At this point I was starting to build Ion, and I had so many ideas racing through my head that I would frequently devote a day to building something else small before returning to Ion. In that first month of construction, I built 2 micro coasters, a ball machine, 3 marble runs made of paper, and a small SS coaster, none of which I posted on here because I wanted to make it seem like I was fully dedicated to building Ion all the time haha.
It's crazy that you were able to do all those side builds without losing steam on Ion! Whenever I tried doing a side-build, I would always end up losing motivation and canceling the first one.
Something that a lot of you newer members won't remember were the SSC companies. Around 2009, we started creating different "companies", or clubs, on SSC. Each one got a private subforum to talk with the other members of that company. There were a lot of rules on how to hire members, progress reports, etc. We even had a full-fledged patent system. Standards were really high, and once you got into a company you were expected to contribute. Sometimes a coaster building company would have a storyboarding company write a back-story to their ride, or have a graphic design company design the logo. I teamed up with RightWayTrey to create "SteelWay Inventions", and we focused on innovation in our builds. We had some incredibly talented builders, including Jumpge, Old Hag, Max, DDRman, JPCoasters, and of course RightWayTrey...that's all I can remember. It was lots of fun though! I made a lot of friends through it, and the private discussions allowed us to come up with some really cool inventions. Heck, that's where RWT came up with the idea for Round About, and where JP invented the reverse-inclined lift that I later used on Invertigo and Deja Vu.