Ok have been bogged down trying to create subways (ramps underneath a playfield in pinball are called subways). To feed a stock 8-ball trough that is normally used at a bottom of a playfield after your ball drains / it’s what stores all the balls. I am using one in the center area to load up and then use as a ‘up-kicker’ to launch balls up through the hole in the lazy susan bearing I showed last time with the stepper motors.
The subways I designed were nearly too much for my Rigidbot 3D printer.. it has a 10x10x10″ build volume and the subways are about 11.5″ .. so took very creative placement to get them to print, and then had printer breakdowns, and trouble printing without warping, and it’s really hot in my garage in summer so limited interest. But pushed through all that this weekend.
So the idea here is that this will be mounted underneath the central flat section, and the white subway will be under the top of one players playfield and the grey will be at the same point for the opposite player.
The Bottom here is just the stock part which has leave switches all along it. This is so that it can count how many balls are loaded in at a time. What isn’t shown here is the solenoid that will be mounted to fire the balls upward. I’m upgrading the power of that solenoid to be stronger than the one used normally since we’ll need ~3-4″ of vertical height I think, but haven’t gotten much into that part yet as needed to get this sorted first.
I may very well remake this out of sheet metal. I’m hoping I could use the CNC plasma cutter and sheet metal tools at makerplace to cut and then form these when the time comes.
Here’s a video of them showing that gravity works ok.
Chronic Dabbler 