Lots of software and hardware tweaks to the table. I now have the saucers kicking the way that I want them to kick with the right saucer raking the MUG targets on occasion and the left kicking to the top of the table also on occasion. I have to say that because there is a lot of variability in how these things kick from ball to ball.

I did a bunch of work on the multiball code so that now there is a 10 second ball save with the start of multiball. I also now have a timed post raise/drop that occurs after every kick out of perdition to prevent cheap reentries of the lane.

I also added a 10 second ball save from the time that a ball is kicked from the trough. Since there aren't a lot of quick ways down after ball launch this probably won't be used very often but it is nice to have.

Lastly I added a slide in the attract mode that displays the high scores for the game along with titles for each score (like "Master of Crockery") and I made some changes to the high score entry routines.

Here's a short video tour of some of the new changes.

Here's some game play:

Not a lot to report other than that I now have code in place to clear the perdition lane should something fail to clear it during either perdition multiball or perdition multiball fail scenarios.

On most tables you put a ball in a ball lock and if the mode is ready the ball locks and if multiball is achieved the ball ejects, simple. The base problem with the design of this table is that the multiball is fricken complicated.

In Cuphead the multiball lock needs to:
- register up to three hits to the perdition counter
- eject the ball after the first two
- raise a post to block other balls from entry 750ms after eject
- lower the post after 2 seconds to allow other ball entries
- only do this on the first two entries
- on the third entry lock the ball and raise the post
- do not allow additional increments of the perdition counter after three until multiball is achieved or failed
- if multiball is achieved:
a) lower the post
b) kick the ball
c) raise the post after 750ms
d) if the ball hits the kicker again repeat from step 'a'
e) when the ball drains lower the post and start counting perdition entries again
- if multiball fails:
a) kill all scoring and coil power
b) lower the post
c) kick the ball
d) raise the post after 750ms
e) if the ball hits the kicker again repeat from step 'b'
f) when the ball drains lower the post and start counting perdition entries again

I've also started making the CNC file for machining the final playfield. A BIG thank you to the Pinsider who has agreed to help me out with this!

Well today was the day that I've been putting off for a couple of weeks, the day where imagination meets reality. When I made the white board I used Onevox's playfield as a guide and fudged the locations of a few elements of the playfield to make everything fit. Today I had to make these liberties match the harsh cold reality of CAD.

After hours of work in VCarve I now have most of the layout done. I'll come back at it again to finish off and then I'll go through and double check to make sure that I've got all of the locations correct. Although I'm not going to make the tool paths I couldn't help but run a simulation to see how the playfield is progressing.

Untitled (resized).png

VCarve is pretty slick, I especially appreciate the snap to center feature that makes it easy to find the center point of a line for layout work. Of lot of convenience that is best appreciated by those of us who grew up with T squares...

My transparent white ABS just arrived so I'm experimenting with this for the walls. The thought of being able to transmit light through the walls is appealing to me. These ABS walls have been very sturdy and impact resistant so I don't think that I'll make steel walls for the final playfield. I guess if it's good enough for LEGO it's good enough for me.

With the transparency you can see the infill pattern showing through the wall. It's kind of cool looking but I'lll have to live with it for a while to know if I like it or if I'll go with 100% infill for the finals.

20210623_094205 (resized).jpg

stefanmader it might be because my walls are ABS that they can take the hits? ABS has a bad name because it is "hard to work with", smells and is prone to warping but it is tough stuff. I use it for all of the parts on my Nell Driver Units because I want them to last in my customers machines for many years.

The walls have 3mm thick tabs on the back side and these are screwed down to the playfield, the saucer walls have reinforcers on them as well since they can take direct hits. Objects are made in F360, sliced with Prusa Slicer and printed on a Prusa.

20210623_111321 (resized).jpg

Thanks!

Several hours spent measuring and laying out the geometry of the playfield in VCarve Desktop. I think I've got everything in place but I need to come back another day and recheck to make sure I didn't make any big mistakes.

Untitled (resized).png

Finished up printing and now Cuphead has something in common with an old 1976 Ford Grenada that I used to drive. The both have "white walls"...

20210624_201106 (resized).jpg

Lastly finished up some small projects like printing up blocks for under the playfield that slide into the notches in the metal supports to lock the playfield so that it doesn't slide towards the player. Also removed some printed shims to lower the playfield by about 1/16" so that the glass can better clear the spinner bracket.

It looks like Sunday the 25th will be the day for machining the playfield so I need to confirm that my plans for artwork will work. I sanded down the old Thunderbolt playfield and put a coat of shellac on it in anticipation of testing out techniques.

20210716_165805 (resized).jpg

My plan is to:
1) mask off all of the areas that need to be painted and paint them white
2) mask off the areas that will stay white and paint the yellow, red, blue and purple
3) use white laser decal paper to do any graphics that are solid and colored
4) use clear decal paper for black lettering and insert keylines
5) use clear decal paper for any colored lettering over bare wood or painted areas and then...
6) use the cricket on "print and cut" mode to make individual letters on white decal paper to cover the clear lettering in number 5

The reason for steps 5 and 6 is that printers are set up to produce colors based upon them printing on white paper. If the artwork is printed on anything else the colors will not register correctly so that is why you need to print color on white paper. Since most printers can't lay down white (I had an ancient Alps printer in the early 90's that did) this is the only way I can see to make this work.

7) keyline everything else by hand

Wish me luck...

The first experiment is done and I learned a few things. I was studying up on my Cricut machine and it has a "print and cut" feature that I've never used in the past. That it does is limit you to a 9.25 x 6.75 area but it will print "bleed lines" around the perimeter of anything that will be cut and then it prints a heavy lined black box around the graphic. The bleed lines ensure that no white from the paper will show through and the black box acts as a guide for the machine for indexing. What the machine will do (after you've printed the graphic and loaded the carried sheet into the machine) is turn on a light and use a photo sensor to find the black line. It does this in eight locations around the perimeter and based upon this it figures out where your graphic is and makes the cuts. The bleed lines give a little margin for error to the cuts.

Here is what a sheet of paper looks like with the bleed lines. These are the heavy lines on the perimeter.

20210717_091538 (resized).jpg

I then got the bright idea that maybe if I use the mylar from my decal pro system, I can hold the graphics together so that they will be aligned properly. You'll have to google Decal Pro if you want more info but the last step in the process is to use mylar with an electrostatic charge to hold the graphics together while they are being released from the paper by water. This actually worked to a degree but because these are decals and not vinyl with an adhesive, there was no way to "weed" out the graphic ahead of time so it will not be the way that I go for the real deal.

Here is what the decal looks like on the apron area of the old playfield. Before I can commit to this system I'm going to have to be sure that the clear coat will not damage the decals. Spraymaxx is only good for a short time (a week in the fridge if I remember right) so I'll have to wait till closer to finish time to check that out.

20210717_091342 (resized).jpg

Not bad but I can see that trying to line up a dozen of these over the playfield will not be an option. I'll have to paint the base colors and insert selected graphics in the various locations as I had planned before.

Thanks again Ben, it was awesome hanging out, making playfields and talking all things pinball! A few Spotted Cows provided perfect hydration for a 90+ degree summer day in the shop.

Here's Ben demonstrating proper technique for keeping small non-tabbed inserts from becoming flying hockey pucks.

20210725_143611 (resized).jpg

The first of two pfs.

20210725_151129 (resized).jpg

Well after all of the fun and excitement of yesterday it's back to the shop to see what these playfields look like in detail. Overall I'm very pleased with how the CNC paths turned out. I went to Ben's with three sheets of Home Depot 1/2" (12mm) birch plywood and I shellaced the top surface of each of these to help prevent splintering during the CNC runs. This worked really well for the most part but there was one section of the board where the veneer was not supported because of a void in the plys that had some minor chipping. Another section had some minor chipping because of poor adhesion between the veneer and the top ply. All in all not bad and nothing that I can't fix since these areas are eight under the apron or are covered with paint/color.

After the first playfield was machined I went over to Woodcraft and picked up a quarter sheet of their fancy 9 ply 1/2" (12mm) birch and we used that for the second pf. Because that board was not shellaced we had some chipping on the first insert pockets so we stopped the CNC and put wide blue 3M masking tape over the areas that would be machined (the old masking tape trick for preventing cross cut chipping in plywood for table saw runs). This worked very well to prevent further chipping of the veneer. When I bought the board before machining it was dead flat but when I looked at it this AM, it has developed a warp to it. This is nothing that the side rails won't be able to straighten out but it was disappointing that the more expensive 9 ply was not as dimensionally stable as the cheap HD ply.

Through a Pinsider I might have the ability to have the PF professionally direct printed so I've been working for the past couple of weeks with making Onevox's artwork match up with my vector files for the CNC. I've moved just about every element of the PF around by small or large amounts so this photoshop adjusting process has taken a lot of time. I used some long distance camera shots to try to eliminate lens distortion for setting up the left dice lane since that bares little resemblance to Onevox's original design. In spite of this the images still had some distortion that I couldn't correct using skew and distort in PS. Today I tried using my flat bed scanner to image these areas thinking that it would have the least distortion. The result looks a little like x-rays overlapping the artwork but it was reassuring to see that everything seems to line up pretty well.

Screen Shot 2021-07-26 at 5.45.01 PM (resized).png

Lots of sanding, cleaning up machined ledges and finishing has been done. I was wondering how best to clean up the dozens of 3/4" insert hole steps and I found that a Dremel flat wire brush really did a nice job of knocking off all of the splintered hairs of wood along the edge of the step off shelf.

I wanted a grey latex paint for the backsides of the PF so I went to Menards and found that they sell small pint sized "test" jars of paint that can be mixed to any color. That was perfect for putting a couple of coats on the backs of the pf's after they had been shellac'ed and sanded smooth.

20210727_133738 (resized).jpg

Once that has dried I'll start setting the inserts in epoxy.

TreyBo69 since I work on old EM's that's what I'm used to seeing so I figured that's what I'd do

benheck no problem, it was a blast hearing your pinball stories! You have to also remember that I consumed a few of those beers myself.

I was a little surprised at how fast you drove the feed rates of your 1/8" end mill but after going over the PF with a fine tooth comb it did a really great job. I guess I can probably increase me feed rates on my little CNC a bit. How many thousandths did you add to the vectors on the second pf? The inserts fit into it like butter but the first one that we machined that I set at exactly 3/4", 1" ... , those inserts will need a little gentle persuasion to seat just like you figured they would.

Lots of work these last few days. One of the problems with the machine is that ALI used a lockdown bar that mounts into the front wood of the cab like the old Bally bars of the 60's did. The machine didn't come with the lockdown bar so I had to mod a Williams or Bally bar to fit which then shortened the playfield glass length so that a custom glass would be needed.

In playing with a glass in place it has become apparent that the light colors from the head TV movies cause too much glare on the upper portions of the playfield glass so I talked with wallybgood and decided to order a sheet of Invisiglass for the machine. Since tempered glass cannot be cut I had my son help me pull the head and then used a 1/4" and 3/4" chisel to lengthen the glass run by about 7/8" so that a full sized sheet will fit. I also took advantage of the removed head to fix the back plate that had come loose.

20210729_141446 (resized).jpg

The other day I had a conference call with Onevox and his printer in NC about having the playfield direct substrate printed. The printer has a multicolor latex machine that uses a vacuum to hold the piece down and the machine can print on wood. We spent about half an hour going over the process to bring the printer up to speed about the various aspects of printing a pinball playfield. In the end they think that their print can go over shellac and that it should be compatible with Spraymax 2K.

To test the process I am making three small playfield sections with an insert and saucer hole and we will do trials of printing onto these. The printer will then send them back to me for clear coating and once we feel confident in the process, I'll send them the two playfields that I'm making. While I was sanding down the inserts I thought that I'd mention a technique that is used in wood working that maybe some won't have seen.

One way to be sure that you've sanded an uneven area down is to make pencil marks across the area and once all of the marks are gone, then the area should be flat. Also since I'm using a hand held random orbit sander and not a thickness sander, the marks will let me know if I'm taking off more on one side of the insert than another since the sander can rock on the insert. Here are three photos demonstrating how this works.

20210729_154114 (resized).jpg20210729_154208 (resized).jpg20210729_154330 (resized).jpg

Yes the printer thinks that direct printing to the plywood/insert board that has been shellac'ed will work. That's one of the beauties of latex printing, it will stick to just about everything. It will also accept most all clear coats so long as they don't contain ammonia in them. He said that Windex will wipe the print completely off.

One reason why I want to clear coat the piece before printing is that I want the surface to be perfectly smooth to accept the latex print material. The print machine will sense the surface and adjust the print head to be just above the playfield. The further away from the surface the print head, the less fine the detail that can be printed. The printer likened it to using an air brush, the further away from the surface you hold the brush the wider the spray pattern. If I have any changes in depth from grain pattern, I'm assuming that will cause issues with print fidelity. That's why I want it dead nuts flat and to let the shellac fill any low spots in the grain pattern.

Like we talked about when I was over this past weekend, shellac is about as safe a clear coat as you can get. It plays well with just about everything that you put over it including lacquer, varnish, spraymax, acrylic paint etc. Shellac does have drawbacks to it, for example if you used it as a final finish and you spilled alcohol on it, the alcohol will eat the finish. Since shellac is dissolved with alcohol that is also a strength of the finish because when you put a new layer on top of an existing layer, the alcohol in the new layer partially dissolves the old shellac and makes for a super strong bond between the old and new layers. Water will also damage shellac but since it will be covered deep in the finishes it will be protected.

The test pieces are insurance that what we think will work, will actually work...

Onevox will have to correct me if I'm wrong but I heard $150 for the two playfields.

BorgDog I'm sending two just in case the first printing gets screwed up, I'm not planning on building another one. It will then be redundancy should I screw something up during clear coating or assembly.

@thatonedude, I have no idea but the printers know Onevox very well.

@flippyd, yes the center drain is brutal when coupled with 2" flippers. I'm not a very good player and it kicks my butt on a daily basis. Bord has played it as well and he is a good player so he might have a better opinion.