I'm hoping to use a plastic sheet on the playfield instead of having to manually cut all the inserts and deal with clearcoating, etc, but I wasn't sure how I was going to handle the star rollovers. The sheet will end up pretty similar to a Hardtop, and I know that star rollovers cause tons of issues with those, with each hole needing to be manually cut out for alignment, rollovers raised, etc. Plus I'm hoping to cut this plastic by hand, and drilling holes in it isn't the easiest, especially for large holes. Doable, but I also have 11 rollovers on my playfield right now (and could really use a few more), so it's something i really don't want to mess with. I looked into using eddy sensors but I can't find any good cheap source for them.
I thought back to earlier EMs, especially some ballys, which have tons of small, ~1/4" rollover buttons, and I figure that those would probably have a much easier time dealing with a hardtop. But with how my playfield is designed, buttons that small will run the risk of not being triggered by the ball. Plus I don't think those small bally rollovers are available anymore.
So i'm trying my hand at 3D printing some custom rollovers:
These are designed to have a button slightly smaller than my 3/8 bit, to give a small bit of wiggle room when drilling the holes, but hopefully not enough to get the ball hung up on. They also seem to be just big enough to still have similar sensitivity/range with a normal rollover star. The transition as the ball rolls over isn't quite as smooth (partly because it's not smooth like a star and partly because my 3D printing isn't that smooth) but it doesn't seem too bad.
They'll need some tweaking, but I think they should be usable.
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