3.31.15 - soon

Video update tomorrow morning, I hope.  Threw my back out Sunday afternoon, so I haven't been motivated this week, but I did finish wiring up the 4th flipper and VUK.  Upper lower playfield shots aren't going quite as well as planned so there will be some tweaking, but at least I can talk through the layout in general.  Here's a sneak peak.

getting there, reveal this weekend?

Well the new upper playfield is cut.  It's grown by about an inch, the angle is steeper, the left side entrance to the waterfall ramp is embedded.  I also tightened up the exit of the loop.  Not only does this give me a little more room for targets, it seems to help slow the ball down a little bit so it's not spitting out so fast.

I've also been doing some work on the waterfall ramp, mostly tweaking the undercuts, adding walls.  I'm pretty confident to cut a hole for the VUK and the 4th flipper at this point.  The layout is really starting to feel full and flowing nicely.  Won't be long before I can test flipping with the glass on so I can verify there's no dead shots.

Got a waterfall ramp

I'm still a little leary about cutting a hole for the 3rd flipper and VUK until I get my new upper playfield cut, especially as crowded as things are starting to get.  I did however accomplish getting my left ramp built out of cardboard (and it works beautifully).  Had to tweak something things, including adjusting the height of the humps so that the ball could still pass underneath at critical areas.  I also had to pull the bottom loop closer to the inlane.  Also when you bend fluted cardboard into curves, it tends to do so not smoothly (it kinks) so I had to add some thinner cardboard on top to smooth it out.  Once I got all that done, I let a ball roll down 10 times and it worked every time.  Of course when it's made from smooth plastic or metal, it'll only be faster.

I'm going to try to get the upper playfield cut today so I can continue completing a fully shooting playfield minus a few features.

Update March 20th - Spring ahead

Alright so I decided to go ahead and print a 1:1 of my layout.  Although I do have a large format printer at work, I hate using that sort of work paper for my own stuff, so what I usually do is print sections on 11x17, then tape them together.  I cut sections to get my wall locations onto the wood, major objects like the record player, flipper location.  Just holding a flipper bat and spinning it with my fingers to see how well the middle flipper could hit shots, it seems ok.  I'm definitely going to have to move the organ captive ball ramp over, it's obstructed by the flipper mech (another reason to model everything, even the mechs).  The vuk is slightly offset because I know the upper playfield is going to grow out a little bit, but I'll cut that new playfield first before I cut my VUK hole in the main playfield.

Here's my progress so far.  I've added a wall for the right outlane, a wall for the shooter lane / record player (ball will head to the upper left where it needs to be on a hard plunge), and I added a small wall around the left flipper switch in case I'm testing with the apron off.  I'm just afraid of the ball shorting out that switch.  You'll also notice that I have plastics with artwork on the slings.  My technique worked pretty well, they look almost professional.  Read more about it on the pinballmaker wiki:
http://pinballmakers.com/wiki/index.php/Construction#Plastics

3d model -> real part, easy with cardboard

Ok so the looping ramp worked out pretty well, so I decided to go ahead and make the piano captive ball ramp.  Honestly this took me like 30 minutes to make from cardboard and some small square balsa.  Balsa isn't completely necessary, but it's cheap (less than a dollar for 3 feet of 1/4"), and it helps stiffen it up by giving it structure.  Haven't yet seen how the ball is going to travel, but I imagine it will easily get up the ramp and pop over it (which means it will hit the standup target no problem).






I'm also starting to fabricate real clear plastics without laser, and even getting art on them.  I wrote up a quick write-up on the pinball makers blog:
http://pinballmakers.com/wiki/index.php/Construction#Plastics

A better layout

So I've really been looking at other tables to see what makes them good.  One thing I noticed on Josh's Kugler family table is that the upper right flipper has lots of things to shoot at (4-5).  It almost justifies needing that extra flipper.  So that's what I started doing, justifying all my flippers with shots.  I also realize there needs to be multiple ways to get to sections of the playfield.  Anyway, here's the layout:

Lower left flipper:
1. This can feed it into the upper right playfield
2. I moved the record down so the left flipper has something to shoot for

Lower right flipper:
1. This will feed a far left lane (ala metallica)
2. This will feed the back orbit shot
3. This can feed the VUK to the upper playfield

Middle right flipper:
1. This shoots the loop-da-loop ramp, which hopefully feeds into the VUK.  Notice that the Loop ramp looks like an "S" which spells "SWAY" with the playfield art
2. This feeds a ramp captive ball (which is the keyboard)
3. This feeds a lane that goes under the captive ball, and depending on how you hit it, you can hit 3 targets along the right wall
4. I'm hoping I'll be able to backhand a shot into the drums

Upper playfield flipper
1. Loop shot
2. target wall
3. waterslide ramp exit

I'm still hoping to fill the slightly dead area underneath part of the upper playfield.  I don't know if I should just stick pop bumpers under there and call it a day or what.

loop-da-loop ramp

Well I made some quick sling covers out of cardboard (I'll eventually get some acrylic laser cut).  I also decided to mess around with a loop ramp.  No, it's not staying in the center, it's just there because that's where the flippers are right now.  And in case you're wondering, no I didn't steal this idea from RAZA.  I've seen it (and played) on a gottlieb gold wings long ago:
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1043

I gotta say I dig it, and I already know how to tie it into the theme (lots of loop references in the song "heaven").  Here's a quick video:

VUK U - measure twice, cut twice (once on a scrap prototype, once on the real playfield)

So rather than going ahead and cutting a hole in my playfield that I've already put some work into (yea yea I'm not that far along, but still), I decided to mount my VUK to a scrap piece of wood (I'm also redoing my upper playfield, not as much work vested into that).  I want to make sure my hole size is optimal, I want to see how much space the switch needs, I want to see how high this coil will actually pop a ball.  I don't want to mount a VUK in front of the upper playfield if it's not even going to make it up there.  Anyway, so the used SEGA VUK I got from hillbilly pinball parts for $20 came out of a baywatch.  I actually have no idea it works, just assuming it does.  Heck, the bracket and rod+coil is worth the $20 by itself.  I can always buy a new coil or switch.  So it's mounted, I've hot glued some cardboard walls to channel the ball towards the hole.  At least the hard part is out of the way, here's a video:

*Oh, btw I swapped out my resistors for a smaller ohm (and a bigger cap) and my coils are much snappier now without the power supply failing*

Here's some pictures of the VUK assembly:

Parts coming...

Ok, so flippers are a little better, but still NOT GOOD ENOUGH, muhawhaw!  So there's 2 possible things holding me back:
1. Bigger cap, smaller ohm resistors.  Parts are on order, they'll be here this thursday.
2. The coils I chose for flippers are middle strength (typical red standard coils you might see in an early 80's pin before steep ramps became popular).  There's 2 more levels of strength, as marco specialties says:
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/FL-11630

• FL-11630 Red - The standard, most commonly used coil
• FL-15411 Orange - Used for long playfield shots
• FL-11629 Blue - Used for long shots and high ramps 

So since I'm looking for long playfield shots, possibly high ramps I'm going to buy another flipper assembly (I need my 4th flipper eventually).  I'm going to order it with a blue coil, swap out my right bottom flipper only so I can compare left to right side.

2nd part, I ordered a VUK.  I tried to build one from parts that pinball life has (I like to shop local and support Terry), but he's got scattered parts on his website that don't look like they'd easily go together if at all.  I didn't want to spend $60 on a SEGA VUK from Marco, but then I searched the part number and I found a website I had heard of a while back called "hillbilly pinball".  I have no clue where they're getting used parts.  Maybe they part out heavily damaged machines, maybe they're used parts that people sell after replacing with new?  Maybe it's old stock?  I don't really know, but they had the same part for $20+shipping.  Currently the website is down (I got my order in just in time last night).  The person running it said they are taking down the website until they can find a new webmaster, apparently the person that's supposed to be doing updates to the parts list hasn't responded in 3 months.  All I know is my order already shipped today with tracking, and it will also arrive here on Thursday.

I've really been fighting against just pulling parts off the shelf and build a pinball like every other pinball manufacturer, but I really don't want something like a mech moving a ball from the main playfield to the upper one hold me back, and quite frankly now that I have a working upper playfield I really want to be able to get the ball up there without me having to manually toss it up there.  Since the upper playfield is a balcony, it really makes more sense to have an elevator.  No I don't want to make a complicated mech like a ben heck hellevator.  It's nice and all, but I like simple.  There will eventually be a delay programmed before the coil kicks, but first music plays "ever carried the weight of another" while yellow LED windows scroll up like an elevator is moving up (illusion of motion) then the ball kicks up the tube (I can easily fabricate out of cardboard and eventually build it out of steel), and the ball will fly right over the upper flipper into the loop, giving the player a chance to time the ball coming around and time the flip.

Since the layout has changed a bit (the ball flipping from the middle flipper is still going to the outside loop), but now the ball is going to make a jog and dump into the elevator just in front of the upper playfield.  I need to adjust the position of the spinning drumkit and record player.  Perhaps I can fit a few more things since I've opened this space a little bit (update to come later).  Since I'm confident this is the direction I'm going though, I don't see why I can't go ahead and mount the middle flipper where I think it needs to be (I can always adjust the opening to that lane), and I can fabricate that entire wall out of cardboard strip.