Atomic Pile is the best mod for Batman'66. It's the first one I bought. It's a shame you had a broken one and couldn't get a replacement. I have no idea what happened in the OPs case or yours, but I do know that sometimes my ISP (charter) will just not deliver email at all if it thinks its spam. No spam box, no junk mail warning, just never gets to me. That's created some issues occasionally with pinmonk support. Also, if I get buried, shipping on the hot items and response times to emails are stretched out for a long time.

Every interaction I've had with the Mod Couple and Yelobird specifically has been good, so I can't imagine them letting the OPs problem linger now that they're back from vacation.

Most of my stuff is underneath the playfield, so no airball issues, but I have transitioned to PETG pretty much exclusively and I usually use at least 70% infill. The only breaks I've ever had was during my short stint with coil stop-mounted 3D printed brackets. That was a teaching moment. There's a LOT of sustained force and vibration that hits coil stops continuously. Much stronger and more damaging than I imagined, so I had to go back to side-mounted brackets parallel to the forces. But aside from that, and a handful of layer defect prints, no issues.

I had Yelobird 's Atomic Pile mod early on Batman '66 SLE on location and had zero issues with any part of it breaking. It got a lot of play, and once I was called to the location to remove a trapped ball from the top of it, so there were airballs happening. I don't think it's an unstable mod, unless the parameters of print or material have changed since the one I got. Stern's impressionist pile is so atrociously ugly, I can't imagine leaving it.

Your bomb-ass results are hard to argue with. Each set you do is better than the last.

Putting Yelobird in posts makes an alert that links to this thread when he gets on, so there have been a number of posts with that @ call alerting him to this thread already.

EDIT: I hope something isn't seriously wrong with him or his family. Quickly perusing, it looks like his last post activity was here 5 months ago, and there are no mods at all on his site for Mandalorian, Godzilla, RUSH, or Toy Story - the last 4 pins released, which is weird. Seems like he came to a halt on pinside at the end of Jan, beginning of Feb, with just occasional logins since, but that's it.

No new mods in 2022 and 5 months of zero pinside posting/activity points to something outside pinside going on that maybe they don't want to share. This is clearly not solely a customer service issue. Whatever they're dealing with, I hope they can manage it ok. The OP was taken care of, contact was made, the most important things were handled. I wish them well in working through whatever's going on in their lives outside pinside.

When you're drowning (and I have no personal knowledge they are, just for example), your focus is on not drowning. There are life events that may happen that become all-consuming or cause paralyzing depression or any number of other things that make it hard to do anything out of a basic routine. Money comes in, they ship stuff out. Maybe they can only handle the bare minimum and any additional issues like broken items are too much to deal with right now. All we know is we don't know, and the OP was taken care of in this case. Yelobird's been on here for like 18 years and has been a huge contributor to the site over a long period of time. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt while he works through whatever he needs to get through.

Went off the rails from what I heard from someone who knew them well. She got obsessed with Q/conspiracy theory nonsense and it took over everything and Pinbits was a casualty. Pretty sad.

Yeah, it was (is? This was about a year or so ago I heard) hardcore obsession from what I heard. Didn't want to do anything else except read about more Q nonsense and the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory. Wouldn't listen to reason. Totally destroyed their Pinbits business for no good reason. From what I was told Martin wasn't as into it, or maybe not into it at all, but couldn't pull her out of it. Again, sad.

I don't know them personally, the other person that told me did. From what they told me she was beyond reason and didn't care about pinbits anymore - a pretty depressing situation for Martin. I don't think he was into the Q/conspiracy thing. It's not an isolated type case. Lots of people have thrown reason to the wind and are all-in on being part of Q, no matter how destructive or ridiculous it is. That's a bummer no matter who the person that's trapped is.

I've said the outlines of what I was told. There's more but I've said enough. I have no reason to disbelieve the person that told me since they knew them well. Why would I make that up? There's no advantage in it for me personally - I never even ordered from them to my knowledge. But at least now people have an idea why Pinbits dropped off the face of the planet so abruptly. I didn't know it was still a mystery to most people.

It was not relayed from a friend of a friend to me, there was literally one degree of separation, and the person that told me is beyond reproach and also has no reason to make stuff up. Also, funny you should mention MSM, but that was in there, too, as well as a bunch of political insanity, etc, but it was all related. And yes, there are PLENTY of Americans that sadly have dropped out from functional society because they believe the crazy stuff out there with Q and conspiracy theories of government and politics that make no sense to anyone that examines them critically. But that's all I'm saying about this. I only said it to let people know what happened when Pinbits name came up so it made a little more sense. I didn't intend for it to turn into a sub-subject. This has nothing to do with The Mod Couple.

Congratulations on your fortitude. Others are not as strong as you. Reddit r/QAnonCasualties has some firsthand stories that may give you perspective different from your personal conspiracy-resistant (aka normal) experience. It's a support group with over 200k members that documents spouses, parents, siblings and friends completely sucked into conspiracies and Q nonsense and blowing up their lives to stay in that state.

I get most excited by downvotes. I want to know who and imagine why - unless it's from dingleberry, because that's just what he does, so I know the why. I do miss my downs from ding.

What happened to him? One day he was merrily downvoting my posts as usual, and then one April day in 2021...nothing. Hasn't been on in over a year.

Weird. I only see two dingle pinsiders: dingleberry and dingle_boys, and dingleberry is MIA.

I have an extraordinary thick skin from years of publishing video games and hearing everyone's grievances, no matter how petty, so no worries. If I was really put out I wouldn't have seen this.

Well, thanks. Wasn't expecting that. The problem I have is I am extremely helpful by nature, but I have a threadbare filter between my brain and mouth, so I will bluntly say what some people would not. My family is used to it, the general public is often wholly unprepared. It's more blunt than abusive, but it can be a shock.

I don't remember our run-in, so I have no idea what it was about, but I was probably wearing my black T-shirt with bold white "UNFAIR" on the front and "UNJUST" on the back. The outcome was therefore a foregone conclusion.

Thanks again for the unsolicited nice post!

See, I don't even categorize people. I just say what needs to be said to whoever. I don't TRY to be offensive, but sometimes I do offend. I'd like to think that's somewhat rare, but it's just the world according to me and sometimes there's a perspective clash that results in sparks.

Keeping this on topic... @yelobird's a good guy. 18 years on here and he's helped plenty of people, too.