Jump to content
Due to a large amount of spamers, accounts will now have to be approved by the Admins so please be patient. ×

Autosteve

Veteran
  • Posts

    6,212
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    22

Autosteve last won the day on March 10

Autosteve had the most liked content!

3 Followers

Personal Information

  • State
    Barden Ridge NSW
  • Machines in your collection
    Getaway pinball, AC/DC pinball, Arcade Slated Pool table, Taito Defender Upright cab, Taito 20" cocktail table, and a Sapphire 3 reel poker machine

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Autosteve's Achievements

Pinball Wizard

Pinball Wizard (16/17)

  • Posting Machine Rare
  • Collaborator
  • First Post
  • Conversation Starter
  • One Year In

Recent Badges

330.1k

Reputation

6

Community Answers

  1. Talking the need for multiple white boards that introduced another problem, the wiring. Didn't want to use close to 3 meters of colour coded harness and dedicated pinball board connectors and pins for each white board so I come up with an easy way that used just one set of pinball board connectors with a few D sub style interfaces. It kept the wire usage down to pinball board connectors to D Sub interfaces in the head, (that remained part of the machine), and components on the playfield to D Sub interfaces on the playfield. Commercial D Sub cables were the interface harnesses between the head and the playfield saving around 1 1/2 meters of harness but more the saving was not needing to use another full set of pinball board connectors and pins on every white board. To change a playfield was unplug the D Sub leads at the playfield and plug them in the next and ready to go so no board connectors needed to be touched. Suited me fine, I just had to standardize the coil drives, lights and switch matrix pinouts used by the D subs and every white board I made would plug straight in ready to test using only the wire used on the playfield and some D sub interface PCBs. Heavy current loads such as + coil supply and GI supply would of used a heavier style connectors but again, at the playfield itself.
  2. Have a look at what the HO train model community has to offer pre-made at non pinball pricing. The light was to light dark areas and not a toy being so small and discrete. A Egyptian shaped and stone coloured column sleeve around that light's post would suit your needs I think. I was after lights to light up the otherwise dark areas as a result of pancaking playfields under each other. I had the choose, go OP on the under plastics GI or light from the level above. I thought this was a nice subtle way to light when needed and in my case that would have been the only level the ball was being played on at that time. That "concept" was a test bed for whiteboards, lots of them quickly changed around such is the importance I put on getting a layout that works and knowing I was never getting that right first time around. If you read the post a member wrote about one of the great designers he says in his apartment he had multiple whiteboards supplied by the factory......(just in case he thought of a good layout at home) Playfield tempets yes, lay on lower half of a blank white board for lining up every hole and fastener location used to mount the slingshots and flippers and outhole so the process doesn't need remeasuring every time.
  3. Just an example, Stern's Munsters, Remove the art work, sound and video along with the Herman target and assorted stickers on targets etc. With a little art, 3D printer work, new sounds and video work and that Munsters could quickly becomes a Barbie. Yes, they are generic and can be turned into what ever you want however if it was a boring machine layout to start with, no theme, art, sounds, toys or video are going to change that.
  4. The light is used if you need a light, nothing more. As for it matching a theme or a name, I think to many people get hung up building to either because if you think about it it is usually just the toys, the sound, the art and video that sets the theme and name. To start on these 4 steps first would be building in reverse. Priority should be the layout and the entertainment value it offers first and foremost and then the other 4 can be made to suit what name and theme you choose. Most production machines had there whiteboards tested "unnamed" way before any name or theme is allocated and often had last minute title changes so no, I put very little to no priority to building the other way around......Too many restraints. You can paint, sound and toy any whiteboard to a theme but if the layout is crap, it's a dude.
  5. I saw these lights a while back and thought I do have a need. Using a multi level game design, I figured there would be dark areas and they looked the piece being the correct scale as opposed to what the industry used for overhead GI uses. 10pcs Model Railway White HO Scale Lamps 10cm 1:87 Street Light Single Head Subtle, yet effective but also 10 of them for under $20. I did figure pretty brittle so a spring would have been fitted in the stem so if hit, it momentarily become a "bobblehead"😆
  6. For those that may be interested it is now official, China is burning just over half the coal the planet is digging up. Good for some being a record coal sales year.
  7. Aldi has a pack of assorted O rings this week at $16 for a couple of hundred largest being however 60mm diameter. Can get them larger at bearing and seal supply places, I've seen over 100mm diameter but as for there price, who knows. I do think they will bounce like hell though. Would need to get the exact size because I'm thinking not much stretch in them but I don't think your going to need much stretch at all. From what I've seen O rings come in 5mm intervals. Would look pretty cool though I think and handy if you want to use 5 lanes in the space of 4 using normal lane dividers. For my upper playfields I was using this idea for the edges of the playfield to stop the ball from plummeting to it's death. Could of used vertical metal rail but no bounce in that and you can't see through it.
  8. Very cool ideas guys and yes I do believe any pinball mech can be improved with major cost savings so most of my ideas are mech related but not all. Funny you both mentioned two of the most over engineered, way to expensive and most troublesome mechs used on a pinball. The Vuk kicker and the ball trough. Did nothing on the Vuk but the ball trough I did...........Interested in seeing what you are thinking @swinks . Mine still needed a plunger or launcher but took out the need for over 7 optic switches and two boards, needed no coil, just a slow RPM motor drive. All fit under a standard apron. Always struck me as strange why the machine needed to detect every ball in the trough and even a jammed one when all the machine needs to know is when a ball drops in the outhole, ready to go on the playfield or goes onto the playfield no matter how many balls it has. Anyway, that might come up later. Wanting to build a multi level machine that usually involves small playfields, I was looking at getting the most use of the small area as I could so what started as a thinner lane divider become a host of other playfield uses. Extremely simple involving mini post rings and common O rings, at first. Any post will do as long as the rubber post ring you use suits it so not limited to just metal mini posts. The picture below shows how the rubbers...(in orange), space the O rings...(in black) perfectly apart. The lower half of the picture shows an overhead view if it was used as a thin lane divider. I wish I thought of this idea when I was maintaining Getaways. Would of needed parallel sided posts under the slingshot plastics and the next size up from mini post rubbers with large O rings but with that many O rings no ball was ever getting jammed under the slingshot plastic and it does block the GI lighting. Not sure on pricing of O rings VS pinball rubbers but no need for double pinball rubbers on a Getaway and I think O rings would have far more bounce than a pinball rubber even without slingshots. The post rings are essential or the ball with hit the post or crush the thin O ring against the post causing it to fail.
  9. The frame come about as a means for me to build a cabinet that allowed me to develop the cabinet as I saw the need to suit my designs and concepts and that I couldn't do as easy with a glued wooden cabinet. Even though I was making jigs, I had no intention of making these for sale however I did factor some might and it was a quick way for me to make the occasional one off frame rather than every one being a custom which are far more time consuming. If the demand was more I would have offloaded the job to one of the many production line welding places around here that could knock them out at a lower cost in larger numbers quicker. I also like Meccano set construction or module design. I make mistakes in design so that Meccano and module design of any project I make comes in handy. I also liked the idea of swap-able panels and to be be quite frank, pinballs are no longer worthy, (income wise) of a dedicated cabinet and stupidly prices stickers with virtually no wear resistance for the side art doesn't help. Now that brings me to the side art...Plywood was quick and easy but then painting and stenciling for a so so outcome. How the machine looked on display was something totally different however. I did a post on this site about a more "homely" machine as in looking more like a piece of furniture rather than a highly coloured industrial Cokacola machine. As I hate painting and rarely get it right especially clear coating wood, I was seriously looking at using "floating floor panels" as the art.......hard as hell to scratch with a surface that requires no attention. I made a "wooden framed" bar for my neighbour using Bunnings acquired floating floor panels and quite frankly that looks amazing so there was my answer. Of coarse I could only use these on a frame be it metal or wood. The floating floor I have a box of. A left over from the bar project..... A sweet product to work with but also save me from painting or stickers. Funny thing is Bunnings always have some floating floor panels for sale. I just like the high gloss and smooth face,
  10. I grabbed one of @swinks lovely 3D pictures and the magic of cut and paste, drew in a colour coded steel layout to show where I thought each piece would go. I only drew in the lower cabinet...... Colour coding is corners are red, lower box are blue and upper box are purple. The way I did the costing was the steel frame including headbox steel.......under $200..... (material used on each cabinet) Cladding material.....under $100 Legs......under $100 Where have I got this costing wrong? Original concept had all the frame internal however after seeing swink's drawing, the tubes to hold the legs could form the exposed corners and the 20 X 20 tubes attached to it welded "the thickness of the cladding material" to allow the removable panels to flush mount with the corners however then the corners need detailing. I think the legs on pinballs is the part that makes pinball look old and dated.
  11. OEM legs are over a hundred here so I figured I had up to that to blow. I'm only using generic steel profiles.....rolled and welded actually meaning it was folded from sheet before being welded alone the seam in a machine pumping out close to a 6 meter length in 10 seconds or so. Out here candy steel is cheap, while we still have a steel industry, but it varies between what profile of steel you are after. The first is always hand made and measured precisely but then making a jig is relatively time consuming that suits the perfect frame however once that jib is made, any frame after that is all cut to a cutting list and placed in the jib and it holds all the metal pieces ready for welding. The jib holds it all square and once it cools down it comes out and you reload the jib with more cut pieces of metal and that all gets seam welded again. That is production line welding. To make the first takes the time but once jigs get involved, the tape measure is only used to cut steel to length and the metal is held perfectly in place for the welder. @swinks great feed back and what I could do if I had your 3D imaging tool. You mentioned weight and yes , that is majorly important....Take that from a person that hauled around these things most of my life. I'd go 8-10mm ply sheeting myself. Taito used that with steel "brackets, not a frame" and I always found them a pig to break up where as a pinball cab, two hits with a hammer on the inside of each corner and they were apart but that is all you get out of glue. You nailed the "tube within a tube" leg mounting idea. Exactly what I was thinking. I figured it saved the line up leg holes and insert bolts procedure and replacing it with an R pin but I wasn't convinced thinking studs from the frame to a square plate on the leg nuts attaching offers the same, (no need to hold while tightening legs part of the normal procedure.) The frame idea came from seeing all the one off metal pieces appearing in pinball cabinets trying to beef up the corners and the other wood joints as it is where it glues, is the weak spot dependent of the strength of the glue. A bit like buying a wooden based bed and a metal framed bed I guess. The metal frame had it's shortfalls too like where to run each tube that offered the maximum ability to replace all these other steel one off pieces that make up a common pinball cabinet. The bottom of the cabinet was pretty straight forward with the floor on top of the tube frame and the sides attached to the side of the tube. The upper tube I figured become the playfield rails on the sides as any higher and it gets in the way of raising the playfield and the top of the sides above the rails are strengthened by the side rails , the front tube above the door frame and the rear at the top of the neck. Wood old school is definitely easier but at what cost having someone build it for you? I wanted a sub $500 cabinet........Bunnings today had this at $44 and is enough to make one cabinet with overs. https://www.bunnings.com.au/ecoply-2400-x-1200-x-12mm-non-structural-plywood-12mm_p0340315 Yes it's non structural and not marine grade but neither is factory pinball and never has been. I've hit steel and areas of no ply running circular saws through old cabs to convenient sizes for the colex bin so that certainly wasn't A grade structural marine plywood as many claim is used. Back to you @swinks Bottom line is we need good cabs at a homebrew price, I think we both agree to that? Now what style cabinet? You mentioned Bally SS....and a removable backglass? I like the Bally SS because after all, if someone decides the homebrewing playfields aspect isn't for them, they could buy a new painted Bally SS playfield........around $1200 and using parts they have or buying them assemble a perfect replica "playfield wise" of a known game matched to after market board set. I'd prefer backglass in door simply because of the amount of back glasses I have seen smashed.......Door removable lifting off hinges but back glass set in a frame inside the door. It also makes the locking the door so much easier than trying to lock the glass in place.......Gottlieb series one glass in door but without the larger door smaller backbox design......I think flush door to backbox would look better. Locking the glass fail designs often show up when the backbox is folded down and the machine is being transported such as these....... WPC has the DMD display panel and the backglass falling out, Bally with lock in top of head allows the glass to slip past the lock lug but merit on it being the simplest. Bally SS with lock on side turning latches on both sides of cabinet with connecting rod exactly the same problem as the Bally above and Williams SS. Still interested in hearing cabinets discussion but I throw in another topic .....Playfields and Playfield Parts...
  12. Yer, I wish I could WiFi my head to the printer. The image in my head is 3D and I can rotate it but no can't do that so you get a 2D cut and paste with my limited skills using paint unfortunately. @CandyLand OEM legs........easy enough to provide for both on the frame. Just means using tube in the corners of the frame instead of the 30 X 30 angle so it's a no added cost material wise variation. Just gives the homebrewer op[tions. As for the tubular legs construction wise. A cut with an angle grinder through 3 of the 4 walls that make up the tube, bend and fill weld to make each offset. Pretty simple but far cheaper than OEM.....Around $60 for 6 meter lengths and how many legs can you make from 6 meters.
  13. A bit of R & D......... Square tubular legs 30 X 30. I like that it can be made in house, making the legs that is but I think I could make each leg quick attach and release to the metal frame. If you can make it easier to attach and detach the legs may as well make a spare set for the back with wheels and then moving the machine is a one man job but without a pinball trolley. Keeps the cabinet corners. That's a plus I think. Not stupidly different from current but enough to show something has changed. Thoughts
  14. Bare boards and a parts list would of been ideal but no worries, when there ready.
  15. In an era when electric blackout and brownouts are predicted, we seem hell bent on making our form of trade dependent on electricity.........what could possibly go wrong? As for arcades, going funds transfer rather than coin solves the age old problem of having to restrict the cost per game to coins available. Funds transfer can do things like $2.20 a game where as that with coin mechs will loose you a lot of revenue unless you go tokens and that allows you to alter the token value. Personally I like coins as a backup if for no other reason, it is more inclined to get a loose coin out of someone's pocket.
×
×
  • Create New...