We have more or less come to the end of the fairground season. Some of our catering units are still attending corporate events but most of the children's attractions are undergoing a welcome rest. We have just begun the first phase of refurbishing a section of our childrens attractions. There are two main thrusts to this work, firstly all of the motors and control systems are being replaced with new state of the art fully automatic controllers. The reasons for this is to improve reliability, although we have never had a breakdown at any of our corporate events, the older rides have begun to need regular remedial work to keep some of the motors running. With the new systems everything will have a standard controller that will be interchangeable so only 1 type of spare parts will be needed. Additionally the systems will self time the ride and control the speed so having to adjust each ride to take into account the number of passengers will become a thing of the past, all the operator will need to do is press the green button to start the ride and everything else will be taken care of.
Secondly we are looking at redecorating some of the childrens rides. Although the paintwork is in excellent condition and probably wont require a repaint for another two or three years, we are looking at giving everything a more traditional feel, doing away with the modern cartoon characters and going back to scrollwork. In the main this is to enable the rides to be used by our Victorian Funfair offshoot, which is probably the fastest growing category of all our hire operations. After the success with the printed front panels for the Victorian side stalls, we are investigating the feasibility of using a similar technique on the rides.
After our successful presentation at the Durham Christmas festival, I was invited to the 5th birthday party of the events management company that organises the festival. It was a good night in the Epernay champagne bar in the walkergate section of Durham city. The company opened a Nebuchadnezzar bottle of champagne which holds some 15 litres of the beverage and took two people to pour it!
I got the chance to do a bit of networking whilst I was there and came away with a couple of possibilities for supplying attractions to events in the North East area.
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Secondly we are looking at redecorating some of the childrens rides. Although the paintwork is in excellent condition and probably wont require a repaint for another two or three years, we are looking at giving everything a more traditional feel, doing away with the modern cartoon characters and going back to scrollwork. In the main this is to enable the rides to be used by our Victorian Funfair offshoot, which is probably the fastest growing category of all our hire operations. After the success with the printed front panels for the Victorian side stalls, we are investigating the feasibility of using a similar technique on the rides.
After our successful presentation at the Durham Christmas festival, I was invited to the 5th birthday party of the events management company that organises the festival. It was a good night in the Epernay champagne bar in the walkergate section of Durham city. The company opened a Nebuchadnezzar bottle of champagne which holds some 15 litres of the beverage and took two people to pour it!
I got the chance to do a bit of networking whilst I was there and came away with a couple of possibilities for supplying attractions to events in the North East area.
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