Models by Santiago Plicio
The Demonizer Fairground Ride
For as many Allen bolts or nuts that I have it seems there aren’t ever quite enough and so another one of my Meccano models was sacrificed and dismantle to harvest the parts.
I choose a fairground ride I called The Tormentor MK II, which I was particularly fond of, but as I dismantled bit by bit, I simultaneously started construction on a new model.
Starting with a solid base, followed by a V-shape twin tower fitted at the front, and then a second tower at the rear.
This second one however was going to be a single straight tower at the very centre which you would see clearly when looking through the V-tower.
The height of the towers was restricted to the max ride height of my own car and anything else I might want further was going to have to be detachable.
Due to the height and proposed action of the towers, they needed to be very solidly anchored to the base and free of any swaying movements and I had to keep reinforcing until such sturdiness was achieved.
Before anything else I continued with adding things like the customer access steps, railings and general amusement ride embellishments and I also added a ticket kiosk and some lights.
At the top I created some channels where I planned for the main rotating unit to be fitted to the towers.
By this time the other model was almost totally dismantled with the exception of the main arm and the riders circular seating unit, which I offered up in place on this new unit right on top as a test and which proved apt both as a fit and with easy free rotation.
It was not the plan to use this same rotating unit as it was too small for this new ride construction but I decided to needed grow it in size rather than start something completely from new and so I started adding parts to stretch the unit to its wanted bigger diameter as I did so I replaced most of the chrome parts with dark blue parts to tie it in with the look of the rest of the new model which consisted of mainly red, yellow and dark blue.
The old Tormentor Mk II rotating unit is still pretty much in the heart of it but now much larger than its predecessor yet just as equally balanced it and poised in its rotations.
The model was virtually finished on Saturday the 14th November 2020 but I still wanted to add a motor and a gearing system to it and perhaps add a few tweaks just to improve it visually.
I have since fixed a motor and a pulley system which worked very well but which was rather faster than what I needed, so I had to fix larger pulleys, adjust all dimensions and fittings and change the position of the motor to be at just the right distancing for all elastic bands to function perfectly.
It took me a few hours just to achieve that but I was delighted at the end of it and finally the right speed was achieved to make the ride experience realistic.
Just when I thought I was finished I decided on increasing the tower heights further by adding two new detachable towers that would mount on top of the existing ones.
Why not build two additional towers to rest on top of the existing ones, and as soon as I was happy with its new status, I added two new 12V lights I had recently bought as kind of spotlights. Finally, I decided to build a third tower to stand at the left-hand side of the model behind the kiosk.
Just in case I get bored, the new model’s rotating unit is interchangeable with another and can be presented as two completely distinctly different personalities but both sharing the same lofty status.
This model if scaled up to life-size would prove a very huge and extremely high machine which with its two different rotations would have a capacity for thrill sensations that only those with an appetite for extreme endurance might tolerate or maybe for only those foolishly brave ones who chance it.
It was once part of the ride that promised only to torment you, but now tormenting has been taken on a descent to a brand-new level.
The Demonizer: Plunging its riders on a high way to heaven and then hell.
Go ahead — yell!