Did some testing with the plastic covering... I previously tried to do a full playfield protector on one of my games, but as expected, it warped and raised off the playfield, presumably due to heat expanding/shrinking. However there are many european pins that have plastic playfields and don't have that issue. I'm not sure if that's due to the material (IPDB claims they're plexiglass but I don't know how they tell) or the thickness (I've now gotten confirmation that at least one manufacturer, Interflip, uses 1/4" plastic over their 1/2" plywood).
I cut two strips of plastic, one from the new sheet of lexan I bought for this project and one from the scraps that (I think) are from the previous full protector I made (hard to tell these sheets apart :/ ), and attached them to a piece of plywood, then I stuck it in my Dracula (the only game I have handy that's all incandescent) to 'bake'. After 12 hours, I could see some slight raising on the old material, and minimal/none on the lexan, which is promising at least... I'm not sure exactly what conditions are needed to reproduce the issue though. Is it just heat expanding the plastic? is it air under the plastic heating due to inserts? Presumably it's more noticeable on larger areas with no anchoring, but that's harder to test.
I also did some more practice cutting of my spare sheet of lexan. Trying regular drill bits and forstner bits. The forstner bits seem to leave more of an edge on the holes. Both seem to have some risk of creating weird spirals of plastic (like on the rightmost hole in the picture). Cutting on wood seems to help, I think since the bit can't 'punch through'. I was able to get pretty clean holes with a drill bit at medium speed. Too fast or too slow tended to cause issues. I also need to make sure to hold down the plastic around the bit as much as possible, to keep it from pulling the plastic up.
Experimented with cutting straight lines as well, and found that it's possible to do pretty cleanly with an exacto and ~5-10 passes. Definitely preferable to power tools. Can also be cut with scissors but they're hard to get into the holes since you're not cutting from the edge.
On last annoying thing: apparently the plastic sheet I purchased is 1/32". It's been a while, but I thought I'd requested 1/16 as 3/32 wasn't available, and I felt like that was the most that could be potentially layered on top of a 1/2" playfield without affecting the mechs+etc sticking through. I'll still use the sheet though since I've already got it, and hopefully it works okay. If I run into issues with it flexing or expanding, but everything else is fine, then i'll consider buying another thicker sheet
blog comments powered by Disqus