Kings of Steel
Bally, 19842020-11-08 11.29.11 (resized).jpg
Now it is time to paint up the rest of the cabinet. After much filling, sanding, yelling and screaming the cabinet made its way to the spray booth (aka yard) to be painted its base coat. This is using "Canyon Black" spray as a base. This is after the first coat. It took about 3 coats total to have a nice finish.
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First on our tour of the cabinet is our cabinet SW-16 board. This is for the flipper switches, coin door and tilt bob. It is wired to the backbox through a serial cable.
We have a standard power supply here wired into our service outlet. This is where we are plugging in our amp power supply, computer power supply and LCD power supply. This could potentially be simplified, but served our purpose well and doesn't overtax the other power supplies for the game.
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Next are the main power supplies for the game. Both are Mean Well power supplies.
The larger one is a SE-600-48 used to power the 48V solenoid coils.
The smaller is a 12v / 5v power output we use to power all the boards. We use standard computer molex connectors off of this to plug into the playfield and the backbox.
Turns out this wasn't enough power for all the LED strip lights we added. So after this we added an additional 5V power supply for the extra LED lighting.
The grounds are common, this is very important or all your coils will lock on.
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We use a Lepai subwoofer amplifier LP-168HA. Main reason is that it is very cheap and powers all 3 speakers. Honestly it sounds pretty good. Unless you are going for a super high end setup, this should suffice.
The only thing very strange is that the subwoofer volume control is separate from the main volume control, so it can be difficult to dial in.
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In the back cabinet we have our subwoofer on a custom mounting plate and behind that we have our 48V cap board. This is using the Total Nuclear Annihilation Power Filter Board Assembly.
Why? It was much cheaper than any of the other power entry solutions. But it does not have the added benefit of making sure the ground is common. Not sure I would recommend this setup, but it worked for us.
What you see hanging down from the head area is our solenoid 48V plugs to the playfield. We have a disconnect here to make the playfield easy to remove.
You also see the 12/5v molex cables and splitters. The playfield pugs into one of these ends and the other goes up the head. The last one powers the LED light strips which have since been replaced with an additional 5v power supply.
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Here is the current layout of the head. We have two PD-16 boards here to control the solenoids on the game, the P3-ROC control board, and that little board in the top right is the fadecandy to control the LED strips.
Eventually the main computer will be sitting under the P3-ROC board, however for right now we drilled a large hole in the right side of the head to run the USB and HDMI cables out to our development computer.
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Here is the LCD panel re-installed in the game in the service position. A small wire keeps the panel level while servicing and two latches keep it in the upright position during normal gameplay. An aluminum channel holds the backglass in position.
We have two LED strips on each side of the backglass and an LED strip running across the back which we call the "Action Bar". It is used in several modes during gameplay.
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Head re-assembled. Yes the temp backglass will stay. Love that you can see the boards behind it and we use it for all kind of cool lighting effects. Here you can see a bit at the top of the head being a bit rough. It was a balance between sanding too much or having it chip away. Not super happy with it but sometimes you just got to move on.
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Look at that super shinny coin door! What you don't see is hours of scrubbing at this thing with goo-gone to get ride of the sticker followed by the brass-o polishing. Then I just had to take the whole thing apart because it was still too dirty. Looks good now though.
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Rails are back. What do I have to say about rails? I hate them, or maybe they hate me. Either one.
First what a pain to take off with those spiral nails. Then I had the bright idea to buy new nails. They only had one size in stock so I didn't think much about it, and when you held them up they looks right. Well after pounding in the screws sure enough they are about 1/8" too long and they started to poke through the other side!!! ARRG. If you looked at the nails side by side the nails really they didn't look much different. Lesson learned. Building your own machine has lots of these.
So I had to remove the rails AGAIN! ... this time I had enough and decided just to screw the rails in instead. The added benefit is that if I mess up the side art traveling with this game it would be easily enough to take the rails off and re-sticker the game. Doesn't look quite as good, but I had enough.
After the cabinet our focus is going to be on the playfield. We have already started stripping the playfield down in preparation for artwork.
Also starting on pinball project #2. A bunch of parts have been ordered and will be arriving soon. At this point it is a bit of a closely garded secret. But I will take a bunch of pictures along the way and we will see about sharing in the future.
Well its now time to get the playfield ready for artwork. But how do we get the design of the game into the computer to create the artwork and try to line everything up.
The idea (and time will tell if this works) is to trace all the playfield features and then use a large format scanner to scan in the tracing paper.
First step is to remove all the top side items on the playfield.
Last step was to get the paper scanned in. We had some trouble with the paper getting bunched up so the solution was to tape the tracing paper to a standard sheet of large white paper prior to scanning.
I ended up having this scanned in at staples, the results were perfect. I added a couple extra measuring lines to ensure that the scanned document came back with the same dimensions.
After adjusting for a slight tilt, here is the scanned playfield in Photoshop ready to have the artwork created for it. This will be done at 300 dpi in CMYK.
While the cabinet was open, decided to go ahead and add in an additional 5v power supply. After adding in all the LED strips there was too much drop on the 5v line causing the P3ROC to reboot occasionally during game play.
The new 5v power supply is to the right in this picture and will be used to supply power to all the LED light strips (about 150 lights in total)
2020-12-09 16.55.50 (resized).jpgAwesome progress. I’m going to do something similar to scan my playfield into the computer but will be CNCing the playfield as well. Have you found a good option to print your artwork onto the playfield?
Quoted from SLCpunk2113:Awesome progress. I’m going to do something similar to scan my playfield into the computer but will be CNCing the playfield as well. Have you found a good option to print your artwork onto the playfield?
Thanks! I have an idea how we are going to have the artwork printed. I'll PM you the details. Unfortunately I am not sure how it will turn out.
Well Pincraft is still alive and kicking. It took much longer to design the artwork than I originally anticipated. But it is finally done!
Here is the playfield design in progress...
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Here is the upper playfield area...
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And here is the entire playfield in progress...
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Quoted from Mbecker:Looking great! So you found somewhere that prints inserts clear with no white vinyl underneath? Is it online?
Sent you a PM with some more details.
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Allentown, PA