Tuomas Hämäläinen 🇺🇦Oct 27
One or two of you might remember me dreaming out loud about designing my own pinball machine and thinking to do it at half scale. This weekend I finally started the process, in CAD, by putting down some basic dimensions for the playfield. It’s loosely based on the metrics of modern Stern playfields. Loosely, because the original dimensions are in inches, and scaling everything down for a 15 mm ball (so 1:1,8 scale) gives funny mm dimensions, so I’m rounding things up and down here and there.
Show threadTuomas Hämäläinen 🇺🇦Oct 27

I’m really looking forward to designing all the different mechanisms for moving the balls around. The craft of building pinball machines has evolved for over a century, so it’s interesting to see what could be done differently when going miniature and heavily utilising 3D printing.

I’ll underline: it’s very important that this thing doesn’t look and feel like a toy. It should do all the things its big brothers and sisters do, just smaller.

Show threadsdsykesOct 27
@tuomas_h wow great project. I’m wondering about the playability of the half size ball though.
Show threadTuomas Hämäläinen 🇺🇦Oct 27
@Sdsykes I built many small pinball games – with mechanical flippers – when I was a kid, out of wood as well as Lego, and those used even smaller balls (maybe 10 mm). Based on that I’m not at all concerned that it won’t be “fun”, but those machines and their parts also weren’t built to any specific scale, so will definitely be interesting to see how it feels when everything is actually scaled down by the same factor.
Show threadsdsykes
@tuomas_h yes. Keep us posted on the progress!
Oct 27 at 12:43pmWeb