An Auckland father built his children a backyard roller coaster from scratch during lockdown; after testing it with 90kg of concrete, he is now selling the entire setup for NZ$4,500

During the COVID-19 lockdown, while most people were busy making dalgona coffee and baking banana bread, a father in Auckland was watching other people’s backyard roller coasters on YouTube. Then he did what most of us never do after a video binge. He built one! That’s right.Bjorn Burton built a roller coaster in his backyard. He started from scratch. He drew the plan, recruited his own dad for weekend labour, and turned a kids’ playhouse into a working ride that snakes through the trees. Not a whisk in sight!All thanks to YouTubeIt was lockdown, so, like many others, Bjorn Burton also had a lot of time on his hands. He was on a binge-watch when he came across some backyard roller coaster videos. While most viewers would watch in surprise, admire them and go back to dinner, Burton decided to build one.He picked up a pencil. He designed the whole thing himself, then built it with weekend help from his own father. The playhouse was the straightforward part. The cart was another story. Constructing it turned out to be fiddly, slow work, and it took plenty of iterations and testing before he was happy with the result.Testing the rideBefore any child went near it, Burton wanted to know if it was safe. So he loaded the cart with bags of concrete totalling 90kg and sent it down the track. Once the ride ended, he repeated it again and again. The ride was carrying three times the weight it was meant to carry. The intended passenger limit was 30kg. But Burton wanted to make sure the roller coaster was safe. By the time a kid finally climbed in, he says, he was very confident about its safety. “I was very confident in its safety before we put one of the children down it,” he told the Evening Report.After the testing, he was content with the finished cart. It was a good one, but he had a small complaint. It reaches the end of the track a little faster than he would like! For a coaster designer, that is a fairly enviable problem.In the Burton household, time moved fast. The children, for whom the roller coaster was built, are much older now. The trees around the track have crept close enough to become a safety concern. So the coaster is going, and the playhouse is going with it.The Burtons are asking NZ$4,500 for the roller coaster, with pick-up from Cockle Bay, the outlet reported. Burton says the figure reflects the investment that went into building it. He is realistic about the market, though. “It’s a tough economic climate at the moment, but we’ve had a couple of offers that haven’t been too far off. I’m happy to price it to the market. We’ll see how it goes.”Now that it is finally time for the DIY roller coaster to go, Burton feels ‘a little bit jealous’. Why? Because, despite being the man who built it, Burton has never taken a ride. Adults are out of the question, he says, and the tight squeeze through the trees is only part of the reason. Weight would not be an issue, in his estimation. The real obstacle is the cart itself, which was made for children and which he doubts he could fit into. That doesn’t mean Burton would give up on the roller coaster. “Maybe one day, when I have grandchildren, I’ll build a bigger one!”