As Mötley said - "Toys, toys, toys"...no wait..

Spent a little time designing the toys, or more precisely, various plastic objects that will cover the bare metal objects etc for a more coherent look. This part is the Vent-cover for one of the VUK/dropholes:

1) Plastic Vent-cover. The piece will be resting on two posts and thus will be elevated about three cm from the playfield. It's made of clear flexible plastic painted from the inside, so hopefully it will withstand minor hits without paint flaking off etc. 

2) The flip-side.

The colors look a lot more off than in reality due to the materials different reflection properties, but I'll probably need to add a little more red/bronze into the mix to even out the differences. I'm not that fond of how it turned out actually, but there's time to tweak...

When the decorations start I believe this to be the equivalent of doll-houses for adults.... I can totally see myself spending hours hiding cables away from the players view, adding detail to toys/figures etc.

Looking forward to it!

SD fun!

It turns out my corrections in the SD-card library for Chipkit has made their way into the official branch now.  Several people on forums around the globe has recommended me to upgrade to the latest fixed SD card library...

If they only knew.

Waiting!

Not much has happened yet.

Now that the decal has fixed itself I'll do a little touching up on the playfield. I forgot to add the shooter-lane switch cutout and the right drophole has a bit to sharp edge on it.

After that is done I'll bring the board to the repairshop for clear coating!

The day that never comes...yet did!

Yeeeehaw!

1) Artwork applied to the playfield. Going the extra mile with the masking and cutouts really paid of - it's looking awesome! Sorry for the bad image quality thou - flash and cell phone camera doesn't give the best results possible...

The decal still got a couple of days of settling in before the clear coating and then a couple of weeks before assembling the parts, but at last the playfield is completed!

Since it's the first time the full playfield is displayed, I thought I might walk through some of the features for you.

- Standard size cabinet (+1 cm actually)
- Manual and automatic plunger
- Two flippers
- Right clear ramp / Upper playfield with 4 exit points.
- Left clear ramp
- Physical 3-ball lock
- Illuminated, motorized and moving "Big Daddy"-toy
- "Quadtych" spinner (fold out spinner)
- Up-post
- Electromagnet
- Three bumpers
- Motorized 3-target bank
- Two VUK's
- Two dropholes/saucers
- Captive ball
- 2,3 and 4 ball multiball
- Three spotlights to highlight areas of interest
- Plenty of standup targets
- Deep ruleset
- Lots of original toys from the Bioshock universe!

Here's a couple of mockup shots of some of the features:

2) Captive ball. Also visible is the standup target to bring Little Sisters out from their hiding spots.

3) Right saucer/drophole. Will be a rather tricky shot, but the rewards will be worth it. The ball will be spit back onto the playfield. The shooter lane is rather short so the ball will be launched directly onto the upper playfield/right ramp. Also - The wooden edges around the artwork looks so damn nice, if I may say so!

4) Motorized 3-target bank and the Big Daddy (Mr Bubbles!) targets behind it. A standup target on each side plus another one further right spells 'EVE' and enables the EVE Hypo (Fast Scoring etc). Each hit on the Big Daddy targets will bring out a physical reaction on the Big Daddy toy.

5) Top playfield view - Obviously not everything is in place here, but the main features are there: Left ramp, Big Daddy toy, magnet cutout,  center drophole and VUK. And the upper playfield of course. The drophole will be covered with a Vent-toy/plastic to simulate the air vents the Little Sisters are emerging/escaping from etc.

I'm pretty psyched about the progress so far - Can't wait until it's assembled and ready for playing!

White at the end of the tunnel

Seems the playfield will be able to recover from the whitemask incident. Phuh.
A little sanding should work and then we're back on track.

Failing Day

Two times I've failed miserably today, maybe it's time to call it a day and just do something else for a while.

First:
I was eager to test my new sanding blocks and sanding papers I've bought.
Unfortunately they did work and covered the entire apartment in a thin layer of dust. That's just dandy.
While not technically a failure, this could be easily avoided by moving outdoors (I already had the extension coord and everything plugged in...)

1) Nice and smooth. About 312 hours of cleaning the apartment remains.

Secondly:
I masked the whitemask today and thought I should spraypaint it.

2) Whitemask striped! Looking sharp, although slightly offset to the left due to my master  overlay skills.

Said and done.
After a minute or so the paint started to bubble and get all lumpy around the inserts.
For some reason I used Novus on the inserts before painting and the paint and Novus didn't mix. At all.

Hopefully I'll be able to sand it down but right now I'm feeling rather miserable. 

3) Lumpy Deluxe. To quote Dr Steinman - Ugly...ugly....ugly!

Touching Up

Sanded some more inserts today. Joy to the world.
(Yesterday I sanded most of the inserts until my fingers literally bleed from numerous freak sanding incidents...)

Then I glued the inserts and did a couple of touchups. Ahem...

1) Touchy touchy. Looks a lot worse than it is, actually. 

Obviously all the excess material will be sanded away before painting the whitemask, but it's rather discouraging to see all my nicely sanded inserts covered in gunk. The end results will be a super smooth surface which is what matters anyway!

Ah... I remember the days when a millimeter was considered to be very small.

Inserts are inserted (pun intended)

Quick update - did a little powertooling so all inserts fit properly now.
Next time I'll measure the inserts more carefully!

1) Playfield with inserted inserts. They are currently not glued in place.
A little sanding is up next, then glue, touchups and paint!

I did try to get a good shot of the playfield, but my cell-camera seems to have given up completely... The "black" inserts at the bottom are dark green and the round insert at the bottom is blue.

What a beaut'!

"It...is...accomplished!"

After months and months of searching, driving, waiting, asking, questing, something else'ing -
The playfield is now routed!

And it looks awesome!

1) Before any work's been done. Flat and boring.

2) The insert layer is taking shape. Excitement grows!

3) Finished, but untouched, playfield. Totally awesome!

4) After a little touch-ups. After the inserts have been inserted (no pun intended) I'll stripe the whitemask on
and spray paint the white color. Then it's decal time!  

There's still some work to be done on it before painting, such as drilling holes for various objects and rails. Most, but not all, screw holes have been marked but some of them I'll have to do after the board is complete (yikes!).


Today is a good day!