Me and Hugh (OPP) finally meet!

So last week I was on vacation.  Flew into Boston, drove up to Maine.  Last minute I'm like "Who do I know in the area?", and I realized Hugh was like 40 minutes from the airport.  I didn't have his phone number so I emailed him early in the morning hoping he would check it.  I felt bad not giving earlier notice, but I couldn't pass up this opportunity.  Turns out he was going to be home that afternoon, so me and my wife drove up barely going out of our way.  He gave me a tour of his basement, and the opportunity to finally play SharpeShooter3 pinball.  Even though I've watched videos of him playing, it's more bizarre when you're playing the physical game and you hear your own voice on it.  We chatted a bit, and I think our biggest negative takeaway with both projects was much it annoyed us that the inserts were off.  It's most likely a combination of bad measurement / Photoshop and Microsoft ICE not doing a great job of merging scans, and the vinyl stretching during application.  The last can be fixed by printing art to something solid like thin polycarbonate sheet (same way outside edge does their hardtop overlays for existing machines):
http://www.pinballgifts.com/store/p75/Pinball_Playfield_Hardtop.html

Photoshop merge.. not much you can do about it.  Ideally you want to scan a playfield in one pass.  I do wonder if there was some sort of registration (like drawing out a grid pattern every inch) would help the software align better.  I should do a test on some art I don't care about (like a poster) and see if it improves the accuracy.

Since my day job has finally slowed down a bit, I want to start getting back to some ideas for the next playfield layout from scratch.  Before I start cutting full playfields, I think I want to test out some ideas on smaller chunks of wood as proof of concept.  Having multiple 3D printers I can quickly make real parts from 3D models.