple of seconds at the bottom of that first straightaway there you're going 18 miles and and then you dive into a 70-degree bank turn and you go 360 450 degrees of 70 degree Bank turn back up into the sky and then you ride over this trust and then drop down into that turn over there which is right next to the wall you go up the next camel hump which points off the edge of the wall and on the other side of that wall is a 15-foot drop into I don't know what and then you turn off of that and then you ride into another Bank and then you roll back to the station all of that takes less time than it took me to describe it it takes like 17 seconds from the top of the lift hill back to the station and it's utterly horrifying and thrilling and the best part of all for me it's very very smooth but it's missing something at least according to pimples online fans who follow this coaster building on his YouTube channel this coaster is awesome and a lot of people have seen us online and we get a lot of help and encouragement from people who watch my kooky little videos about it one question that keeps coming up over and over again is doesn't it go upside down at any point it doesn't go upside down yet so I've had a number of people ask me if we could add some kind of inversion some way to make the roller-coaster go upside down here in the yard I have to try now Pemble and his coaster collaborator John Eliot are making the loop-de-loop dream a reality and yes he insists this is safe before we built this coaster or any of the other coasters we started with a spreadsheet and we did meter by meter math and physics on how the cart would behave how the track would behave what the slopes needed to be what the bank toll would need to be all of the things we figured out before we ever started to build any of it that's the only way you can have it turn out predictably yep to absolutely guarantee that things are safe pema turns to his friend Todd okay Todd isn't really his friend he's a crash-test dummy I know that I weigh 200 pounds and I want to ride my rollercoaster so we put our 300-pound crash-test dummy Tod on the roller coaster and let him ride it a bunch of times before we ever put a human being on it so we test everything [Music] but an upside down loop is a different thing entirely the physics of loops is kind of interesting and presents a number of opportunities and challenges one of the main things that you think about in loops is centripetal acceleration and that's the force with which your cart is pushing on the outside of your loop so how hard is it pushing against the track with a perfectly circular loop you need incredible speed incredible centripetal acceleration to keep the cart pushing up when it reaches the top of the loop most commercial coasters these days use an upside-down teardrop shaped loop called a cloth Lloyd loop so the way a clock lloyd loop looks is when you enter the loop you have a nice big radius and then the radius decreases decreases decreases decreases very tight turn at the top and then back out of the loop one of the challenges of our plaque oyd loop will be that we can't build a really really big one we're gonna need a relatively small radius loop the top of our coaster is 20 feet from the bottom of our coaster so we basically have 20 feet of altitude 20 feet of potential energy that we can use to get in and out of the loop and when we exit the loop we still have to finish the whole rest of the course so we can't use up all our energy just to get through this loop if we enter the loop at a certain speed when we run the math on that what I'm starting to find is that the G's that you're gonna pull the force on the cart and the rider and the track and the whole system is gonna get pretty freakin high when you're entering that loop and by high I mean like 3 4 5 G's really high is not going to be fun it's not gonna feel good it might be something that you'd be proud of having achieved but it's not going to be something you would enjoy grinding and welding Pemble and Eliot have a new section of track it's not a loop after all it's a barrel roll which should fit better into the existing layout and according to pemba won't subject the rider too painful g-forces so what we got here is the very top part of the barrel roll so what happens is our cart will enter there's entry down there but basically the cart enters this part of the barrel world the rider is pointing this way and then they spin around this piece of track and by the time they finish this top part they've made a 180 degree roll from this to that over the course of about 18 feet and so we're feeling very happy about this because this was the hardest part to build the materials to build this coaster cost a little bit less than $10,000 it's the labor that's gonna get you this roller coaster took us about three months me and my friend John worked on it together and we probably put about 300 hours of labor into the thing so not a trivial amount of work I've had a really lucky and wonderful life I built one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and I sold that and I made a little bit of money I run a management consulting company now called goal boss we teach leadership and teamwork it's amazing how much of what we learn on the roller coaster project figures into the training and consulting that we do the new section of barrel roll track is fitted right after the first drop it really changes how the coaster rides in this roll the center of gravity of the rider is way down by your waist which means that your head whips around and there's just like a whole lot of energy it's it's not comfortable it's borderline not safe utterly scary is the only person who has ever ridden it and okay he'll probably be the last it seemed like an incredibly good idea at the time now it's really cool to watch it's really fun to roll the cart over the thing I've ridden it once and that was plenty but if you're a crash-test dummy like Todd remember him then it's a ton of fun to ride so my key takeaway from building an inversion into a roller coaster is if you don't study engineering and rollercoaster manufacture you're just not gonna get it right the first time and that's okay we're just gonna do it again I think the best thing to do for this coaster is to tear it down completely and rebuild it and design it from day one with an inversion in mind my advice to anybody building a backyard rollercoaster go slow do the math be careful and know when to not ride it and don't forget to have a Todd on hand [Applause]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 4,042,584

Rating: 4.9096632 out of 5

Keywords: amusement park, backyard, obsessed, roller coaster, will pemble, will pemble roller coast, backyard roller coaster, backyard amusement park, custom roller coaster, rollercoaster, custom made roller coaster, roller coaster obsessed, wired obsessed, coasterdad, roller coaster construction, how to build a roller coaster, building a roller coaster, roller coaster building, roller coasters, coaster, coaster build, home made, home made roller coaster, diy roller coaster, wired

Id: 8tP5VbBlR6s

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TexasTeej]

Now THERE is a backyard roller coaster! Good work as always