Is Cedar Fair done with intamin?

The last intamin coaster installed at a Cedar Fair park was intimidator 305 in 2010. All of there latest coaster installations were B&M (intimidator, leviathan, gatekeeper, banshee) and carowinds 2015 coaster is going to be a B&M giga coaster. I prefer B&M over intamin, and cedar points next coaster will probably be made by B&M. I wonder why cedar fair isn't working with intamin anymore, they made some of there best rides and broke height records. i know they've had many problems with there rides, but the make some of my favorite rides like millennium, maverick, and storm runner.

You can't possibly not be aware of the issues that every single Intamin ride has had, right?

Millennium Force: Blocking and lift control was problematic first year.
Wicked Twister: Blown electrical components, ill-fitting restraints, and modification to the support structure.
Top Thrill Dragster: Was down part of the first year, up time is awful.
Maverick: An entire section of track had to be redesigned, delaying opening by a month.
Shoot The Rapids: Tons of down time, boats apparently couldn't navigate the channel, then the lift failure.

If that's not enough...

Intimidator 305 at Kings Dominion: Trim the drop, reprofile the first turn, replace restraints.
Pilgrims Plunge at Holiday World: Awful uptime, lame splash, and it was just flipping boring. Gone after a few seasons.

This doesn't even address the people who have been hurt or killed around the rides.

C'mon Jeff. Those aren't good reasons to not work with Intamin. I always read about how the manufacturers (including Intamin) build what the parks want. If they wanted a flume ride where the boats for the channels and floated properly, they should've specified that. If they wanted the structure to support Wicked Twister properly, that should've been in the proposal. <<end sarcasm, obviously>>

Don't get me wrong, most of my personal favorite rides are by Intamin. But if I'm buying a new mega-million dollar coaster for my park, I'm probably going with B&M or someone else... Too many Intamin issues. Poor reliability, under-engineered, and a not so great safety record.

What they said ^^

And I disagre with you about the park needing a B&M Hyper coaster, as Magnum and Millenium both would be looked at as similar by the GP.

Haven't we had this conversation? (about the GP and a B & M hyper).

Shoot the Rapids has to be the single worst-designed ride of the bunch. I can give some leeway with MF and TTD as they were groundbreaking and pushing the envelope...and things have (finally) worked out with regards to TTD, at least as good as it's going to get.

But Shoot the Rapids? How do you screw up a frickin' flume ride? A flume ride.

It's just a stinker, which will unfortunately probably be taking up that wonderful real estate for quite some time.

STR was a fairly new design. That and Pilgrim's Plunge, and STR was the only one with chain lifts. Did any other Intamin flume ride have this track and boat style before?

The problem, GigaG, is that there should be absolutely nothing new about this flume ride. It does nothing new. Load boats, float down flume. Go up hill. Go down hill.

Or in the case of STR:

Load boats, float down flume. Go up hill. Go down hill. Fall down hill. Partially submerge guests. Crawl through flume at snail's pace. Have boats you still cannot load fully years later.

Giga, I gotta agree with Kevin--flume technology has been around since the last millennium. How exactly is STR different than Snake River Falls, other than one works as intended and STR doesn't?

I think CP (or other thrill ride parks) should stick with Intamin for big/intense coasters and NOT choose Intamin for other types of rides (like flumes). I actually prefer Intamin coasters because they definitely pack harder punches than B&Ms (even though B&Ms are more reliable). I really hope CP isn't "done with Intamin."

Renegade said:
And I disagre with you about the park needing a B&M Hyper coaster, as Magnum and Millenium both would be looked at as similar by the GP.

No one would care about the difference either way. Can you see a bunch of coaster nerds (or the "GP") standing at the gate opening day, saying, "Oh, I'm not interested in that, they already had big rolley coasters!!!111" That conversation would never happen.

And after 14 years I think you would be able to spell Millennium by now. And disagree.

[url][url]<ahem>Millennium is spelled with two n's :).

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

anthony battaglia said:
I wonder why cedar fair isn't working with intamin anymore, they made some of there best rides and broke height records.

Cedar Fair owns numerous Intamin rides. As a result, I'm sure they communicate and "work with" Intamin on at least a monthly basis for ride parts, etc.

Parks have lots of choices when it comes to new attractions. I'm sure that Cedar Fair has considered Intamin rides in the years since 2010. However, due to many of the negative events which have happened (as mentioned in posts by others), I would agree that Intamin is probably not their favorite company right now. Cedar Fair is too big of a chain to be "done" with any one ride manufacturer.

To be honest, I don't care if Cedar Point builds any more uber-intense coasters. They have plenty of them, probably more than any other park in the world. They can start with making alterations to the coasters they have to make them more comfortable - "soft" restraints on Maverick and re-doing Mean Streak for starters. I'm gonna be a broken record here, but build me things that are fun and put through a ton of people.

Besides, how many things does Intamin offer that they don't already have, or can't buy from a more reliable US based source? Intamin is probably never going to sell another Plug-and-Play wood coaster or Megalite in this country now that Chance/Morgan and RMC have emerged.

^^ Magic 8 Ball says "outlook not so good".

Topics are overlapping here, but I've always thought one of the main reasons that Shoot the Rapids sucks, design wise, is that they paid too much attention to how the ride looks from the front. Emphasis was on the two drops, one going away and one coming back. They had to straddle the river and be so that boats could pass below. (a moot point now) Theres also a railroad track to deal with. With all that going on they needed a cute station, a queue, and a way to get the boats around to those lifts without a lot of space available. (would you say they were trying to revive the WWL experience in less than half the space?) It lead to a weird design, slow moving channels, drops that suck anyway, and an overall fail. A better approach would have been to design a multi level flume with one really great drop. Or, forget about the drop all together and come up with a "rapids section" of some kind that would be unique. But at least a longer, straighter approach to the first lift might've saved the day a couple of seasons ago.

I don't know where I put the blame. A park is always going to say "we'd like a ride of this type, but it has to go here, and we want it to do this and this and this, and it has to have X capacity." The manufacturer says "ok, we came up with this as a solution for you". Whoever here had the idea, it clearly was a bad one in the end.

I don't think there's anything about the footprint or design requirements that I would put on the park. Boat rides are not a new concept. There are at least three boat rides at Epcot alone, and one goes backwards!

Well, you're probably right. I was trying to cut Intamin the benefit of the doubt. (I don't know why...)
And speaking of Maelstrom, (or should I say Future Frozen), something like that would've been a good choice for STR. Thrilling enough, but suitable for everyone too.

RCMAC said:
I don't know where I put the blame. A park is always going to say "we'd like a ride of this type, but it has to go here, and we want it to do this and this and this, and it has to have X capacity." The manufacturer says "ok, we came up with this as a solution for you". Whoever here had the idea, it clearly was a bad one in the end.

The only blame to be had with Cedar Fair is that they went back to Intamin (probably getting some sort of discount) after all the other problems they had in the past. If you're riding STR, there's absolutely zero about Intamin's ride technology that in any way improves upon what OD Hopkins was able to do 20 years before whilst still producing an attraction that turned out to have the same exact capacity as Shoot The Rapids per boat.

Jeff said:
No one would care about the difference either way. Can you see a bunch of coaster nerds (or the "GP") standing at the gate opening day, saying, "Oh, I'm not interested in that, they already had big rolley coasters!!!111" That conversation would never happen.

And after 14 years I think you would be able to spell Millennium by now. And disagree.

Disagree was clearly a typo. In my defense about Millennium, I've only had ten years. I'm also just coming off a surgery for a broken wrist, so pain pills have me loopy.

Back on topic. No, I don't believe Cedar Fair is done with Intamin, but I've been wrong before (in this thread even!)

^ Uh, pretty sure that "rolley" was an intentional misspelling as evidenced by the use of "!!!111" at the end. It was for emphasis. :-/

Intamin has had their fair share of problems but how many of their rides and coasters broke records when they opened?? Almost all of them, lets be honest. Yes, Shoot the Rapids has had it's fair share of problems and one incident worse than others but that doesnt make it a bad ride. STR has the problems it does because of the dry wheels that put the boats on the chains to go up the hill. Also, the sensors on the ride, and it's not just shoot the rapids, its dragster, maverick, wicked twister, etc... that have problems because of all the moving components. Dragters hydraulic completely blew shutting down the ride for two days! Intamin although they have their fair share of problems with the relibability of their rides doesn't make their rides bad. Intamin in my opinion has some of the smoothest and fastest rides on the planet. Not to mention M&B rides have their fair share of mechanical problems. Look at Gatekeeper. Cedar Fair should not be done with Intamin! They have manufactured some of the top record breaking rides in the world, why stop now??