News: New toy breaks on first day

I noticed that they were having problems with the block system. At least nothings wrong with the hydraulics.

TTD 120mph said:
At least nothings wrong with the hydraulics.

Yet

Maybe they should quit advancing opening day. In the 1970's we didn't open untill the weekend before Memorial Day weekend.Sounds like they could use a little more time to get ready

You know I dont think we will see anything big with the hydraulics this year. With the new parts (pretty much everything is new) the only thing that will be required is maintenance checks on them to make sure theyre running good. I know Dragster will have downtime this year, but again, nothing major.

Dragster had problems with the sled on Sunday which was surprising coming so early in the season. You'd think it would need to warm up for the sled to start causing trouble. The train would roll up, position...brakes go down and it doesn't engage and brakes go up. At one point I saw a engineer stick his head under the train while it was in launch position. Weird thing to see...

As for the not being ready. Definatly, the park was not ready for opening. Although this was my first CP opening day, It seems like the park wasn't upto par.

Skyhawk looks really weak and doesn't look reliable at all, with the scrawny little arms and cables. All the sounds it makes during operation is mind boggeling. Sounds like a dinosaur. Bad idea putting it into that area of the park.

Let's hope they have preordered some of the failure-prone spare parts this time around. I realize that a lot of things could go wrong, but there has to be some that are more likely to fail than others.

I was one of the people stuck on dragster for 15 min.

Dutchman said:
Maybe they should quit advancing opening day. In the 1970's we didn't open untill the weekend before Memorial Day weekend.Sounds like they could use a little more time to get ready

Yeah, since 6 months isn't nearly enough time to get a park ready, and since it hasn't ever been enough time in previous years. (Sarcasm)

Maybe instead of opening later, they could start prep earlier.

Which is funny because I had been thinking with the mild winter and all the warm weather we had in April, they could've opened a month early.

Does anybody know why it's down and how soon until it's up?

i think its down because it broke. it'll proly be up when its fixed. :) just kiddin man.

Free swinging was the first real major sign of problems as I understand the situations. I would guess that it will be up by next Monday. But that is a very optomistic guess, and I would expect it to possibly be down longer.

BlueStreak64 said:
Free swinging was the first real major sign of problems as I understand the situations.

What exactly is free swinging? As opposed to what kind?

I'm being serious and I'm not trying to slam you.

Do you mean uncontrollable swinging?

It's how it sounds.

Basically the ride is not operating normally and it is not able to stop itself and it just swings until it reaches its "zero" from gravity and friction.

Thanks Blue.......

Hopefully it will be up by next Wednesday. My son just crossed the 48 inch mark and Skyhawk was something he was looking forward to.

skyhawk doesn't actually have "brakes" does it? doesn't it have cables that run through tubes with "cylinders" on the cable? its all run by air pressure, right? so, couldn't it just be a loss of pressure in the tubes somehow?? like a leak or something??

Loss of pressure should cause the cables to bring the ride to halt pretty quickly (I would think). My guess when I heard the problem was that the cable broke. That would remove all tension on the ride (as I understand it) and allow it to rock back and forth like it did. I'm curious as to how they check the cable each morning like they do on the other cabled rides.

I find that suprising because that cable looks heavy duty to me.