Devil's Whip

As a young boy I was always fascinated when the annual funfair arrived in my home town. I used to spend hours watching the men assembling the fairground rides, fascinated with seeing the fixings of all the components, motors and gears etc, and finally getting to ride each attraction. Each fairground ride has its own merits, but in my childhood none bettered the excitement than “The Whip’.

The original ‘Whip’ was patented in 1914 and involved the carriages travelling along the straights of a u-track and then being "whipped" round the corners at each end so that a considerable centrifugal force was applied. The original patent application said, "the suddenness of the quick centrifugal motion will cause agitation or commotion of the occupants, and hence much merriment and amusement."

Now, far from my childhood and in my senior years, I decided to see if I could recreate the motion typical of the Whip. My intention was not to build a full Meccano model but just master the mechanism which I knew intuitively would be a real challenge. Despite my apparent foresight I was still amazed at just how much effort and many failed attempts it took, trying different systems with little or no success before I finally had something that began to resemble the motion of the Whip. Encouraged by this, I built a long platform to which I added two large pulleys, one at each end, and a crude piece of string knotted to the required length to fit round the 2 pulleys was employed as the drive belt. This needed to be super tight but it still was not able to cope as soon as a carriage was added to it and the reality was that it should be able to cope with 6-8 of those carriages and their passengers. This was proving far from easy and indeed problematic and despite trying several other ideas none worked anywhere near properly. The main issues being the carriages attached to the main rotating belt did not move smoothly and kept presenting handling problems at the turning on each corner.

Finally another idea emerged and was implemented. I built two pulleys at each end, fixing a spring cord to the top one to drive the 2 pulleys and on the two bottom ones I attached a long string belt to where the carriages would be connected. I then had to modify how the carriages actually attached to the string belt and make many adjustments to the front and wheels of the carriages until finally an acceptable motion was achieved.

I tested this platform with just one carriage attached running straight of the floor and was happy with the result, but wanted to see it work on a fixed surface so I used a piece of plywood big enough to accommodate the space needed for the carriage to turn and move along. I did not imagine even at this stage that I would go on to make a complete model, but I proceeded with extras fittings until I had completed 6 carriages and when they were all attached to the mechanism and all moving successfully my interest suddenly grew and I knew that I had to pay homage to my childhood obsession and complete the model in full.

I restricted the width of the structure and due to the lack of space available to cope with the resulting oscillations, I had to fix fixed wheels to my carriages rather than letting them run free as on the original rise. I had to use many colours in the model that I might not have otherwise chosen but most of my main Meccano parts where being used in my other model ‘The Star Gazer’, which I was working on simultaneously. However I feel this worked in the model favour adding much character to the model.

Finally to provide some extra interest, I couldn’t resist indulging in adding one feature not found on the original ride and decided to construct a tunnel at one end. The ‘Tunnel of Love’ is well known at fairgrounds although the occupants of the ‘Devil’s Whip’ carriages would be hard put to concentrate on thoughts of love while being whipped round with a force of about 2g let alone given the time for such indulgences!