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Pirate Adventure

Martin Smith said:
Thank you for this, interesting to see the layout of what was where. I wonder if there is an actual schematic that shows all the extra bits the visitor never saw, like where all the electronics and Audi rooms where. No doubt there were locker rooms etc.. I only wonder as on you tube there is a video where John wardley goes ‘upstairs’ in the haunted house at Alton towers where there are walkways etc where the staff could keep an eye on people in the ride. The pirate adventure must have had something similar.
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I would love to see a schematic, not sure if it would be worth trying to reach out to DMR. Alton Towers Haunted House video was done in partly to preserve the rides rich history by Euro Theme Park archive.

I know Drayton Manor have mostly removed this at the park now, but schematics could help with say recreating the attraction in computer 3D, something I am very slowly working on.....haven't made too much progress in 12 months due to a promotion and heavy work commitments, but it is still in the works. Schematics would HUGELY help with something such as this.
 
I know in the queue line at the top as you turn right into the station area there was a door to the left and it was unlocked once and I had a look and it showed a big staircase back to the ground and you could see the boats as they left the area where you exited the ride to go into a un themed area and traveled back round to the lift hill back into the station.

Pirate Adventure

Drayton Manor
darkridedatabase.com darkridedatabase.com
I’m sure Dan would explain more as if he worked on the ride was in this area a lot.

I would love how they got the boats into and out of the maintenance area and how many boats fitted in there as many times I saw the back of the boat sticking out of the black cover.
 
The area you are on about Andy is this here.

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You can see the lift hill just about in this photo. The boats left the exit station, turned to the right, went up this hill and straight into the loading station....you can also see the doorway you would have looked through.

The maintenance area was rather simple. I can't remeber how many boats it would fit, but it was to the right just after you passed the woman getting water poured over her head. You could move part of rhe metal guide channel out the way to direct boats into this area. There was a small crane to remove the boats out the water and out of the channel. This area was immediately behind the doorway you can see from the train.
 
Themeparksandy1981 said:
I found the book in question
View attachment 5750View attachment 5751View attachment 5752
Pirate adventure construction video
Click to expand...
Is it possible to
Themeparksandy1981 said:
I found the book in question
View attachment 5750View attachment 5751View attachment 5752
Pirate adventure construction video
Click to expand...
upload the
Dan_R said:
The area you are on about Andy is this here.

View attachment 5755

You can see the lift hill just about in this photo. The boats left the exit station, turned to the right, went up this hill and straight into the loading station....you can also see the doorway you would have looked through.

The maintenance area was rather simple. I can't remeber how many boats it would fit, but it was to the right just after you passed the woman getting water poured over her head. You could move part of rhe metal guide channel out the way to direct boats into this area. There was a small crane to remove the boats out the water and out of the channel. This area was immediately behind the doorway you can see from the train.
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Themeparksandy1981 said:
I found the book in question
View attachment 5750View attachment 5751View attachment 5752
Pirate adventure construction video
Click to expand...
Is it possible to upload the whole book? I don’t know if it’s a copyright infringement seeing as they are giving it away for free? Just the chances of ever getting one will be close to zero!
 
Martin Smith said:
Is it possible to

upload the


Is it possible to upload the whole book? I don’t know if it’s a copyright infringement seeing as they are giving it away for free? Just the chances of ever getting one will be close to zero!
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Wouldn't be copyright infringement but not sure how doable it would be to upload the whole book to the site depending on how many pages it has.
 
alfie8 said:
Wouldn't be copyright infringement but not sure how doable it would be to upload the whole book to the site depending on how many pages it has.
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Without going off topic you will need to be really interested in the peel family who originally owned the land and the history of the Bryan family to really enjoy the book as 3/4 of it is about them.
 
Themeparksandy1981 said:
Without going off topic you will need to be really interested in the peel family who originally owned the land and the history of the Bryan family to really enjoy the book as 3/4 of it is about them.
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Ah ok, I thought it was about the history of the theme park itself! I bet the Bryan family have hundreds of photos. They still have an interest in the park don’t they. Anyway, that’s off topic. I did find a while ago a newspaper article on the pirate adventure when it opened and there was an interview with I think Colin Bryan and there was some mention of having to dig a well to get the water to feed the ride. I’m not sure if I’m mixing up information there but I’m certain that was what I read.
 
Martin Smith said:
Ah ok, I thought it was about the history of the theme park itself! I bet the Bryan family have hundreds of photos. They still have an interest in the park don’t they. Anyway, that’s off topic. I did find a while ago a newspaper article on the pirate adventure when it opened and there was an interview with I think Colin Bryan and there was some mention of having to dig a well to get the water to feed the ride. I’m not sure if I’m mixing up information there but I’m certain that was what I read.
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I thought it was about the park itself as well. Would be nice if somebody could piece together a good video or possibly even book about the whole park's history. (sorry for off topic)
 
It starts off about the Peel family and all about the house that was originally on the house. The only surviving bit is of the clock tower by the tower suite. The clock itself is in the Zoo tea rooms as that was originally the peel family museum.
George and Vera Bryan went to Disney in the 80s and after that visit gave them the vision for turning Drayton Manor Zoo and Amusement park into a full on theme park. With the Jungle Cruise, Jungle Palladium and Pirate Adventure added.
 
Dan_R said:
The area you are on about Andy is this here.

View attachment 5755

You can see the lift hill just about in this photo. The boats left the exit station, turned to the right, went up this hill and straight into the loading station....you can also see the doorway you would have looked through.

The maintenance area was rather simple. I can't remeber how many boats it would fit, but it was to the right just after you passed the woman getting water poured over her head. You could move part of rhe metal guide channel out the way to direct boats into this area. There was a small crane to remove the boats out the water and out of the channel. This area was immediately behind the doorway you can see from the train.
Click to expand...
All that is surely still all in place? It must be like and abandoned ride in there now. It would be so interesting to see what it’s like now. Someone somewhere must know!
 
Martin Smith said:
All that is surely still all in place? It must be like and abandoned ride in there now. It would be so interesting to see what it’s like now. Someone somewhere must know!
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Staff have been in there and have taken pictures but they not allowed to put them on the internet. The Dark ride database pictures were taken during the time the ride was been stripped out in 2019.
 
Martin Smith said:
Is it possible to

upload the


Is it possible to upload the whole book? I don’t know if it’s a copyright infringement seeing as they are giving it away for free? Just the chances of ever getting one will be close to zero!
Click to expand...
Please do not upload the entire book to the site.. It will be a lot of scanned pages and that will be a heavy load on our server >.>
 
Dan_R said:
Misc: Most animatronics were pneumatically powered from a single large air compressor that ran compressed air pipes throughout the attractions to computer controlled valves to power the movements to the animatronics.
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Most pneumatic animatronics in Pirate Adventure were solenoid valve controlled, but yes the solenoids themselves were controlled/configured using computer software, using bespoke cicuit boards which were built by a Golding owned company. Obviously very few animatronics (bar I think the captain on the ship in the battle scene) had complicated movements beyond 3 or 4 motions, so a raspberry pi and relay board coded using Python would work just as fine in programming the basic ones now, with the solenoids input signals corresponding to specific units of air pressure being delivered to the (usually two) pneumatic actuators used for each figure. The programming can quite easily allow for repeated cycles of motions over periods of time too.

The difficulty of dealing with these kinds of equipment arises when you need animatronics with complex movements, especially when you're using a number of double acting actuators in unison for things like smoothed out motions or facial movements. The type of cannons that were used in the Pirate Adventure battle scene were also harder to programme as the cylinder 'recharge' time needed to deliver the large scale back and forth movements of the entire cannons was a lot longer, at least using the actuators that were already built in to them.

Interesting fact: the three Farmer Studios animatronics added in 1996 still used the original 1990 built air compressor as a feeding source. I would have thought they would have built a new compressor to save them needing to network all the way to the original compressor, but clearly the piping network was easy to work with, even going all the way to the front of the Pirate Adventure queue- line.
 
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Kam said:
Most pneumatic animatronics in Pirate Adventure were solenoid valve controlled, but yes the solenoids themselves were controlled/configured using computer software, using bespoke cicuit boards which were built by a Golding owned company. Obviously very few animatronics (bar I think the captain on the ship in the battle scene) had complicated movements beyond 3 or 4 motions, so a raspberry pi and relay board coded using Python would work just as fine in programming the basic ones now, with the solenoids input signals corresponding to specific units of air pressure being delivered to the (usually two) pneumatic actuators used for each figure. The programming can quite easily allow for repeated cycles of motions over periods of time too.

The difficulty of dealing with these kinds of equipment arises when you need animatronics with complex movements, especially when you're using a number of double acting actuators in unison for things like smoothed out motions or facial movements. The type of cannons that were used in the Pirate Adventure battle scene were also harder to programme as the cylinder 'recharge' time needed to deliver the large scale back and forth movements of the entire cannons was a lot longer, at least using the actuators that were already built in to them.

Interesting fact: the three Farmer Studios animatronics added in 1996 still used the original 1990 built air compressor as a feeding source. I would have thought they would have built a new compressor to save them needing to network all the way to the original compressor, but clearly the piping network was easy to work with, even going all the way to the front of the Pirate Adventure queue- line.
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Fascinating, what were the three Farmer animatronics added in 1996? I heard one was one of the parrots?
 
Dan_R said:
Fascinating, what were the three Farmer animatronics added in 1996? I heard one was one of the parrots?
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Themeparksandy1981 said:
I think it was the 2 pirates that were in the queue line as 1 of them sat on a shelf reading a book and the other just moved his hand back and forth in the hammock.
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They were Horatio (the parrot sitting on the treasure in the station), Peg leg polly (the other parrot who used to be next to the front entrance of the ride, inside a cabin, removed last year), and the Book reading sailor, which I am in the process of restoring. Pictured below:

The small pipe you can see directly next to his feet is the inlet pipe responsible for the first part of his two way leg motion. There is another pipe around the back of the cylinder responsible for the second 'retraction' part of the motion moving his leg back in to its original place. Both of those pipes would usually be set up to a single two way solenoid valve using push in connectors.

The sailor is in far better condition than some of the other pirates, mainly because he was up on a perch and out of reach
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He's actually reading an old 1990s Leicester catalogue, which makes complete sense given Farmer Studios' old home location. It's full of old company listings within the Leicester area. I took a picture of the book here, taken around car park for the park main office in 2020, shortly after he was removed.
1712449025557.png
 
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