Written by Kent Learned, 23 May 2018, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
Wonderland had 12 remote control boats, and about 10 remote controlled cars & trucks, made by Tornado International, located near Birmingham, UK. An American fellow by the name of Larry Lewis was repairing them on the weekends. Someone figured I didn’t have enough to do during the week, and I could fix them instead, and would only need to have an occasional look at them on the weekends. It didn’t quite work out that way.
The first problem seemed to be the attendants occasionally dropping the boats while they were changing the batteries. They were saying the batteries were going dead every few hours, so they had 4 opportunities to drop each boat, everyday. This wasn’t good, as propellers were being damaged quite regularly, and the replacements had to come from England via Tasmania. We were also getting too many leaks in the boats due to cracking.
I got a data-sheet for the batteries we were using, and the specs sheet said they should have lasted all day on a normal park day. We were only getting two hours. I looked into the cost of new batteries, and the retail suppliers were very expensive. I found a battery wholesaler and he’d sell me 20 for about half retail price. Management reluctantly bought them. That solved the batteries going flat; there was a lot less drop-age damage after that.
The next big problem was boats stalling in the middle of the pond for a minute, drifting about for a while, and then coming back to life. I got out the circuits and started adjusting them a bit, and it helped some. I got all the info out on how to set up a pond for maximum performance, and ours wasn’t. I installed a different antenna system, and things got a step better. It was decided that we should get new receivers for the boats, as the old ones were breaking down too much. Well, the new receivers were a little bit weaker, and although they were very reliable, they were more prone to the dead spot stoppages.
They eventually bought/leased a new boat system from some company, and there was a maintenance contract with them. I still had to go down about once a month for something. Those boats disappeared about a year later, and there were never any replacements.
There were two spare boats stored up in the sound room, and I eventually took them home after the replacement boats were removed. There was a post recently asking about the replacement boats, and a few days later my oldest boy (he’s 33) came over and found the 2 old boats in the back shed and has taken them home. He’s planning to put some modern remote control gear in it and get one going again.