(Topic ID: 172723)

Homepin OFFICIAL Thread - Pinball Parts & Machine Progress

By Homepin

7 years ago


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Topic index (key posts)

33 key posts have been marked in this topic, showing the first 10 items.

Display key post list sorted by: Post date | Keypost summary | User name

Post #29 Images of flipper coils being assembled in the Homepin factory. Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #31 Images of prototype Thunderbirds mechs. Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #46 MPU Testing: Image and Video Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #47 Pinball Cab CNC Tests: Images and Video Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #61 Fliipper Coil pictorial Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #122 Delivery trucks being loaded in China Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #130 Factory tour video Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #131 Flipper links & other assembly parts Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #142 The plastic used for flipper links Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)

Post #153 Flipper buttons Posted by Homepin (7 years ago)


Topic indices are generated from key posts and maintained by Pinside Editors. For more information, or to become an editor yourself read this post!

There are 4,513 posts in this topic. You are on page 1 of 91.
44
#1 7 years ago

Hello Pinball Enthusiasts,

I thought it was time to start a thread where I can show our progress in the Homepin factory with all things Pinball and Arcade related. In fact this is the first thread I have started on Pinside.

For those who don't know who Homepin is I will explain briefly here (skip the next couple of paragraphs if you are already aware of Homepin).

Homepin was started about six years ago in a small electronic workshop under my house in Kuranda Far North Queensland Australia. Initially we manufactured replacement boards for numerous pinball machines. The idea to start a factory in China grew from my lifelong desire to run an electronics factory manufacturing "something". As I had been involved in the amusement industry from when I was 21yo I figured that pinball or something arcade related would be a good place to start.

For about 15 years I had been trading with China and had started a small office there in Guangzhou mainly sourcing things for various customers and also having items manufactured, checking quality and organising shipping for other customers. I was already in China several times a year often for a few months at a time.

Fast forward a bit and now I have a factory in Shenzhen (just across the border from Hong Kong) with many different machines from plastic injection to folders, lathes CNC milling machines and pretty much what you would expect in a factory including facilities for printed circuit board assembly. Homepin is a 100% Australian owned and run business. We do not have any Chinese partner and there is always an Australian engineer present in the factory supervising operations.

I want to make it totally clear here about what we do and about this thread. Homepin is an amusement company. In fact our registered Chinese business name is "Shenzhen City, Arcade Game Science & Technology Company Limited". We are not exclusively about pinball machines, we make anything relating to arcade machines in general and that happens to include pinball.

For various reasons we have found ourselves manufacturing licenced Video game tables under a very famous Australian brand name, "Hankin". Back in the day, Hankin was a very big player in the amusement industry in Australia and did quite a lot of manufacturing. They made the tables that we now build under licence and also made five models of pinball machines.

A.Hankin & Co are still in the amusement business to this day operating juke boxes and pool tables in hotels mostly around New South Wales. Homepin has a very close working relationship with the Hankin company.

Initially, after establishing the Homepin factory in Shenzhen, I didn't think much about continuing the manufacture of replacement PCBs but when we had some quiet times it occurred to me that it would make sense to make boards to keep the staff busy. To that end, the latest boards we are building are replacements for WMS MPU boards. The pictures below show our work on them and the jig that arrived this morning to enable us to test them before packing and shipping. It will take some time for us to wire the jig so it might be a week or so before we are ready to ship these boards out.

Official Homepin agents for all of our replacement board products are "Johns-Arcade" in Australia and "Pinball Life" in the USA.

A quick word about "other Pinside threads" relating to Homepin and Thunderbirds pinball. It was never my intention to have much of a presence in the USA or Canada initially. I wanted to get the factory running smoothly, have our first machine shipping and then work on further products that would be more suitable for those markets. Most know that things turned sour pretty quickly and "most" of that was connected with a few stirrers on here at that time. It seems the moderators are doing a much better job more recently of curtailing keyboard warriors (just my observation).

I intend to show various things as we are doing them in the factory because I know there are many who are interested. Sometimes these things might be arcade related rather than pinball but that's the business we are in. I welcome CONSTRUCTIVE or POSITIVE feedback. If you want to niggle or be negative please don't bother posting in this thread. Where possible I will endeavour to answer questions when they don't clash with commercially sensitive matters.

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#2 7 years ago

I'm interested to see how you do competing in the ever growing pinball market.
Best wishes,Mike.

#3 7 years ago
Quoted from Grizlyrig:

I'm interested to see how you do competing in the ever growing pinball market.
Best wishes,Mike.

Thanks.

One of our advantages is that we are not ONLY in the pinball business. Our arcade business and replacement pinball board business are big enough to survive on their own merits.

That gives us an advantage as far as "buying time" is concerned to build the pinball business.

#4 7 years ago

Great to see an official Homepin thread.

#5 7 years ago

I wish you the best of luck and that all your pinballs will be a hit.

#6 7 years ago

Good luck and may all your locks be lit.

#7 7 years ago

Mike -
Are you still doing those -35 Bally kits anymore?

#8 7 years ago

In for updated

#9 7 years ago
Quoted from dasvis:

Mike -
Are you still doing those -35 Bally kits anymore?

We still have lots of parts for these kits but stopped doing them as there are many other options to replace a -35. I wouldn't dismiss doing another run of them sometime in the future if there was demand.

Homepin tries to make the boards that others don't. When we do make one that is also made by others we try to ensure it has some improvement or extra that others don't.

Like the MPU's shown in the first post. They come with a RAMTRON RAM installed and a PLCC removal tool included. Our boards also are designed to be as close in appearance to the originals but with thicker PCB tracks and IC sockets where they need to be such as IC20 on this board.

#10 7 years ago

Can't wait to see the progress

#11 7 years ago

I can't wait to see what comes! Homepin really saved me by producing an aux flasher board for my Mario mushroom world. Something bad happened and traces were burnt off and all but one transistor was shorted! Homepin was the only source for replacement. Their board appeared to be far better quality than the original!
Thanks Homepin!

#12 7 years ago

Very awesome and im glad the boards appear to be very close in looks to the original.....love that

#13 7 years ago

I would be interested in knowing more about the old Hankin pinball games.

#14 7 years ago

It would be interesting to see a sneak peek of Thunderbirds. Is it going to be a DMD game?

#15 7 years ago
Quoted from Platypus:

I would be interested in knowing more about the old Hankin pinball games.

Here a short vid of the Hankin Empire Strikes Back (1980)

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2868

#16 7 years ago
Quoted from Platypus:

I would be interested in knowing more about the old Hankin pinball games.

Also the Hankin Shark (1980)

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=3339

#17 7 years ago

I like that Shark art and playfield. how many were made? 1980 was shortly after Jaws came out. I was living in the Virgin Islands at the time working as a dive master and many people were fearful of even walking in the water along a beach.

#18 7 years ago
Quoted from Platypus:

I would be interested in knowing more about the old Hankin pinball games.

http://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?mfgid=2&sortby=name&searchtype=advanced

#19 7 years ago

Any chance you will offer Williams system 11 mpu boards?

Thanks

#20 7 years ago

When you have time a video of the machine assembling the MPU would be cool

#21 7 years ago

Mike, this is the kind of post I wanted to see from the start. Good idea to try and get a clean slate. Hopefully things stay clean.

#22 7 years ago
Quoted from luvthatapex2:

It would be interesting to see a sneak peek of Thunderbirds. Is it going to be a DMD game?

The display cabinet at Pinfest had a colour LED display, similar size to a regular DMD

#23 7 years ago
Quoted from Platypus:

I like that Shark art and playfield. how many were made? 1980 was shortly after Jaws came out. I was living in the Virgin Islands at the time working as a dive master and many people were fearful of even walking in the water along a beach.

I think there were only about 200 of the Hankin Shark ever made.

#24 7 years ago
Quoted from Platypus:

I would be interested in knowing more about the old Hankin pinball games.

There was an Empire Strikes Back and Orbit 1 alongside each other at the recent Newcastle Pinfest, I got a few photos.

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#25 7 years ago
Quoted from blue95:

There was an Empire Strikes Back and Orbit 1 alongside each other at the recent Newcastle Pinfest, I got a few photos.

Fantastic. They look to be in great condition.

#26 7 years ago
Quoted from PinSinner:

Fantastic. They look to be in great condition.

They are, the owner Trevor has all 5 Hankins that he is in the process of restoring.

#27 7 years ago

Good on him. I can't imagine there are many of them left. Having all five is a real achievement. I'll need to make the trip to Pinfest one year if he brings them again, as I would love to see them in person.

#28 7 years ago

These seems to be a lot of interest in the Hankin pinballs (which is very good IMO). Here are a couple of pics from Pinfest 2015 with David Hankin signing an owners Shark at the show and another with David, his wife and myself at Pinfest.

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#29 7 years ago

I have had massive troubles connecting to the internet this past week and uploading pictures has been an exercise in frustration. Many say it was because of the tensions in Hong Kong and (usually) when political things flare up the Chinese Govt tightens up all things internet.

Anyway, things seem a little better this morning so here are some pictures of us making flipper coils.

First a worker rivets the wire tags to the moulded formers. Then they are taken upstairs to our electronics assembly area where they are wound on our new 6 bank winding machine. We are only using 2 banks of it as we really don't need the full capabilities of this machine.

The coil wrappers should be delivered in a day or so and we will have a batch of fresh coils ready for the labels when they arrive.

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#30 7 years ago

A batch of 300 flipper plungers being machined - we send them outside for plating. These will be black nickel plated.

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#31 7 years ago

One of the final mechanisms for Thunderbirds being tweaked before we order a large quantity of parts to build it.

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#32 7 years ago

Black nickel plated plungers? I'm guessing there's no additional cost for you to do that...there's not any mechanical benefit to doing that, is there?

#33 7 years ago
Quoted from Frax:

Black nickel plated plungers? I'm guessing there's no additional cost for you to do that...there's not any mechanical benefit to doing that, is there?

We have to plate them with something and black nickel (in China) is one of the few finishes we can use that complies with RoHS.

It is actually a very nice finish and feels, to the touch, very slippery, almost like the part has been oiled??

This picture doesn't really do the finish justice - it looks a lot better in person.

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#34 7 years ago

The Homepin logo stamped in a metal part.

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#35 7 years ago

Love the updates!

#36 7 years ago

Finishing another batch of replacement motor driver boards.

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#37 7 years ago

Any chance of doing system 11 mpu boards they are hard to find and the aftermarket have sound issues.

#38 7 years ago
Quoted from Mitch:

Any chance of doing system 11 mpu boards they are hard to find and the aftermarket have sound issues.

The problem we would have making these is that we have no way of testing them. If that changes in the future we would certainly look at it.

#39 7 years ago

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#40 7 years ago

I wanted to say Thank You for posting progess pics and showing the manufacturing side of things.Really interesting to me.
Mike

#41 7 years ago
Quoted from Homepin:

The Homepin logo stamped in a metal part.

I love how you brand or stamp your parts. It makes it obvious to the customer that your parts are made by you and are the genuine product.

I'm enjoying the updates. It gives an insite into the whole process that one ordinarily wouldn't get to see. Keep up the good work.

#42 7 years ago

Sid having a great old time wiring the test jig for these boards.

Actually I won't write his comments over the past few days about this job here

...and the boards keep stacking up waiting for Sid to have the jig ready!!!

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#43 7 years ago

Great thread Mike. Love seeing this stuff.

I think Sid needs a hand.

I'm sure this has been answered elsewhere, but what controller/driver boards will you be using for the pins? Is it a completely new Homepin system?

#44 7 years ago
Quoted from cooked71:

what controller/driver boards will you be using for the pins? Is it a completely new Homepin system?

Yes, it will be our own Homepin embedded controller system. This was all but finished when our Chinese programmer passed away in his dormitory and basically (without repeating all the drama and details again) we started again from scratch!

We are getting close again and it will be better than ever this time around!

#45 7 years ago

Sid looks so impressed there

#46 7 years ago

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#47 7 years ago

Cutting plywood pinball cabinets in the Homepin factory.

You can see a few drops of water has spilled onto the work from the water cooling system used to cool the CNC head that runs at 30K RPM.

We will replace all the water hoses shortly, just waiting on the new ones from the CNC machine factory to be delivered.

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#48 7 years ago

what is the timber in the ply?

#49 7 years ago
Quoted from swinks:

what is the timber in the ply?

These test sheets are 18mm eucalyptus, 13 ply, AA grade and A0 (to meet RoHS requirements).

It does splinter a little but a light hand sand brings the parts up a treat.

We will also be experimenting with poplar but it hasn't been delivered yet (in A0 rating).

So far we are happy with the results using the eucalyptus.

#50 7 years ago
Quoted from Homepin:

18mm eucalyptus

Nice Aussie touch.

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