(no subject)
When I was young - maybe a pre-teen? - my parents bought me a make-it-at-home ball bearing roller coaster called Spacewarp. I was thrilled! I've always loved watching things moving around in channels, like those metal overhead paths in pinball games for instance. I loved digging channels at the beach and pouring water in at the top and watching it run through. I loved watching hamsters move through their little tunnels. A marble roller coaster sounded amazing! (This is even part of why I love playing Factorio so much. I can build routes for things to move on conveyor belts or trains and watch them flow: it's really satisfying.)
Then I never actually put it together. I understand in retrospect that it was a matter of self-doubt and fear. Once I started cutting the plastic lines to make the track, I couldn't put them back together. What if I cut them wrong? I put together the other parts, like the little stairway the bearings would climb, or the helical elevator they'd ride on, but not the rails. I was too scared.
I still loved the idea of these coasters my whole life. A lot of the parts of the one my parents bought me are still at their home, joined by a number of other parts I collected from thrift stores or flea markets when I happened to see a kit being sold. I started trying to put something together with all the parts once, maybe 15 years ago, and found that the aged plastic was so brittle that things would break instead of snapping together.
I thought about trying to make replacement parts, and even went as far once as contacting a plastic fabrication company to get a quote for making replacement parts. That turned out to be pretty pricy, so I didn't go that route. I thought about buying plastic round stock to machine my own parts, but I don't have the tools or knowledge for that kind of thing.
Then, at some point, a company started making a number of kits highly similar to the Spacewarp kit under the name Spacerail. When I was in Evanston, I bought myself one of them and got it about 90% put together. It was symbolic of growing into a level of confidence in my abilities that I didn't have as a kid. It was really meaningful to me.
But I wasn't able to completely finish it and tweak everything to make it run smoothly before moving overseas. I had to get rid of it, and because life was chaotic I wasn't able to find anyone who wanted it quickly enough and I ended up putting in the dumpster. That pained me.
While in Regina, I found one of the smaller Spacerail kits at a thrift store and bought it. Here was a chance to have one again! It was missing one of the metal poles and some rail. I replaced the missing pole with a dowel rod adjusted to *just* the right diameter with layers of masking tape. I was planning to buy a reel of replacement rail from the maker, but when I looked their shorter reels were out of stock, so I waited and kind of forgot. Then the fire happened and I lost that kit.
As a Christmas present this year, my parents bought a Spacerail kit for me again. With my history with this stuff, it's a pretty meaningful gift to have from them for a lot of reasons. Maybe this one I can actually put together and make run before yet another thing throws my life into even greater disorder.