Homebrew Pinball #3, Part 40

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



While doing some gameplay test I had my first 3D printing casualty... Luckily it wasn't from the ball hitting it, but from a design flaw. My shooter lane diverter gate is using a regular ball gate (what bally tended to use in its outlanes), and they aren't too accurate since they just use a relay to spin the gate. When the gate is resting against the side rail it's fine, but when it's energized and out in the playfield it can have a lot of variance. In this case it ended up stopping above the 5 bank of drop targets:
You can guess what happened next...

I've now added some software compensation to prevent this from happening:

You'll also notice my new gate is orange. I ran out of my original spool of white PLA plastic, so now I'm trying out some orange PETG; recommended to me by by another homebrewer as being much stronger than PLA and good for pinball mechs. It took me five prints to get a usable gate though, and it's still a bit messy, so I need to work more on dialing in the settings for printing with the different material.

Posted Friday, October 23, 2020
at 09:23 AM


Tags: Blog Post, Pinball, Project, P3,


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