furie said:
Yeah, I'm just going on the reasons I've been given why the rides I (and everyone else who has had a dreadful ride on Baco) experienced on Baco were considerably less than satisfactory - or complete and utter bollocks to be less polite. I'm not sure it's down to the wheels to be honest, or if it is, then what the hell are PA doing running it with shot wheels on both trains all the time?
I can almost guarantee it is the wheels. It's not a, 'someone told me' fact, it's just through thought experiment, but follow me through on this.
Firstly, I'll just add in here I've ridden Baco in excess of 50 times (3x 1 week holidays, riding between 2 and 10 times a day). So, in terms of ride experience, I'm probably one of the people on this website, perhaps excluding a few Spanish members, to have ridden it most. The ride experience varies massively between seats on the very same train. You can ride the front butter smooth, row 2 a little rough, row 3 butter smooth, row 6 horrendous, to the extent, I could tell which train I was on purely from the front left hand ride experience. One train (can't remember which one specifically), was silky on the front left, the other, slightly vibrating. I rode the 'smooth' train on row 6, right hand side, and almost had my ribs broken. That ride
was the most painful and bruising ride of my life, on any coaster, anywhere. Yet I went back round, to the front row, for a chill out, because I knew that train was smooth front row.
Now, a little process of elimination. Firstly, we have to rule out the track work for this roughness, because such inconsistencies cannot be down to the rails themselves. The rider element is constant, as my personal boundaries for pain do not vary between extreme and super wussy depending on where I sit on the coaster. This leaves only the train. Now, to the best of my knowledge, the trains have no suspension/damping for the wings, so if the wheels were to have varying degrees of flat sections (ie: wheels flats), this would be felt directly by the rider, as it can, in fact, on many coasters (certain rows of The Swarm have done it, exactly the same feeling as Baco, just no where near as bad).
Next, if we consider the motion of the vibrations, it really is an up-down. Not a forwards backwards, or a woody-esque side to side, it's a distinct, frequent and repetitive up-down motion. In fact, probably at a rate of roughly, 2100rpm (assuming wheel circumference to be roughly 1m).
Now, I can imagine the question now being, well how come this is only a problem on Baco? Well, it's again, down to the trains. If you sit on a traditional coaster, as you're directly above the track, any flat sections on the wheel will firstly be significantly dampened by the weight of the train. Remembering a coaster wheels tyre is made from a similar compound to that used on fold-up scooters, you can understand why the wheel would, by pure design, suppress some bounce. Secondly, by being seated within the wheel base, any bounce is actually suppressed towards the centre of the axle by pure nature of the design.
In the case of Baco, the opposite can be said. The wheel base is in the centre of the carriage, so firstly, the train is naturally trying to pivot about the centre of the track anyway. The centre of gravity also lies roughly in line with the riders lower back/seat base, so any vibration comes from bum upwards. This, linked with the fact the trains are imbalanced by design, means any form of up down motion from the wheel area would hit riders in the spine base, and by nature of the design, amplify any vibration towards the wing tips (thus the reason outside seats are always slightly worse than inside ones).
A simple experiment to model this at home would be as follows. Take a 30cm ruler and place a nice big block of blu-tack in the middle. Now shake up and down from the tips, and visually observe the amount of vibration (this, representing a typical coaster train). Now, split the blu-tack and place it on the ends of the ruler, shaking it from the middle. See the difference? Now, this obviously exaggerates the effect, but explains the principle behind it.
And to round off the final potential question; why doesn't this happen on B&M's wing riders? Well the simple answer is,
it does. The only differences are, the centre of gravity across the train lies roughly in line with the riders chest, reducing the amount of spine-based shake. Secondly, if you just have a quick look to the internet, you can see the size difference between Intamin wheels and B&M wheels. Any substantial flat on a B&M would take much longer to form than on the comparatively small Intamin wheels.
And why do they run the trains like this? Well firstly, it's hard to detect this type of motion. By nature of the design we could be talking about minute flats that the train design amplifies. The other point to make is that the cost of constantly replacing wheels would be astronomical. I would imagine, wheel changes will be written into a maintence schedule somewhere which dictates at what point it's financially viable to change the wheels. I'll again re-iterate, it's not every single row, they all have their own unique characteristics and so some rows wheels may perform better than others.
And how are the flats caused? Try launching a car, slowing a real life train, braking on a bike, etc etc, if the rubber sticks for even a split second, a tiny little bit of wear develops, and it's simply the extreme of this which causes the most uncomfortable ride experiences.
furie said:
I know that Erol loved it (or at least enjoyed it) when we all hated it, on the same train. That definitely suggests it's tolerance to the vibrations and whether the ride is actually doing "stuff for you", rather than actually anything physical. Much like the Balder argument where the same people on the same train in seats next to each other come off with completely different opinions of the ride (one meh, one OMFG).
An argument I can entirely appreciate, but not in this case, in my experience. Tried and tested with numerous members of family, it was a practice we employed over many a holiday of finding the right row, and the right seat, on the right train, and making sure we got it, because otherwise, we all knew we were going to come off saying 'ouch', not 'omg'. The ride experience, I am sure, won't push everyones buttons because of course, we all prefer different things, but the main detraction from Baco is not the ride itself but the pain it induces, and as explained above, this is the best reason I can fathom for such variance within one train.
Now, I won't defend Intamin or PA at this point, because in my opinion, that is a flaw with the ride. It's probably just one that neither side have the finance, time or enthusiasm to fix, when the ride is still pulling large queues, a train re-design is expensive, and Intamin have plenty of other success stories and are selling big projects the world over. Who knows, with the uptake of B&M Wing Coasters being what it is, a redesign may well be on the cards, but I suspect the main nail in the Intamin wing rider coffin, is the fact the prime example is not just a wing rider, but a notoriously unreliable, expensive and complex accelerator coaster as well.
