The Pinball Diaries

Red transparent deep rectangle target with rear mount. WMS #A-20499-9

#02-4660 little itty-bitty post, in Sketchup.

Well, there it is. First mockup with parts on a playfield. I’d say it’s got a little ways to go.

Here’s the start of a drill/dimple template for the ball trough holes. Everything is traced, but I’m not quite sure what the best way to mark up the measurements is, yet.

Drill/Dimple template for the narrow target switch in Sketchup:

I was starting to get a little tired of hunching over the ToTAN playfield to get drill-template measurements so decided to try scanning pieces of it and measuring on the computer.

I stuck a portion of it on the scanner (with a ruler to make it easier to verify the scale) and propped it up with some fancy Spanish tile I had in my basement that happened to stack to the exact height of the scanner.

Sketchup has a nice feature where you can import an image and draw a line say, across one inch of the ruler, and then tell Sketchup: resize my entire model so the line I just drew is actually one inch.

After that, everything is to scale, 1:1. Tracing the holes of one of the pop bumpers I came up with the same measurements as measuring on the actual playfield (well, within 1/64”, typically, which is good enough for this).

Of the oblong variety. WMS #A-18017-6 and/or #A-15658-6.

Need to add a drill template for it.

a.k.a. Double Sided Hood. WMS #03-8318-XX. Red is #03-8318-9.

Here’s the pop bumper body:

And presto! The whole pop-bumper with Theatre of Magic color scheme:

I’m still missing the bumper base (WMS #03-6009-A5) but I probably won’t bother with it since it won’t be visible in a mock-up and won’t affect the placement of the bumper.

K, this was actually a pain in the ass. Revolved shapes in Sketchup are a bit awkward to create and work with and that was especially the case here.

Then again, Sketchup is free, so I can’t shouldn’t complain too much. A friend suggested I check out Shade. Mustn’t let this turn into a 3D modeling and rendering blog.

I should really be putting Medieval Madness back together.