The Modern Firepower Pinball Project - Playfield Posts Installed

It should be quite obvious by now that I did not achieve my goal of having a playable pinball machine by New Year's.  The factors were twofold:  missing or incorrect parts, but more importantly a massive underestimation of the work it takes to assemble a playfield.

I foolishly expected assembly to be somewhat plug and play, and thought I would crank it out in a few hours.  Reality is that you have to carefully check every part, align every hole, drill every hole (making sure not to drill all the way through the board!), and then screw in very carefully each part.

The posts alone were taking about 10-20 minutes each, and there's a lot of posts.  Part of the challenge is making sure the right post, or post screw/bolt, is being used at each location.  Make the wrong choice and you might drill the hole incorrectly.  There's really only one shot to get everything right, so I took my time.

I also learned the hard way to make sure to drill the pilot holes to the correct size.  I was slightly small on many of my holes, and actually snapped a screw post off in the playfield!  The post broke off flush with the playfield, and my attempts to simply remove or drill out the post, without damanging the playfield, were unsuccessful.  I finally drilled small pilot holes all around the sides of the broken post until I could free it.  To fix the playfield, I drilled a larger hole to permit the use of a bolt post and T-Nut.  Then end result is even better than stock, so I consider myself lucky.  I really wish all post holes used T-nuts and bolts instead of wood screws - they install faster and seem more robust.