The Curse Rider Fairground Ride

After years of designing fairground rides which rotate as their main feature, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are only so many limited shapes a model can take and functions it might perform, so it’s never too easy trying to come up with a new form that still feels fresh and original. It’s an endless mission of trying never to get old!

I set out to create a new ride with a dual movement capacity — one that would not only rotate but also gradually lift and tilt too. It took nine days to get to the point where the model was built, sporting twelve long swinging arms with passenger cars hanging from the bottom of them.

The finished look takes the form a round large spaceship shaped canopy. This sits on top of a large rotating circular plate to which the motor engages.

As has become the norm, I made sure the arms and canopy are both removable for ease of transportation, but at least the set up is far more straight forward than what goes on around the country with the travelling fairs.

Whilst I set out to design a dual functioning model, at this point in time this is only in principle rather than in completion. That is to say that the rotating canopy has been constructed with the aim that it can rotate in the traditional sense, or can similarly tilt to one side and take an angular rotating position, as if it were a spaceship adjusting its trajectory before applying the thrust of its afterburners.

Unfortunately though, at this current stage the model will need further development to be able to reach those goals, as the current length of each of the canopy’s arms make it impossible to operate the ride while it is in the tilted position. It will take some modification of the length of the arms as well as to the base to allow the model to really take off and achieve its dual aims further.

I have added an internal light which really brings the base area to life.

The base itself has been built very solidly and is over a metre long with three levels accessed by steps to get to the passenger cars.

The ride features an arched entrance way, lights and warning signs amongst other bits of decorative features.

In similar fairground rides the passengers normally sit facing into the wind and the direction that they are spinning, but here I have opted for the much more dizzying experience of being spun round and round side on, the way that parents have spun their kids in their gardens for generations before us.

As the curse of getting old eventually comes to us all, and our kids get heavier and heavier, it is left to the mechanical arms of the fairground rides to help us reconnect with the nostalgia of our wonder years.

Where we no longer have the physical strength, endurance or even balance to endlessly spin our grandchildren around and around, we have instead the desire to create models inspired by those memories instead.

The Curse Rider: Test your resolve and have your world spun round by arms that never grow tired or old.