Homebrew Pinball #3, Part 15

Cross posted from the original Pinside thread, this is one of many posts regarding my third homebrew pinball machine, creatively nicknamed 'P3'



Mounted the final mech today, the outlane saver. I'm having some trouble with its reliability currently. It keeps going up too high and getting stuck above the playfield. I added a bolt across the bottom to stop it from going too far, but then the bolt got stuck instead. So I added a spring to prevent the bolt from hitting the bottom of the coil so hard, but the spring reduced the travel enough to make the mechanism weak. I'll need to play some with adjusting the lengths of the parts in an attempt to lengthen the travel, or maybe make a custom bracket to allow everything to be longer (currently I'm just using a regular up-post/vuk bracket).

Here's a video of what the saver does when it doesn't get stuck or bottom out:

It's super strong and just sends the ball flying back onto the playfield if you time it right. I like having an outlane saver that doesn't save you completely, it just keeps the ball in play. The magna save does the same thing to a lesser extent, and the mini playfield shot between the flippers also manages pretty well, since your shot tends to go right into the right slingshot and out of control. This can be good or bad, depending on your playfield situation, since chances are once it gets bouncing around it's going to knock down a few drop targets, which will help you complete your hand, but they might not be the cards you want to make a good hand.

If you fire the popper too late though, you'll end up with a ball that, due to its left/down motion, leaves the metal guide sideways, and just flies off to the left. I've had it end up in the left inlane, the left outlane, all the way down in the mini playfield, and even somehow jumping backwards into the trough. I'll have to put up some air ball protection to make sure it always returns to the playfield somehow.

Posted Thursday, September 17, 2020
at 04:07 PM


Tags: Blog Post, Pinball, Project, P3,


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