James’ Blog

Dremel time

Posted on October 21st, 2006 by James.
Categories: Pinball.

My fantastic friend Simon has lent me his Dremel! Muhahahaha!! Now no material may stand in my way! Not plastic, nor wood or even metal is beyond my grap! All shall be cut and shaped to my desire!.. a-hem.. (woo)

But first this:

My new flipper arm clampy bit. See how it’s not totally squished like the old one! I fitted the new ones and now my flippers work like a charm 🙂

For a while the right popper has been a bit iffy, occasionally sending the ball out at such a rate that it bounces on the rails and onto the playfield without loading into the cannon. My solution was to take a computer blanking plate (or any small bit of metal) and I Dremeled it into a little guide to sit over the popper exit. Now the ball pops out perfectly every time 🙂

and now back to the plastic Dremeling!

I mounted the dremel in the routing attachment, upside down so I had a nice smooth flat surface with the dremel tip poking out. This made it tons tons easier to cut out the shapes. I tried using the cutting disc at first, but it’s nearly impossible to cut a curve with it, so I just cut out the shapes very very roughly with the disc, then used the grinding tips to do the fine work. It was fairly easy to cut them out, but it did take ages and I think I breathed in about 2 pints of plastic dust. Remember to always wear protection kids 😉

.. This is where it all goes a bit poo. I peeled back the protective film on one of my nice new plastics and compared it to the original:

It’s way way way too dark 🙁 Everything else is great. It’s nice and strong and the right size. I haven’t sanded it down fully yet, I just wanted to check it out… but then I saw this 🙁

Obviously I need to photoshop them and make them a lot lighter. It must be because they were semi transparent when they were scanned, so in printing out to transparancy I have to account for that. Luckily I have 8 more A4 sheets of the transparancy paper, but it’s going to be a bitch peeling off the old printout and sticking the new ones back in exactly the right place. Luckily I’ve not fully cut out all the plastics, only the one in this pic.. and it’s still got some extra round the edge. Trouble is, this one is the only one I really need! Bah! It was all going so well! Back to the printer I go.

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