Building a theme park involves hundreds of people and many creative teams from around the world. Three of the rides were manufactured in Italy. Each of these was an 'off the shelf ride' which was cosmetically modified to fit into the theme of our park. The spinning coaster called 'Pieces of Eight' was changed two ways. One of the loops of the figure eight track was enlarged to provide a larger safety envelope inside. This allowed us to place the Crow's Nest (A spinning drop tower ride) inside the spinning coaster envelope. The second modification was to create custom bodies on the cars to better fit the ride into our story. We were careful to not change the dimensions of the cars, seats nor mechanical components in any way so as to not require total and very expensive ride engineering and certification.

I first did a sketch of a broken barrel based on the dimensions of the normal cars. This was sent to Italy along with a prototype of the 'Piece of Eight' (an oversized gold medallion) As the talented Italian sculptures worked on the prototype car they sent us pictures. These we marked up with notes to guide the needed changes. Once the ride was finished we looked things over and sent our approval. Everything was then crated up and shipped to the Caribbean. This past week the forty foot containers were emptied at long last and the assembly of the ride began. We got our first peek at the completed cars aside from the photos we had seen previously. They looked great!