Fire Action pinball

 

While surfing the internet, I came across the Fire Action pinball.

The translite:

The playfield.

Playfield design

It looked very familiar to me!

The Fire Action pinball is made by the Brazilian company Taito. It is an imitation of the Firepower pinball. The graphics used in the games are not copies. Taito designed the graphics themselves, so I assume they did not violate copyrights.  They also made other imitations of popular pinball machines.

For more information see the IPDB pinball database.

For comparison here are the FirePower (left) and Fire Action (right) pinballs side by side:

 

Some examples of other translites from the Taito company:

 

For more Taito pinball pictures see http://www.pinballgames.com.br/maquinas-a-venda/

Nuts and 3d printed plastics

 

M3 and M4 screws are a very easy and strong way to connect 3d printed plastic parts that possible need to be taken apart again later. Gluing parts is another very good option, but only when you never need to take them apart any more.

The nuts can be either left on the surface of the plastic like here:

A bit more convenient is to embed the nuts in nut traps: either horizontal of vertical. They are then hold in place and don’t move when mounting the screws.

The drawbacks if the nut traps are various:

• More work to design them.
• Sometimes need to add extra support layers to hold the layers on top of them. Particularly is this needed when the nut trap is on the bottom of an object.
• The horizontal ones do take away a lot of material, weakening the object. They can only be used in larger objects.
• Need to have access to either the side or the back of the object.
• Depending on the object the screws needed can get very long, because they have to go through part or whole of the object.

Then I came across these nuts you melt in the plastic. They solve lot of issues.

One is inserted into the plastic part.  They only need very little space and material, but still hold the plastic very strongly.

They come if lots of all kinds different lengths, diameter and screw sizes. The ones shown in the picture are M3 x 4mm high x 4mm diameter. They are mounted in the plastic using a soldering iron set to 250 degree for ABS.

Here is an example of use of them: hold the spring screw.

Glue ABS plastic

 

Glue ABS plastic

ABS plastic can be glued with acetone. This is a solvent of ABS and it temporarily makes part of the plastic liquid . Couple of drops and it is fixed.

Alternatively, superglue does also work well to glue ABS and PLA plastics.

Acetone is a bit messy to work with. It is very smelly and evaporates very fast. So I needed a way to minimise evaporation and easy application. I found a tip on a forum to put it in a syringe. I was afraid the acetone would dissolve the syringe, but that did not happen.

It is very easy to use with a syringe. Just by holding it in your hand small drops appear due to your hand warmth. So you don’t need to press the plunger.

Because the acetone evaporates very fast, the parts are fixed together within 30 seconds. Same speed as superglue. The acetone is very fluidly, so it fills tiny gaps very nicely.

Also you can store the acetone in the syringe. There is only a very small hole where the acetone can evaporate out. Even after storing it for a couple of weeks it looks like no acetone has evaporated. I normally store it upright, with needle pointing up.

I just took a normal needle and grinded the tip off:

Welcome!

 

This is my brand new blog. First for me.

The following subjects will be addressed here:

• 3d printing models
• Filament maker
• Custom pinball machine
• Interesting thing  I come across

Google blogger does not have the option to sort the blocks from old to new. Only new to old. But that is not really handy if you like to follow the progress. Also blogger has a lot of ‘junk’ on the bottom of the blog that is difficult to get rid off.

If you would like to read the blog from begin to end I suggest the following approach:

1) select the welcome blog from the right –> do it now!

2) after reading the entry, scroll down and click on ‘newer post'