While everyone remembers Apollo 13 from its namesake 13 ball multiball, its rocket ball lock is quite a cool feature too! The rocket catches the ball, starts rotating upright and then drops the locked ball onto a passage under the playfield. The huge LED 7-segment under it is also a cool detail and something Sega used later in Starship troopers.

#mechanism : the arrangement or relation of the parts of anything as adapted to produce an effect

- French: mécanisme

- German: der Mechanismus

- Italian: meccanismo

- Portuguese: mecanismo

- Spanish: mecanismo

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Word of The Hour's Annual Survey @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/form

Sharkey's Shootout's main toy, the Mystery eightball. It's a magnetic diverter that take a ball from the left ramp and diverts it to left or right. It can also hold the ball, while the mystery feature is running. It has a rotating disc inside with a decoder ring for opto switches so it knows which way it's pointing. During the gameplay it shows you the prize you won in the same fashion as the magic eightball toy.

Big Guns' backbox bagatelle game sounded somehow off. I investigated and sure enough, all 4 bolts that hold the upkicker mechanism onto the light panel were loose, with two nuts missing completely.

After some cabinet bottom searching and Loctite later it works and sounds as it should.

The Twilight Zone has so much cool stuff for a 90s pin I don't even know where to start, but this magnetic mini playfield has always amazed the players.

It has two player controllable pulsing magnets and the objective is to bounce the ball around to hit the scoring switches behind the rubbers and just before you run out of time, make the top shot to double the score and start a mode.

It's also used in one multiball mode, where the top exit scores the jackpot. You can get multiple balls in this thing at once!

Technically, for a mini playfield, it has a lot of stuff in it. It carries two big magnets, several controlled lights, couple of flashers, in addition to several micro and optical switches. It's also really heavy!

The underside is not bare when it's in the game, there's this cardboard-like cover preventing damage and short from the balls moving under it.

https://video.apz.fi/w/e7HpWfreTDBPoxxP9AQrLJ

#mechanism : the arrangement or relation of the parts of anything as adapted to produce an effect

- French: mécanisme

- German: der Mechanismus

- Italian: meccanismo

- Portuguese: mecanismo

- Spanish: mecanismo

------------

Word of The Hour's Annual Survey @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/form

Sometimes you get progress and at times cheapening out backfires.

A lot of classic pins had their playfield slide along wooden rails for when you needed to rest it against the backbox. For some reason, Williams came up with a single hinge version around mid-80s, that caused the playfield to tilt so 1/3 of it was below the cabinet sides. Working on stuff around the back of the playfield was painful to a degree it was just easier to pull the whole playfield from the machine.

The sliding rails introduced in '92 was like a godsent for the people repairing pins. You could pull the playfield out and it'd rest on rails and you could lean it against the backbox at a sane height.

Naturally they tried to cheapen this out by getting rid of the nice sliding rail and just make it slide against grooves CNC'd into the cabinet wood, which was like worst of the two worlds. They must've gotten some feedback, as the next released game used the metal rails again!

https://video.apz.fi/w/xhtFGRwDLsYfVR5JKmiXkG

There's some mechanisms that use flipper coils in unexpected ways. This is Revenge from Mars' jumping ramp, that stays up extended times, resulting normal single coil overheating.

This thing is starting to stick in up position and I'm investigating why. #pinball #pinrepair #arcaderepair #mechanism

Clockwork with animation

Preliminary Observations of the 5 April 2024 Mw 4.8 New Jersey Earthquake
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https://doi.org/10.1785/0320240024 <-- shared paper
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https://doi.org/10.1785/0320240020 <-- shared paper
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https://doi.org/10.1177/87552930231215428 <-- shared paper
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[This is ‘unusual’ seismic activity and shaking patterns for this part of the USA, on an ‘unmapped’ fault, and seemingly challenging existing models of earthquake risk in the region; while a 4.8 is not big, it must have been quite a surprise for the people in this heavily populated U.S. Northeast not used to such things (per the paper, the USGS estimated it was felt by some 42 million people.]
#GIS #spatial #mapping #earthquake #risk #hazard #spatialanalysis #model #modeling #NewJersey #USA #geology #engineeringgeology #seismic #USGS #seismology #fault #faulting #Tewksbury #DidYouFeelIt #geotechnical #NIST #remotesensing #InSAR #strikeslip #mechanism #thrust

Time for the mandatory Williams Fire! mechanical fire animation appreciation video. How this worked puzzled me so bad back in the days.

Under the playfield we find a rotating drum with a transparency over it and some lights.

The game came without the graphics over the drum, so what you see here is actually a photo of a friend's couch, printed onto a transparent sheet with a laser printer. The real thing looks pretty much like this.

What happens to the ball in pinball when you lose it? I've heard some wild takes on this topic, so here's what actually happens.

This is a recut of last summer's video, with about 0.38% more production value added to it.

For some reason I had a bunch of these tiny Segasa branded coils. They fit nicely in the place of that burned out one, specs are exact match. I won't be turning my back to this game another time while we're debugging it! Now this machine has all its 16 score reels working.

"Pinball's not fair, there's always some magnets making the ball go out from the sides!". I've heard it so many times. Some won't believe even when I show them there's no secret drain magnets in the games. Most odd movements can be just explained by spinning ball hitting rubber parts. The games however do have plenty of magnets to manipulate the ball, but it may not be what you'd expect. Let's have a look of some! #pinball #mechanism #magnet #arcade

Odd little design feature in Williams' Dracula. The gate is actuated by a spring connected to the solenoid. I wonder why they did it like this, as unlike in similar case in Fish Tales, the ball will never go through the gate without the solenoid pulling. #pinball #pinrepair #mechanism