Credit where credit is due, the Data East pop design is an iteration on the Bally design of the early 80s.

I'm curious why Stern went back to the Williams style. Are they cheaper? Is it a footprint thing? Is it that they hired a lot of former Williams guys and their preferences became the standard part? (Maybe that standard part is easier to modify in a pinch? Some games do alter the pop assembly a little bit for clearance)

Here is what I want. When I turn a machine on, I want it ready to play almost instantly.

And Allied Leisure had a similar design back in 77

the kind of technically correct I love

now someone figure out which EM did it first

C’mon folks, rebuilding pops is NOT a big deal. Once you’ve fine just a few, you should be able to sleepwalk through it. Use all new parts when you do it. Adjust carefully and enjoy snappy pops for literally years. Maybe after four or five years of heavy use you’ll need to maaybe make a slight adjustment to the switch gap. Pop performance and difficulty of rebuild/maintenance are definitely near the bottom of my list of pinball tech difficulties and complaints.

Objection! You hate everything DE did even though the hardware was virtually the same as everything else.

DE pops just don’t pop so good.

Which is probably why Stern dumped them.

But I digress.

What I haven’t seen is a convincing argument from anybody why pinball companies need to go through the trouble and expense of revising a pop bumper system that has served us well forever.

“It might make it easier to rebuild a pop bumper in 20 years” isn’t very convincing.

They pop great? They're used in a lot of modern games and they work just fine. I don't think anyone complains about TNA's or Rick and Morty's pop being weak

"If you are "having trouble" dialing them in, you either aren't very good at pinball tech, or you need to replace some of your 25-50 year old pop bumper parts."

So….you think pop bumpers need to be redesigned to work with magnet sensors?

Why didn’t DE think of that?

How about just taking the pop bumper out of new designs?

Would make them a lot easier to rebuild.

People like pops. Some don't like boring pop bumper clusters, but who doesn't like a well placed pop? TNA, RnM, Godzilla, etc.. Or even when they're nested, if there is a shot through them, people respond well to that. Stern JP, Iron Maiden, a lot of Pat Lawlor designs, etc...

I'm in favor of ditching the tired 3 pop trio under the top lanes, it's been done so much the corpse is starting to stink even under all the layers of formaldehyde.

But TNA, Rick and Morty, Godzilla—just to name a few recent games—have certainly shown pops don't have to be boring.

Edit: Ninja'd

Nope, they work fine.

Leave them be.

They do the job they need to do and do it well. It's been months since I had to adjust one in the long term fleet and even then it's because I was dicking around with something else.

I'm far more annoyed Stern went to the backbox latch lockdown bar.

I've actually come around on the latch lockdown bar. It's a bit easier and less finicky than the lever, although it doesn't feel like a premium solution like the lever.

I think it’s great, they simplified and cheapified something that was over engineered and more expensive than it needed to be.

And since it’s obviously a concern around here, in 20 years it’ll be easier to deal with. I’ve bought 3 WPCs in a row where that thing was all screwed up. The Congo I could t even remove the glass until I got the game to my shop.

Gonna make my life a lot
Easier when I’m 75 and rescuing some stern Back to the Future from a Long Island basement!

It's fine by me, as well as a lighter cabinet, & outside head bolts; but it isn't cheapifying anything.

Exactly. servicing aspects are typically just new skirt and socket which seems to be mostly mitigated with the wedge sockets used later anyway. Considering the frequency of servicing (how many skirts have you needed to replace a second time?), the maintenance aspect is pretty minor imo.

Spoons and leafs are nice, as they do provide that avenue for adjustment. Just like slings, some people might want them to trigger on a hair.. others want a bit less sensitivity. You can have it all.

I recall when I first started getting into more project machines.. I wanted to make changes all over the place. I wanted connectors everywhere do I didn't have to desolder etc. In retrospect, I see connectors and any component board as a point of failure. Just imagining having some opto board on a pop mech with all those vibrations etc. Stuff is bound to cause issues.

The current design is so simple and elegant, there would need to be a real functional reason to modify it.

***

Little but perhaps related segue, Speaking of pop bumpers, have any of you ever come across metal skirts? I have this weird memory of my first pinball having metal skirts.. Was a Cheetah.. I'm sure they were not OE.. But I'm sure I remember them being metal, but nobody seems to have heard of that.

I severely miss this in the jump to PC based games.

Yes, I restored a 60s Bally EM that had them.

Resized_16699221109967716534641397945293_385163287893037 (resized).jpeg

I'd assume the two latches are cheaper than that ridiculous spring-loaded lockdown lever thing everybody misses, but I digress:

Stern taking 40 pounds or so out of their cabinets is without a doubt the greatest industry innovation in decades. And yet nobody here seems thankful about it!

When I'm 75, trying to fix a pop bumper mech that is loaded with optos, infrared beams, and magnet sensors, at least the games will be easy to move!

The metal backbox don't bother me, the lockdown bar reeks of cost cutting though.

It does!!!

But again...so what? The latches work fine, and seem less prone to breakage, and have a much more satisfying "snap" than some sloppy spring loaded lockdown mech. Though, I guess we'll find out in 20 years or so! Haven't heard of any latch failures yet and they've been using them for 10 years.

Are today's pop skirts at least made of a lot more durable plastic than they used to be? I'm thinking of old games where they would chip all over the place, which seemed to be made of regular plastic and not the super-durable nylon that was used on mechanical units. Do skirts still chip on today's new games?

I think that's just a function of age. I get a lot more 50-year old EMs with chipped pop skirts than I do 25-year old games, but that's to be expected, no?

Plastic breaking down with age and UV exposure.

I see a lot of late 70s to early 80s Bally with broken skirt edges.

Nylon is dull-looking and opaque white but much more flexible and tough, hard to imagine it chipping and cracking as much which is why it was used in counters, flipper bushings etc. since the really old days. It's not pretty and shiny like the cheaper regular plastic that was used elsewhere like on the playfield stuff. But don't know for sure if skirts have ever been made out of nylon, or some other newer-tech plastic. You figure new ones at least have to be better than the 60s just from advancements in plastics.

Remember, a lot of the later Stern Electronics pins had all in one assembles that could be removed starting back in 1980.

How's the mud holding up?

I was looking at the Bond manual and noticed the Rocket is directional detecting optos. Reminded me of this thread
pasted_image (resized).png

Whoah put that thing away this is a family website

And these actually look like real old school optos that can be replaced; Not the new Stern shit. I'm all for it.

SickNate designed something similar to some of the ideas that have been discussed for his Mad max homebrew

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/witness-mad-max-fury-road-homebrew/page/3#post-5407720

the reinvention of the pop bumper is when there are NO pop bumper bundles at all. see Godzilla and CV

I literally had this same idea myself, like 10 years ago. Unfortunately, I had no good way to manufacture parts at the time or else I would've built a prototype.

Come on, the only way to do that is to regress our display technology back to DMD to reduce graphics loading, and put back realtime music synthesis to reduce audio loading...

Oh, wait. I actually love all three of these ideas. Fully on board with doing this.

I have a Ghostbusters and it irks me it takes so long to boot up.

Star Trek? BAM! I'm running boss.

How about a tiny opto send/receive unit, or a proximity sensor, pointing upward at the end of the skirt stem, and the stem has a little magnet or reflective thingey or whatever on the end of it?

The stem has about half an inch of movement freedom. If the trough prox sensor in TZ is any indication, magnetic sensing in a very small space can be very fiddly. Also, I've learned from personal experience of building a custom ball lock that firing a coil close to a magnetic sensor can trip the sensor. Which might not be a huge deal, but it can still happen.

An opto mounted to the stem might just work, assuming the wire can be thin but flexible enough to avoid breaking. A reflector would eliminate the potential for broken wires, though it would have to be kept clean to work properly. Maybe the solution is to replace the spoon switch with sort of a circular (but still leaf-style) switch:
spoon (resized).png

Red is the stem, green and white are wires, light gray are the blades, dark gray are switch contacts. There might need to be more contacts or put the rings closer together, but basically as long as this is properly centered under the stem, no adjustment would be required AND the random rubbing angles would potentially self-clean the switch. It's mechanically similar to what we have now, but could fit in a smaller space. Not having a spoon switch pushing on the stem also means the skirt takes less force to trigger, possibly preventing the issue where the ball comes to a stop on a nearby post and just sits on the bumper skirt without firing it.

My only excuse for building my homebrews on a PC platform is because I picked themes best displayed on an LCD, and even then it means a bunch of extra work doing graphics-related programming which I enjoy very little. There are other projects planned for later, so I'm absolutely going to try and program a future game on a chip that boots instantly.

The outer ring would need to be spring-loaded somehow in all directions, otherwise there wouldn't be any self-cleaning 'wipe' like leaf switch points have, they would merely make contact. And because you'd want the stem to still be able to move as far as it can mechanically after contact is made, like the leaf switch + cup does. And then it would add extra pressure just like the cup does. And cleaning those rings, yikes.

What needs to change is the light socket. That is the biggest pita for me when rebuilding them. Find some way to make a connection without having to unsolder/resolder. The wms games with the flat metal connections especially suck.

On my games I see a couple issues. The male threads on the pop ring break off and then the pop bumper tears the yokes apart. Other issue is a hole gets worn in the pop spoon and the pop skirt gets suck and switch will not read. Also have the pop body where the rod/ring wears break off or create a hole.

Ballys did in the 80s, like Eight Ball Deluxe for example. The wires can be unplugged from the socket, don't need to unsolder them.

Orbitor 1's "spinning" bumpers were cool and really worked for that game, even though playing O1 once every decade scratches that itch. I'd love to see the idea reused somehow though, maybe as a rising toy like the pop in Circus Voltaire.

Orb 1 (resized).jpg

More connectors, more problems.

Pop bumpers are a high impact part. You can’t have some easy in easy out light socket.

Also, pop bumper light sockets need to be replaced about once every 30 years.

But ya still gotta unsolder them to replace the pop ring or a chipped skirt.