Back in the day, Bally sold a blank playfield with the ball return stuff cut out and the shooter lane routed for $35.

Its probably easier to go the VP route like WOOLY did first. Then you could get the playfield cut after you make your first pass. The thing about changing lanes/ramps etc is lining up everything (inserts, wireforms etc)

Its a cool idea and I wish I had the knowhow to try

I've looked into this. really depends on how you go about it (investment in equipment). Just the playfield alone (cnc'd routed, ink, inserts, clear) you're talking minimum $500 (CPR is probably not far off). Add a pair of flipper mechs ($90), flipper bats, a few posts, and a basic way to drive it (no code, just flipping) which means hitting it with 48v for 1/2 a second then switching to 12v for holding.

If you ignore the finished playfield portion (just picking up a reasonable sheet of 1/2" baltic birch), I bet you can make a starting whitewood for prototyping for around $160.. but keep in mind that's no shooter, no ball trough. That's placing a ball, playing, and then manually putting the ball back into play.

Oh, dang. Aurich is throwing his hat in the boutique game! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!!!

Just messin', man. From one artist to another, enjoy the tinkering.

Ryan Claytor
Elephant Eater Comics
www.ElephantEater.com

In quantity, silkscreened, finished playfields are $250 each.

I have been keen to do this myself and probably going the more complex route but will potentially be alot easier for others. I am making 3D models of all the parts so you visually can move things around and see if things will work, have room or not. I have finished the cabinet so I can make a flat pack from and now gearing up to make the models of many of the playfield parts.

I just had a heap of inserts arrive in the last week to start modelling.

$500 sounds about right to me if you add up all the parts. That's not including the control boards.

I freehand-routed my own inserts in a playfield design back in 2000...without a CNC. I used a hole saw for saucer shots and a Dremel to dig the shooter groove. I used a jigsaw for the bottom design. It was not fun at all. Some of the insert holes have gaping holes around them, but they are otherwise flush when the inserts are installed. I used the cheap 1/2" crap plywood from Home Depot and retraced a previous playfield to drill out holes for the trough, flippers, switches, etc. Now with the sage wisdom of Pinside, I'll get some good Baltic birch and re-do it properly.

As for the CNC, I may just make insert templates and hand rout it that way, since I don't have CAD. Any word on decent CAD programs on the Mac? I've got an old MacBook from 2008.

Hank approves. Dinos V Monster Trucks 4 EVA!

Parts:
1) A sheet of 24"x48"x0.5" plywood from Home Depot or Lowe's. ~$15
2) At least 1 flipper, preferably 2. ~$40 each
3) A few sheets of thick cardboard from Michaels or Target or something for guides and ramps. $3->$8
4) A few packs of 1.5" panhead machine screws from Home Depot or Lowe's. ~$2 a pack of 10 I think
5) 0.5" hex head machine screws from Home Depot or Lowe's (Not the self drilling kind!). ~$10 for 100 I think
6) 40 typical star posts from Pinball life. ~$0.40 each in quantity.
7) 30 minimum 1.9" screw-in studs from Pinball Life. ~$1.5 each I think
8) 125-Piece White Rubber Ring Set from Pinball Life. ~$30
9) Proc/Fast/Whatever kit for controlling stuff $600->$1000
10) Old used computer with a compiler of some type $100 off CL

Tools Required:
1)Hand Drill
-0.0625" bit for dimpling and wire guides (if used)
-0.5" bit for flipper holes and GI holes
-Philips bit
-Hex bit
-Bit Extension adapter (1.5" minimum)
2)Circular Saw (Hand or table)
3)Hand Router with 1/4" bit

Add or remove additional parts as needed:
Slingshots
Trough
Opto PCB
Kickers
Poppers
Jet Bumpers
Targets
Target Banks
Rollovers
Misc switches and brackets
Wire Guides
Common Ramps
Large piece of sheet metal from lowes for custom guides and ramps and brackets.
etc...

It adds up over time.

I'm currently at this stage with Spaceballs. I'm finding that there aren't a whole lot of dimensional drawings of pinball parts out there, so I'm having to buy/borrow them and actually measure them and put them into a CAD program.

I'd probably buy a hooker for someone if they magically had a 3d model of a blank playfield laying around, with all of the slingshot, shooter lane, flipper, etc... geometry figured out.

I am literally sitting here right now digitizing a model of the 3-bank motorized drop target assembly from BK2K that BadBrick was nice enough to take out of his machine and let me borrow.

I also ordered a bunch of inserts that just arrived this week. I'm going to 3D print router guides and test assemblies. I'll make those models public if anyone wants them.

Bingo

As odd as it sounds, Virtual Pinball (not future pinball) is great as a first pass schematic for things. Get your sizing right, save a bmp schematic, scale it up to size, print it at Staples. Boom! Ready to drill and lay out.

What format do you need it in?

You need a lower apron and the mech to serve the ball back to the shooterlane
Flipper feeder lanes
As you say, slingshots and flippers

Everything else will depend on what you want

I have about $700 in boards, and ~$500 in playfield components in my home waiting for me to do something with them. I'm sure there are missing components, but so far its roughly enough for a whitewood with 2 flippers + mechs, three pops, two slings and assorted posts, rubbers, guides etc...

I have a pile of old junk to use for spare switches, targets and metal components like ball trough parts and whatnot. Those will add cost eventually, but for now it's theoretically functional.

I also have a small selection of playfield items modeled in Solidworks, and a few templates for pop bumper and slingshot cutouts. No word on how accurate they are yet

Technically, you don't really need an apron. Wire guides would serve the same purpose, and would probably be much cheaper (remember, this is a whitewood, not a production game )

Don't you normally rent those?

Oh, forgot to mention- WIRE! Don't underestimate the cost of lots of wire colours! You'll need at least 9 18 gauge colours and 10 20+ gauge colours. If you find a good place to get spools of striped wire, go for it. Colour code everything as best you can.

For homebrew or prototype purposes, buy white, and a pack of sharpies in different colors. Then 3D print a little holder thingy for the sharpie and pull the wire thru it. Presto, you have color ID wire

Well, at least that's what I did...

Sharpies bleed and fade within months.

I've seen some prototype/homebrew builds where most of the colors are the same, and they just label the ends with tags of some sort.

From what I have played with, 3D modelling ramps (in Solidworks at least) and wireforms is horrendously painful. It's not hard, but the time in vs usefulness out is not a great balance. I think a more free-form modelling suite would work much better but my day to day life is all Solidworks machining/manufacturing/fabrication type stuff so my artistic/freeform/surface modelling skill is non-existent.

My intention is to use foam core/cardstock and 3D printing to develop the geometry then 3D model the prototype afterwards.

Welllll then you need to work faster

Then you won't need so many pre-orders

I'd start with a sheet of white cardboard and magic markers.

Draw your hopes and dreams on both sides. Different colors for mechs and wires. Playfield supports and brackets for boards and wire harnesses.

Add it all up and start ordering. Then move onto whitewood. Then get fancy and swap all over to your finished playfield.

LTG : )™
Disclaimer : You might want to do 40 or 50 cardboard drawings first as you move into shot layouts and stuff.

When I first proto something I use solid coloured wire that I can get locally. Not really ideal since when you have 2 lamp banks + 2 swich banks (bus of 32 wires) those same 8 colours get confusing to follow.

With Haunted Cruise (and future games now too), once I know of what worked I then bought correct wire colours from Bay Area Amusements. Not the cheapest way to do it, but the easiest for sure. I could ensure my lamps were yellow stripped, switches were green stripped, optos orange stripped, ect. It's very easy to find and debug a bad wire now.

I'm about 60% of the way to a 3d model of a PF with the standard "Italian bottom" with 2 flippers, single inlane guides, 2 slings. I also have the cut patterns for pop bumpers, and the PF side of a pop bumper assembly modelled.

No verification on the geometry being 'acceptable' but I have homebrew pinball as my new years resolution...

like this still have to model the underneath mechs but using 2005 solidworks on a mac but their are other free programs to design with.

Playfield - 27-2-14.jpg

maybe you can help me with the programming wolf marsh and we can file share.

here is the cabinet almost done.

Screenshot 2.pngScreenshot.jpg

Nice! Way further ahead than myself.

I'm definitely not modelling a cab either though. At least not till I start taking pre-orders and I need a nice render

Yes! Just like that. Someone else is hooking me up with some stuff as well, but I'll gladly take more if you are willing to share! Let me know via PM.

I can definitely help with programming. The spaceballs board set looks like its going to cost about $140 to make, so that's another option as well.

My christmas break started yesterday, so now I'm into my heavy winter project season. Let the fun begin.

If anyone wants to set up a drop box or something, I would happily dump a folder of solidworks pinball crap into it in exchange for other solidworks pinball crap haha.

what program are you using as sharing does get challenging when some use inventor and others solid works etc. Happy to help and keen for 2015 to be the year to get a white wood flipping as well.

This is a good idea, are you able to save them as a 2005 solid works file?

My biggest handbrake is programming and just wish a basic system was out there with the initial program available with hit start button, load ball, flippers, slings, pops and targets was already programmed in and you just assigned a number to link with your wiring. I have stalled for over a year because I did not want to have a pinball sitting there unable to flip.

But I also know that once you dive in a lot can be learned.

Design and rules programming is easy and fun. Finishing and polishing is tedious and hard. Just having a flipping whitewood and rules does not make a complete table, though it does make a fun one-of-a-kind toy

No I don't believe SW can save as old versions, but we could save iges/step/parasolid stuff that would still provide geometry and whatnot.

If there's enough people who want to talk homebrew on the mechanical end, not so much software, we should make a thread or google group or something. I don't know how active it would be but I know there's a bunch of mechs, geometry, and dimensions I could use measured or checked that I don't have access to, and I'm sure there's the odd thing I could measure or check for other folks.

I agree but it's a start and comforting to at least test the shots. Everyone is different where I find 3d cad fun and easy where others wouldn't.

But agree it would be fun to have a small resource group to share and help others get through the areas they don't know.

cad, programming, vector and you have a small design team.

I say VP because you can rudimentary test the layout. Physics are very incorrect of course, but gives you an idea at least.

I remember in some of Ben Heck's shop-casts Jpop mentioned that it's better to design on foamcore/cardboard/wood then on a computer because you'd get more organic designs. Once you have a shot or curve you like measure it and mark it in cad. This is something I've started doing that and it really is much better then pure cad designing.

This is what I'd do. Start with a playfield size piece of paper and sketch things out, then hack it together in nordmanite (tm) and hot-glue.

Don't forget the power supply.

The Other Hardware: http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?board=6.0
and
Miscellaneous : http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?board=7.0
forums at Pinball Controllers have a lot of discussions about this stuff, but it's never come together 100% as far as CAD libraries, playfield blanks, etc.

For "Dinos vs Monster trucks" I started with a cad drawing printout then built it up with foam and cardboard and some junk parts just to see if it looked like it was going to work. Once everything looked ok we built the whitewood. For the whitewood I used 1"x 1/16 strips of aluminum as ball guides since it is a much easier material to work with to figure out the correct bends.

arcfoam4.jpg

arcpf2.jpg

Keith, that's awesome! What kind of wood did you use for the PF?

I would be down for this. I haven't started yet on my prototype but I don't plan on using solid works to model everything. I've already searched all over the web and there just isn't much out there for 3D models of standard parts.

You may want to get in touch with this guy:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/3d-taf

AFAIK he's mentioned in several threads that he's been slowly assembling STLs (or something I assume you could export as an STL with some reasonable level of fidelity) for his render projects.

Aurich are you taking pre-orders yet?
Where do I send my money...