Rollercoaster track shapes are really complex, and they have to be made to very tight specifications. How do steel mills manage to do this?
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The steel mills have the easy part they just make whatever pieces they’re told. A roller coaster is not a single piece of metal. Lots of surveying and engineering happen and then they send an order to the steel mill.
What do you mean “how do they manage to do this”? That’d require a certification course on milling machines. The milling machines we have nowadays is just very well manufactured and can produce parts within a specification of 0.0001mm.
Humans are awesome, despite what the social convention wants you to believe.
There are a great variety of production / creation mechanisms that our modern industry offers. Some are really good at shaping steel, some are really good at working it. It’s not unusual for there to be seperate companies involved. It is common for a part to be created in plant A, moved to plant B to be milled, then receive final treatment, like hardening, in plant C, which ships it to plant D for final finishing touches and assembly.
They don’t have to be very tight specifications. They are made in short pieces and welded together on site.
Go ask this at /r/rollercoasters. Several folks over there are very well versed in the processes involved in coaster track fabrication. Processes are different between different kinds of rides. Most are a rolled tube setup, some are wood and others are made entirely of flat plate.
There’s a few videos online, but manufacturers tend to be pretty secretive of the exact machines and techniques that they use. Most tubular steel rides share a similar technique that requires bending of the tubes slowly in various dies and in various specialized pipe benders. Everyone has their own take on it, bit most of the magic is in rolling the pipe as accurately as possible.
The mill doesn’t do anything. Its the various builders of the amusement rides that do it themselves or through companies they know can make that shit work.
There are various steps but one crucial is the bending of the running beams. That is the fun part, with this segments are build that can be transported on site and bolted down there
Basically its an art form where although machinery exists that is computerized it still takes serious manual effort to get it prizes
It also includes a good portion is blood, sweat, tears, banging and swearing.
Plus, it might look solid but at those lengths metal gets surprisingly flexible, so we aren’t talking about mm precision here
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