Bracing

Can anyone help with woodie bracing and how to design that? Where do you put it on woddies?

Look at wooden coasters in real life and base your supports off of that.

Or we could tell him ourselves.

Coasterman, as you probably know, when coasters go around turns at high speeds, they create centripetal forces, which cause the track to sway to the outside of the turn. This is where lateral bracing comes in. The point of lateral bracing is to prevent this sway as much as possible, which in turn keeps the roller coaster from falling down. Later aupports are also needed on the highest points of the ride, because slight imperfections in the track cause the train to vibrate as it travels over that part, and with 100 feet of nothing but an 8-foot-wide tower below it, which make that part sway too. These places include lift hills, airtime hills, etc. For the most part, NL's autosupports do a good job of supporting the hills and such, but it's the designer's job to do all of the turns, or at least improve the turns if they're high enough off the ground.
There are a few different styles in use for lateral bracing on real coasters, which I'll show you:

GCI:


GG:


CCI:

This is sort of a bad, uninformative picture, but I couldn't really find any decent ones.

[AyTrane]

I will add some input to this topic.

First, GCI and CCI have very similar supports, due to a splitting off of staff in the mid-90's. They are not the same, because they don't use the same Engineers, but the style is similar.

You can support a ride any way you want, you don't need to constrain yourself to any particular ride manufacturer. You can use their ideas to help guide you on designing your own structure.

The key things you need to keep an eye out for are this different types of bracing. Here is a diagram that shows some of the names for each piece. This is not a complete bent, and this is actually a railroad bent, but it gives a good general idea.



On tall supporting structures, lateral bracing is needed because of the dynamics of the ride. When the train rolls over a tall hill, it makes this section very top heavy, so lateral bracing helps keep the structure from tipping over. Shorter hills do not need as much, if any, lateral bracing.

Fear the Four actually had the right idea, recommending you to look at existing structures to help understand them. Scour various wooden coasters on www.rcdb.com and you should be able to get a general knowledge of what is actually going on with the structure.