Homebrew Pinball #3, Part 25

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



Began work on the habitrail for the ramp, to return the ball to the left inlane. I 3D printed some clips with flat bottoms to make it easy to hold the rails while I align them and work. The plan is eventually to either use some brass and solder it, or try to braze some steel, but for now, I'm using some easy to bend 1/8" copper wire (and cheap, since it's just on spools at Home Depot) to get it right and test things. I'm curious to see if the clips can hold up to soldering/welding, it'd be convenient.

The actual alignment is a bit iffy; since my ramp model didn't match the actual model that means the habitrail I drew won't line up with the physical ramp either. I tried to eye-ball adjust it to match where it looks like the ramp actually is, but we'll see how well that works.

The actual attachment to the ramp will also be weird. It was designed to connect to a plastic tube that goes across the playfield, and didn't have much flow. Originally I just sorta hand-waved this part as "I'll make something to hold the habitrail, can't be that bad", but now I'm at the part where I need to actually figure out how to connect a ramp whose shape I don't know to the habitrail I haven't built yet.... Here's my first attempt. I'll probably just have to print this a lot of times to get the fit right, assuming the basic shape even works.

Posted Thursday, September 24, 2020
at 10:36 PM


Tags: Blog Post, Pinball, Project, P3,


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