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Spinball Whizzer: General Discussion

Never been squeezed into a shared seat, in many solo rides.
Often been paired with a two, which is great, but opposite pairing with another single rider was boring, not much spinning at all.
 
I used to ride Spinball as a single rider all the time when it had an SRQ, it'd be a go-to ride whenever it was (lightly) raining as with only loading 3 people per car there'd be a single rider batched into almost every car and you could guarantee a minimal wait. Meanwhile main queue instantly jumped from (say) 30 to 55min.

Bring back SRQ on Spinball!
 
Appeared to be closed all of today, and was testing with dummies in the latter part of the day.
 
This is an interesting find. When Spinball was being built, it was tested using Maurer's own purpose built testing vehicle. It looks very stripped out with no headrests, no seat padding, no lap bars and part of the side handles missing.
 

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Archie said:
This is an interesting find. When Spinball was being built, it was tested using Maurer's own purpose built testing vehicle. It looks very stripped out with no headrests, no seat padding, no lap bars and part of the side handles missing.
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Looks very much like the colour scheme used for Eurovision this year.
 
From one of my more recent visits I noticed the condition of the track is probably the worst I’ve ever seen in any theme park. It’s gone beyond rust now and started to rot. Surely it can’t be left like this much longer?

I understand the steel is thick, but surely this needs looking at?


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Blackhole_Sun said:
From one of my more recent visits I noticed the condition of the track is probably the worst I’ve ever seen in any theme park. It’s gone beyond rust now and started to rot. Surely it can’t be left like this much longer?

I understand the steel is thick, but surely this needs looking at?


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That looks more like grease, grime and dirt deposits rather than rust. But whatever it is, it doesn't look good.
 
Always felt either Spinball or Rita will be the next coasters to close though more likely with Spinball if it turns out that Project Horizon is a spinning coaster with a higher capacity then the park might feel that Spinball is a duplicate and is surplus for them and decide to get rid of it.

The recent bad downtime with it is only making look more and more like an easy target for the chop.
 
djtruefitt said:
I don’t get why they didn’t bother cleaning/painting any of it whilst the ride was shut for months at the start of the season whilst they changed the PLC. There was ages whilst it was just sat there not testing or anything. Even just a clean and jet wash would look nicer.
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Because Merlin (pre tax profit £134m) don't care enough to allocate sufficant funding to the basics of theme park operation and maintenance.
 
Blackhole_Sun said:
That won’t polish out I am afraid, it’s defiantly rot/corrosion.

Needs to be sorted out or scrapped. Even if it wasn’t rot there is no excuse for a ride system to look like this.
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Definitely not corrosion. .

As stated twice above its grease, if it was corrosion why is it only on one side of every cross member (due to the cars direction of travel) and bang in the centre of them all aswell?

It'll be off the chain dogs, looks like they could do with using a higher viscosity grease on the lift chain though.
 
Worryingly Spinball is not the worst ride in terms of appearance.

I can see it going soon.. the life cycle must surely be coming to an end.
 
Yes that’s true, but having just watched the latest digital dan video 😂, he has made a very good point about removing spinball.

If they just bought a new ride system at the start of the season, why would they then replace in very soon. It would be a waste of money as if they wanted to get rid of it soon, they wouldn’t have replaced the ride system.
 
tactic said:
Yes that’s true, but having just watched the latest digital dan video 😂, he has made a very good point about removing spinball.

If they just bought a new ride system at the start of the season, why would they then replace in very soon. It would be a waste of money as if they wanted to get rid of it soon, they wouldn’t have replaced the ride system.
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Not the first time Merlin wasted money on something from VR on Galactica, DBGT (recent form too in Ghost Train), Dungeons, and perhaps TWODW if that is due to go within the next few years.

So yeah, Merlin can waste money like no tomorrow so Spinball going wouldn't be out of the ordinary and look at BPB when they installed that new system on Wild Mouse and look what happened then...
 
tactic said:
Yes that’s true, but having just watched the latest digital dan video 😂, he has made a very good point about removing spinball.

If they just bought a new ride system at the start of the season, why would they then replace in very soon. It would be a waste of money as if they wanted to get rid of it soon, they wouldn’t have replaced the ride system.
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May have been necessary to keep it operating correctly and safely. We don’t know how much the system cost or what it was exactly anyway. It may have been a small outlay which was worth it for a couple of years.

They couldn’t afford to lose another coaster with Nemesis being out and the rest of the lineup is ageing and unreliable as it is.
 
Burks said:
Definitely not corrosion. .

As stated twice above its grease, if it was corrosion why is it only on one side of every cross member (due to the cars direction of travel) and bang in the centre of them all aswell?

It'll be off the chain dogs, looks like they could do with using a higher viscosity grease on the lift chain though.
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I am agreeing here. The picture clearly shows that it is grease and not corosion. Like you say, from the chain dog. Built up over many years.

A higher viscosity grease is not needed I wouldn't think. Not only has that probably built up over a long time (so not much is being lost) we are currently in the warmer months of the year, so any grease is going to be at its loosest anyway.

Perfectly normal for grease to be on the track like this. Not nice to see, but normal. Plenty of coasters in the UK alone, are the same.
 
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