The Orbiter Fairground Ride
Built by Santiago Plicio in September 2012
In June 2012 I started my new model. Not sure what would it be or how it would look, I thought to build a swinging large boat with the movement of a pendulum instead of a full rotation one, as in my Terror’s Ark. Not easy to achieve in such a large scale; however I wanted to try.
I proceeded with the base and tower. To support the tower I built the base quite high to give a very strong support to it, and added to the top a round structure which I have used previously in other of my models, consisting in 24 flanged sectors bolted together. The idea was to have wheels attach to the moving section and get a very steady movement and support, however it ended up that it was not needed after all.
The construction of the boat started and ended up by becoming a galleon with riggings, masts, cannons etc. which was not good for the planned model, so what next?
Having kept the 16 cars from my double previous wheel gave me the idea to save work and time to use them in another wheel of 16 arms instead of the 8 as in the previous ones.
So another wheel emerged, many changes were done to the cars to save weight and when the wheel was joined together it buckled like a satellite dish, which made me undo all the fittings and change it until I achieved the almost perfect round and flat wheel.
A new power motor and gearing system were fitted to the top of the tower with a small pulley meant to drive the wheel with only one elastic band, so I needed to fit a very large pulley part 19c to the back of the moving wheel to engage with the band. However, as a heavy-duty axle was holding the wheel, none of these pulleys could be fitted to it, so I decided to drill the boss of this pulley to fit in this bigger axle and bolt it to the moving structure, finally succeeding in the perfect movement. In case the elastic band breaks a second band is held to the back with two bolts just in case and I do not have to remove the whole wheel to fit a new one to it.
The base is fitted to five Meccano storage plastic boxes with their lids, all held with brackets to avoid them becoming detached; two at the front, one on each side, and one at the back.