The Modern Firepower Pinball Project - The Playfield

Early on in this project, long before it had a fancy name, Troy had located a local businessman that ran a call center in his front office and a pinball warehouse in his back office.  The businessman had dozens upon dozens of pinball machines, most in a state of disarray, heaped upon each other in precarious stacks stretching for the ceiling.  A handful of the machines had been shopped and were playable.  We paid him a visit in our noble quest for pinball knowledge, and he was generous enough to let us play his machines and examine their condition.  Through his thick Russian accent came repeated answers that no, he had nothing he wanted to sell us.  He said that he was sitting on a future goldmine, but the time wasn’t right to strike.  If only he had known that the IRS would soon seize everything, he might have been more willing to make a deal before he fled the country.

But buying a pinball machine was not why we had paid him a visit.  Our primary goal this day was to choose a pinball machine to emulate.  

This was my first opportunity to peek under the hood of a pinball machine.  I was amazed by the miles of wiring under the playfield, the mechanical complexity of the slingshots and eject holes, the everything.  

A typical 80's era playfield underside.

I found myself looking at pinball games with new eyes as well.  I had recently come to understand that pinballs were not just simple points tallying games, but rather interactive, mission based games.  Missions vary from game to game, and generally match the theme of the particular game.  Troy was able to demonstrate how the game guides you to hit certain targets, enabling a mission, and how you had to hit different targets to complete the mission.  The lights on the playfield took on a new meaning for me; no longer just pretty colors, they were mission indicators keeping track of my progress and rank.  This was no game of chance; pinball was a game of skill.

While we played a lot of machines during our brief visit, we both kept coming back to one game in particular – the William’s classic Firepower from 1980.  This game was a machine of firsts: the first electronic multi-ball, the first with a lane change feature controlled by the right flipper button, the first with animated displays.  The groundbreaking nature of this game felt appropriate for our project, our first pinball anything.

A scan from a sales flyer for Firepower.

A couple other factors also attracted us to Firepower.  It didn’t have any ramps or railways, and no complex mechanical animations; it was little more than a sheet of plywood and some playfield machinery.  There were good samplings of core features:  flippers, slingshots, bumpers, eject holes and even an outlane ball saver.  But the most attractive feature was the gameplay, Firepower was fun.  The large expanse of open playfield in the middle somehow made the game more enjoyable.  The sound of the pinball, rolling steel on wood, was notably sweeter on this game.

Our decision was unanimous; Firepower would be the basis, the inspiration, and the benchmark of our first pinball machine.   

Research into Firepower began immediately.  I was excited when I found the website www.firepowerpinball.com, it was a jackpot of information, including scans of a bare playfield.

Detail of a pop bumper hole from my CAD drawing of the Firepower playfield.

I loaded the playfield scans into a 3D CAD tool and began sketching out a playfield, the ultimate goal having the playfield CNC machined.  Every hole in the images, no matter how big or small, had to be recreated in the CAD drawing.  But beyond just representing the holes, I had to accurately size the holes for the components they would mate with.  The most challenging were the holes for the colored plastic inserts that lights would shine through, they had to be sized perfectly, and I had no physical parts to measure.

Troy came to the rescue and paid our Russian friend another visit.  It took a lot of smooth talk, but Troy finally convinced the pinball hoarder to sell a worn out and partially stripped Black Knight playfield for $50.  While the price was steep for what was basically fuel for fire pit, for the first time I was able to take physical measurements of an actual playfield and many components.  Priceless.

I completed the original test playfield design on New Year’s Eve, 2010.  We emailed the files off to our CNC shop, but soon got news that there were problems.  I had used the Sketchup program (under the Google brand at that time) to do all the modeling, and when I converted the file for CNC use the data didn’t convert cleanly – circles had flat sides and looked more like stop signs.  We had a playfield CNC’d using the bad data anyway, as it would allow us to test some of our components for fit and functionality.

When we received the freshly cut playfield, we excitedly began bolting some parts to it, but quickly discovered an unanticipated issue – the playfield was too thick.  The wood shop had mistakenly used ¾” plywood instead of the ½” that we had specified (17/32” is the official thickness of a playfield, but we weren’t to the point of requiring that level of accuracy).  It quickly became obvious that there was little testing that could be done with this playfield, though that didn’t stop us from trying.  We successfully hooked up some flippers, a switch, a slingshot, and a pop bumper and played like little kids on the most exciting toy they had ever played.  The playfield layout was mostly correct, though a few small design adjustments would be needed to make everything line up correctly.

Our very first test playfield, though too thick, has continued to serve as a testbed.  It currently is being used to test the construction of the pinball cabinet, making sure the dimensions are correct and that all parts line up.

To continue the project, I had to find a replacement for Google Sketchup, and eventually chose Alibre Design as an affordable solution.  The files it generated were perfect for the wood shop’s computers, but I had to start from scratch in the design and layout, and I found that Alibre Design was very slow when using an imported image as a background to sketch on.  This eventually stalled the project, as it slowed my progress down enough that I got sidetracked before I completed the design.

I also had another problem with the playfield design; the plastic light inserts seemed to be hard to come by.  Common shapes, sizes and colors, like a 1” white circle, are easy enough to find, but other shapes and colors were endangered or extinct.  I decided I had to purchase all the inserts first, just to ensure I had them and could measure them before completing the playfield design.  Since not all of the original Firepower insert shapes were available, alternates would have to be chosen, and I was having a hard time finding suitable replacements for a few key inserts.  

At this time I was also running into a problem with sourcing the playfield machinery.  For many playfield mechanical assemblies there are multiple designs.  A good example is the ball trough, the channel at the bottom of the playfield that stores and counts the drained pinballs and serves up game balls to the waiting ball shooter.  The version that originally came on Firepower and Black Knight was an obsolete design, and one of my goals with the project was to use modern hardware (hence the project name, Modern Firepower).  I found a newer design that looked superior in every way: optical versus mechanical switches, 7 ball capacity versus 3, only needed 1 solenoid instead of 2, and what looked to my eye to be a very trouble free and simple design.  I purchased the newer ball trough and modified the playfield to match this design, but soon found out that the worldwide stock of these components has since been exhausted.  I now had a one-off playfield design, I could never make another just like it.  This same issue existed for other components, like the ball eject assemblies for the 3 multi-ball capture holes, for which I could only find two of my chosen design. 

It quickly became apparent that most playfield assemblies vary game by game, with little in the way of standards.  Want to buy a generic ball eject assembly?  No such thing exists.  Generic slingshot? Nope.  Everything is branded or licensed by the specific manufacturer, many have numerous designs customized to different games, and all too often were in limited or exhausted stock.  It was challenging enough trying to pick a playfield assembly that would work with the playfield layout, but near impossible to find anything that would be available for years to come to continue using the same parts on future builds.

What the small volume pinball manufacturer and the DIY hobbyist community need are a line of generic pinball parts, modern designs that are best of breed and continually available.  I’m not talking about artistic elements like ramps and rails, just the common, shared hardware like slingshots.  At least one of the big parts suppliers (don’t recall now if it was Marco Specialties or Pinball Life) agreed with us, and advised us that for a mere $1 million in capital we could get manufacturing going to create generic parts.  It was obvious they were serious and really wanted us to step up to the plate.  I quickly checked my pockets but found I was about a million short of the needed capital.

One of the original objectives of the project was quickly coming into focus.  That objective was to determine what it would take to create a small volume pinball company.  Beyond design and engineering, beyond programming and construction, it was going to take money, and lots of it. It’s too expensive and time consuming to customize each and every playfield for the currently available parts, but it is more expensive to have production lines started up to make the standardized parts we required.

At this point the project was fully stalled.  Even though I had already solved the electronic and programmatic challenges (more on that another day), parts sourcing was proving too big an obstacle.

The project remained stalled for the next year and a half.  Occasionally I would poke around it a bit, see if anything had changed in the industry.  Mostly I would scan the storefronts of the big names like Marco Specialties, Pinball Life, Bay Area Amusements, MAD Amusements and various others. Instead of the situation improving, it only seemed to get more dire.  Many parts I had originally spec’d were already unavailable – I hadn’t moved quick enough to acquire them.  None of the parts that had previously disappeared from stock had returned.  My original assessment was right, the ecosystem only exists to support occasional parts maintenance for existing games, not full scale parts supply for new machines.  Without a massive influx of capital from somewhere, I didn’t see that changing anytime soon.

Backlit with sunlight, the colored inserts shine like jewels.

On a near daily basis I was reminded of the project as various bits and pieces are scattered all throughout my home.  The trashed Black Knight playfield still lives in my garage, peaking out at me from under a utility trailer.  The partially assembled but overly thick test playfield hangs out in my basement with the other pinball parts I had already procured, too large to hide it from visiting friends who all ask questions about it and then want to play it.  The various electronics are stored in my office where I work almost daily.  Even on my computer's desktop is a small reminder of the time and money spent with no reward - the shortcut to my pinball engine software.  When I close my eyes I can still see the thousands of lines of code that I spent countless hours fingering.

I felt shame for starting a project without finishing it.  I felt guilt for purchasing hard to find pinball parts only to store them and not use them.  And yet I still felt hope that one day, somehow, just maybe...

It was very recently that I was browsing the website www.ClassicPlayfields.com that I stumbled upon something that reignited the project.  Classic Playfield Reproductions make authorized reproductions of pinball playfields, plastics and backglasses.  I had spent a lot of time on their website over the years; earlier versions of their website had a lot of behind the scenes articles and tutorials on making playfields which were very helpful to me, but now that the company has become more professional and commerical, most of the DIY information is long gone.  My amazing find was a Firepower playfield and plastics set, a gorgeous and brand new reproduction.  I had actually searched for a reproduction playfield before at CPR, so I knew that this was a new development.  This playfield solved so many of my obstacles – I no longer had to spend months designing a playfield, or source the hard to find plastic inserts (CPR makes their own!).  I would only have to find hardware to fit this specific game.  While this certainly doesn’t make a small volume pinball manufacturing company any more feasible, it now made a single game well within reach.

Certain that I could find enough playfield machinery to complete the game, I quickly pulled the trigger and purchased the playfield and plastics set.  Now that I have it in my hands, I’m amazed at how beautifully this playfield was constructed and finished.  It is almost too beautiful to play with.

The reproduction plastics set for Firepower has all the originals plus a few custom extras that the original game never had.

 As soon as I ordered the playfield, I also set about ordering all the individual components I would need to populate it.  Some of my previously purchased components wouldn’t work on this playfield, so I had to replace them with the correct vintage.   

Just one of many parts shipments needed to build out the pinball machine.

In my searching I got extremely lucky and found  www.thearcadeboneyard.com, a company that specializes in salvaging used parts from games destined for the fire pit.  Almost every piece of Firepower playfield hardware was posted there on this website, and I snapped up almost every last bit of it.  My biggest find was the various curved metal ball guides that are specific to this game.  I had been planning to fabricate these from wood,  but with the originals I no longer had to.

It seems that the stars and planets have aligned, and karma is allowing me to build one, and only one, Firepower pinball playfield.  The situation is a little sad, as I couldn’t do a second Firepower game without finding a used original Firepower game from which to steal parts.

But that is alright, because for now, only one machine is my goal.