a fairground life

Monday morning and a few minutes before 10am we start all over again. The crew arrived on time and we started by uncoupling all the rides and setting the lorries. While "r","g" and "s" built up the skydiver, I did the miami. It was around noon when these two rides were nearly finished, although I had to find a 150mm x 12mm dia bolt for the miami that had sheared during erection the previous week. It was one of three that secured a ram for raising the back flash. To take no chances I ran out to Homebase near Ikea to find a replacement. They only had 10mm dia size but this would do to get the flash raised. When I returned we finished off the miami and the DZ. So for 4pm the job was done again ready for opening the next night. At that the heavens opened. Tuesday I left at 7am to return to Glasgow, "r" had the dentist and a shopping list of items including that 12mm dia bolt. I was otherwise engaged attending my duties as a committee man. It was around 7pm by the time we got bak to WL and the fair was already open (due to the efforts of Blakey and Tattoo). Wednesday night and the DZ started to mess around, stopping halfway up, an intermittent fault. Thursday and it was the same. We tried brushes, contactors, limit switches etc etc but it still stopped intermittently at the same point.So "r" made several calls to the manufacturer for information. Friday and we though we had it going fine, we had cleaned the bands and measured the control loop voltage ranging from 19.2v-21v DC (less than 19v and the computer registers a fault and shuts the ride down), but then it messed about again.That night I was at the pie and pea's in the marquee so missed the action. Saturday morning we got our thinking caps on and worked through the problem- if it was a contactor it wouldn't stick at the exact same place as it would probably fail randomly resulting in different positions of the ride. The calls to Italy told us that there was nothing in that error code loop other than a circuit, so it could not be a component problem ie valve,relay etc. So we got 10m of seven core cable, went to the top of the tower and connected it to the bands, then we ran it down the trunking and connected it to the next set of bands below the hinge point. This made a ring circuit and bypassed the section of wiring that folds during setup/dismantling. All this took nearly 3 hours to do and at 1:30pm we just finished in time for opening. For the next hour we watched with bated breath every time the ride passed the "sticky" point. After two hours everything seemed OK, but the DZ stopped again once more, thankfully we think it was just a brush as "r" changed one and the ride ran the rest of the night fine. So we guess that there was a fractured wire in the folding portion of tower frame giving an intermittent connection. At 9pm we started to pulldown and for midnight we were in for supper, just aswell because the midges were biting hard. The next morning at 6am we headed off to Burntisland with the skydiver. I was following "r" with the show and noticed the skydiver trailer was leaning down at one side. At that I felt the lorry splutter, I called him to pull in at the next lay-by. I changed the fuel filter while he looked at the suspension. It turned out that one linkage rubber had split on the ride height valve."r" flipped it into the correct position and the ride leveled off. However by a few miles it was leaning again. We got into BI just after 8am and started to set up. That day I looked under the trailer to see what was what. The suspension problem had caused a retaining bolts to shear and a rubber element to fallout. So now I need to fix this too. At that we returned to WL to take the rest of the kit to Selkirk.

Monday I called a supplier for information and quotes regarding the suspension. It turns out that there are two possible sizes of rubber element, 6.5 in and 7.5 in. Just as I was about to order them both in, he told me the price- £77 each!!!! for a bit of rubber? I guess I better measure them to get the correct size before I order anything.