I'm still alive

I've spent the last couple months getting my other pins ready for a party, and partially finishing my basement.  2 months ago it was completely unfinished and now.. well, it's... partially finished.  I replaced the basement door (it had a hole from a cat door I removed years ago), I painted the steps, I removed the stair noses, I put up diamond plate rubber sheets on the fronts, I covered the foundation wall with drylok, then studs, then insulation and drywall and put some trim up.  I also put down some temporary carpet in the main area which really makes it feel more cozy.  I'll eventually get the rest of the walls studed, wiring installed, and drywall but I wanted at least the entryway to look decent.

Anyway, since the party was last Saturday, I can finally get back on the project.  So one thing I did with the new door, I really wanted to dress it up.  Thinkgeek sells decals for doors (just so happens to be a 32" wide sticker to fit my door exactly), and they had a sale for $50.  Stupidly, I installed it dry, thinking if I went slow enough I wouldn't get bubbles.  Well the material stretched, and bubbles found their way underneath, and frankly it looks like crap (see red circle below).  I might try to remove it, put down some glue, and redo it hoping the liquid glue will float it until it dries.

So onto the cabinet, I ordered new stickers for the new cabinet.  Thankfully bannerbuzz had a 30-50% off sale during christmas, so I took advantage and got decals for next to nothing.  Now I've heard of the wet method before (water with a little soap), but it just doesn't compute to me.  I know that's how they do tinted windows, but glue and soapy water just doesn't make sense to me.  I went ahead and tried it, and I'll be damned if it didn't give me a nice smooth finish.
 
See, no bubbles!  I just applied it, so we'll see how well the glue sticks after it's cured.


I also got the brackets installed for the cherry leaf switches for the flippers.  Turns out the leaf was too long because it was hitting the shooter lane cover, but after trimming it back it fit just fine.  I really like the feeling of cherry switches, feeling that click as you push the button in.

My hope is to get the flippers and ball trough wired up, confirm my wiring is correct, and start flipping.  Once that's going, I'll truly have a flipping whitewood and can start experimenting with ramps, walls, and targets.

10.21.14 update - backbox

So got the speaker grill brackets from Marco, got the aluminum channels from mcmaster, got everything installed now.  I'll be picking up the lift channel and top trim from pinball life on friday for the backglass but I can still slide the glass by itself carefully into the channels.  I went ahead and printed a draft print of a temporary backglass on my printer (8 sheets of 8-1/2 x 11), so it looks washed out right now (especially with a single automotive fluorescent bulb shining behind it), but it gives me an idea of how it's going to look.

Speakers sound good and clear in the backbox (ran a test off my phone).  Still not as much bass as I would have liked, but maybe down the road I can buy a separate subwoofer and split the audio.

10.19.14 update

So I've done a little work.. Got the back wall, upper playfield, and speaker panel cut out.  The violin ramp is hot glued to the playfield for now, going to bend some acrylic to create a usable ramp.  I bought an aluminum channel for the "backglass" glass I got from pinball life on friday, but now I need another channel for the speaker panel to rest in.  I've also got brackets (for hanging onto the backbox) coming in from Marco that is supposed to be here on Tuesday.  Once all that comes together, the backbox will finally look somewhat finished.  In fact, I'm probably going to print a temporary backglass taping 8.5x11 sheets together so I have something to fill in.

Expo review time

Ok, time for a break from the project now that I've engulfed myself with pinball this weekend (minus saturday).

The hobbit - Not a big fan of the the hobbit as a theme.  The playfield feels too open (which of course is to make room for the MM trolls that pop up from the plafyield).  The drop targets in front of the standup targets is a neat concept, but there's a mode where they keep popping up and down, which makes a lot of noise (which is actually quite annoying), I wonder if they'll get it to be quieter?  A lot of people were expecting the dragon to spit balls, but obviously this isn't the case.

The walking dead - Hate the zombie theme, gameplay was so-so when I first played it.  After getting 3-4 games on it, I've warmed up a little bit to the gameplay but I still think the pop bumper area REALLY slows the game down too much.

P3 galaxy lightspeed - Still disappointed by this title.  It's honestly turned into a virtual pinball game, nearly all the things to hit are virtual objects on the LCD (using the drop-down targets as nothing but stopping points to reverse the ball since the LCD tracks the ball).  I think this is going to be a really hard sell.

Full throttle - Super fast gameplay, you can't look away for a second.  This was actually a LOT of fun to play (reminds me a lot of Bk2k).  It's so fast in fact I often found the ball bouncing over walls (and flippers) which would get frustrating as a tournament machine.  Also the right ramp is really tight (like less than 1.5") which makes it REALLY hard to nail this ramp.  I found the action to be so fast that having the LCD screen embedded into the playfield made hardly any difference, you really couldn't take your eye off the ball unless you were cradling it.  The fact that the 2nd title is Aliens designed by Dennis Nordman, and there IS an option to just buy the playfield if you already own full throttle for less than $4k, this company has a bright future.

The big lebowski - Quite honestly the most beautiful, most impressive pinball machine I've seen in a long time.  The fact that a new company created 3 working (mostly) prototypes in about a year is impressive.  The artwork is superb, the music soundtrack and soundbites are great, the animations are great, the detail of the backlit stars on the apron is a nice touch, the bowling alley with the lighting under the roof (which looks very model train realistic) is nice, the car that swings out from the building as a bash toy looks great.  If I could possibly make a complaint about this game, it's that the rug is nearly impossible to see (I really hope they end up adding a spotlight, otherwise owners will surely add one themselves).  If I had $8500 (or basically sold almost every pinball I owned), I would so buy this machine.

1.2 jigawatts

 So that's what I did today, added power.  First I had to make a bracket to mount the switch to (another thing the cabinet didn't come with).  Could have probably bought a bracket, but why spend $8 + shipping, and wait a week when I can get it done today?  So then  I bought a switch at radio shack, not realizing I grabbed a 12VDC toggle switch by mistake (do not wire a DC switch into AC).  Luckily, I forgot I still had a toggle switch mounted in the first cabinet I had, so I snagged that out.  It's a nice robust 20A switch too, don't make em like that anymore.  So then it was just a matter of soldering the linecord directly to a powerstrip, with the hot wire (white) going through the switch.  So now when you do the typical switch flip under the right side of the cabinet, the strip gets energized.  Right now I just havea 5v wall plug (with faston connectors) connected to the 4 measly GI bulbs on the playfield, but at least I got some sort of electrical hooked up now.  I figure I'm going to need 2 outlets at minimum on the final (one for a computer, one for the main power transformer).  In the interim, I may also keep the wall plug for temporary GI lighting, and I may temporarily wire up my mp3 trigger to some random switches just to have some sound going while I work on the layout.

 

Couple other small tidbits:
1. Backglass: Think I'm going to try acrylic. I can get a sheet for $20 from mcmaster, as apposed to real glass which would cost me $50 with beveled edges (cuts weight in half too). Then I'm going to do an array printout on 8.5x11 pages for the art (as a placeholder) before I invest money in real printing. I'm going to stick to the standard williams size that the F14 backbox had (19" high x 27" wide)/
2. Speaker panel: Going to make it the same size as the standard bezel, going to use aluminum channel to create the groove, then I need to get some brackets so it can hang onto the backbox. I'll need to re-cut the speaker holes, and an opening for the LCD monitor to show through
3. Playfield layout (Upper ramp): Since the upper playfield is going to be lower than I want, and I want the left waterslide ramp to be as high as possible so it can have maximum speed from gravity, I'm likely going to build a ramp for the far left exit so it kicks the ball as high on the playfield as possible.  This will also hopefully slow the ball down a little so it isn't slamming into that corner (though I can always add a rubber cushion stopper).  For the hidden under-the-backbox loop shot, I've decided this will be the first spot I play around with inserts.  I'd be far better off practicing on not so nice wood that I can start over with versus scrapping all the work I've done so far on the playfield.  One thing I want to try is adding switches that trigger the insert lighting to turn on as the ball rolls over it.  Sort of keep it simple, and let the ball control the lighting (I want a chase effect as it loops around so you get a cool moving background glow).  I'm picking up 30 one-inch clear inserts from pinball life on friday.  I think these aren't too terribly big.  If I really need something smaller, I can always order some 3/4" from pinball resource.
4. The ball lift to the upper playfield is going to be done with a neodynium magnet behind the back wall, which is attached to an arm, which is attached to a 2rpm geared 6vdc motor that swings it on a path (ball will appear to climb the wall).  I'll steal power from the GI line, and have it turn on by a switch (the ball activates it), then turns back off by a switch hidden in the back that is hit when it rotates so far.  I built an automatic page turner in college using this method and it worked nearly flawlessly.
5. My decals for the cabinet arrive tomorrow.  Not sure when I'll get time to apply them.  Between pinball life explosion on friday, a funeral on saturday, and expo either saturday night or sunday morning, it's not looking like I'm going to make much progress until next week.

whitewood

Still not ready to flip yet, but the playfield is where it needs to be.  The picture below doesn't look like much, but it actually took a lot to get there:

I had to move the back rails at least 4-5 times.  I started out with the playfield flat (angle only added by the rear feet),  but that only gave me about 4.5 inches of height, way lower than I originally designed.  I moved it down to give me about 6.5" of height, but then realized the rails weren't even making the left side a good 3/8" too low.  After one more adjustment, it was completely level.

So now I can actually shoot a ball, and... ram it into a couple pieces of cardboard wall.  The back wall is mounted to the playfield, though I'm pretty sure I need to lower the hole if I want the ball to pass through (unless I carve out part of the cabinet, which I don't).  I ended up routing it so I got a nice smooth and flat cut, I can always pop it back out and trim it deeper.

I may actually wire up the flippers and ball trough early just so I can start flipping (not completely happy with the way the slings are turning out).

shooter lane groove cut

This step was actually a little nerve wracking.  I was worried about not cutting straight, I was worried about getting depths wrong, but I went about it methodical.  I taped and clamped a ruler as a guide (distance from where the router tip needed to be to the flat edge), then started with a very shallow cut, going as far as I needed to make a cut.

Then little by little, I dropped the cutter and went along the same cut, stopping an inch from where I cut last.  Eventually I ended up with a staggered cut you see 



Once I got the steps, I went back with a chisel to take off chunks.  I found that scraping it perpendicular was safer that attacking at an angle which tended to take deeper chunks than I wanted to.  Then in I went with 100 grit sandpaper to smooth it out.  It's not quite as perfect as a CNC would do, but I must say it's not bad at all!