Homebrew Pinball #3, Part 37

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



Last month I picked up a world cup soccer, and while shopping it I noticed that it had the same style one way gate as one of my spares, with a second wireform to hold the gate open, and that this was the type used by TNA, so it's available from PBL. I did a rough mockup of the part from measuring it on WCS, and it looked like it'd fit, so I ordered the mech from PBL for $30, rather than making another custom mech.

Of course, it didn't quite fit, but I was able to make due. I ended up having to move the mount for my support rails in a bit, and then mounted the gate mech on top of the rail at an angle. I could have put it in a nicer position, but I'd mounted the switches for the lanes in the way. As I probably could have predicted when I decided to do all my switch wiring with one mech still missing, it was a bad idea.

When I hooked it up to test it first, the gate didn't work. I could hear it buzzing, but it wasn't quite strong enough to pull the flap in. If I gave it a small nudge it'd work though. Once I turned the playfield over, gravity did the work for me and it worked fine. In retrospect I realized that this is another mech designed for 50V, not 25V, so I guess I should be happy it works at all. On the plus side that means that it's pulling such minuscule power at 25V that it'll probably never overheat, even without any PWM. I left it on for two minutes and couldn't even feel any warmth from the coil. I like the idea of being able to just have gates and diverters constantly energized, vs having them react when they know a ball is coming at them. There's a lot of times in other games where I get caught by surprise by the orbit coming around or not coming around, etc, since there's no indication on the playfield. At a minimum I think it'd be nice to have a little stop sign insert or something if you're going to do that...

Using a transformer that only outputs 25V seems to be my single biggest mistake so far with the whole project.... It's just continually messing me up since it's not something I ever really thought about before. As much as I like the gottlieb flippers and the general retro feel I think that, if I do another homebrew after this one, I'll either switch to all 50V, or at least get a transformer that can support both, and just use williams mechs...

Posted Tuesday, October 20, 2020
at 02:01 PM


Tags: Blog Post, Pinball, Project, P3,


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