Part 3: Whitewood 1

Milestone 1: First Drawing

The first milestone required Pat to produce a playfield drawing of what the MONOPOLY Pinball game would look like.  Nothing necessarily screwed together or wired, just an idea of how the playfield geometry will look. 

Pat took to drawing in AutoCAD (the playfield designer's tool of choice), while John started working on some ideas for mechanical devices.  I spent the first week at Stern learning their hardware and software systems.

Around the end of November Pat produced MONOPOLY pinball drawing #1: The MONOPOLY pinball game didn't really go through any major layout changes between the first and last drawings.  You can see that there was no Bank device yet, no Electric Company sign, and there were two drop targets on the right side.  The shot above the side ramp was a kickback target, kind of like a slingshot.  There was also a spinner through the lower jets.  Note that the railroad ramp returned to the right flipper, not the left.   This drawing was brought into Stern one day in December for an initial walkthrough, and everybody was excited to see some traditional Pat design trademarks on paper once again.   Side flipper, six jet bumpers, and the five-lane lower playfield.  Many people see these elements and cry "oh, it's Addams Family again", but when you have something that works you like to use it again (with subtle variations, of course).  The Waterworks flipper was an homage to Harry Williams, he used a similar rotating flipper on Hot Hand (a Stern Pinball game from 1979). The Bank toy was to come much later.  All we knew at this point is that we were going to have some kind of toy in front of the center ramp.  A square on the AutoCAD drawing indicated the position and orientation.

Milestone 2 : First Playfield Geometry

Our next milestone required us to show a playfield with some ball guides in the general shape of the playfield.  Pat took the drawing from AutoCAD and fed it into some custom software designed by PLD to let our ShopBOT drill the first playfield.

The ShopBOT is a large router attached to a series of stepper motors that let the a standard PC guide the router.  Using the ShopBOT, we can create almost anything out of wood from playfields to entire cabinets if we need to.  Stern was providing a blank cabinet with transformer and power harness, so all we needed to do was create the playfield and wire it up to have a working prototype.

(all pictures are presented here as thumbnails, click on a picture to see a larger version)

Here is the first set of ball guides being bent, with a full-sized plot of the playfield as a guide.  
A slightly fuzzy picture of the ShopBOT getting ready to route the first playfield.
John working on the Waterworks flipper assembly.

The first routed playfield, being sanded and smoothed before mounting the hardware.

Meanwhile, John tests his first Waterworks motor assembly with a power supply.

The playfield is wired for flipper and Waterworks power and dropped into a cabinet.  The playfield was now flippable, but just barely.  It was enough to demonstrate the major shots on the game and get a feel for how the MONOPOLY pinball game would eventually flip.