Thanks. I really appreciate the support. It helps to know you've all got my back.
I approached this part of the project with a bit of trepidation.
The great disassembly has come.
The first thing I did was crawl around under the machine with paint pens, and I color coded every connection that could possibly ever be confused. There's six USB cables on the back of the PC, for instance, and if I plug them in in a different order during the rebuild, they might re-enumerate and screw up who knows what in the configurations of the games and emulators I've already set up. I did all the video connections, the audio in versus audio out on the graphic equalizer, pretty much everything.
Here's the back of the PC with ports identified. The cables that go in to each of these have identical paint rings.
Then, I undid many, many connections.
The control panel then slides off the fronts of the rails. It's tied by a cable to the pedals, so those move together.
Here they are, laying on the floor in the room where the great rebuilding shall occur.
After that, there's a scary several person job where I undo a bunch of temporary scaffolding, hold the playfield monitor by the axle, and have my assistants tilt the front and back cabinet away from it, unplugging the axle from the bearing blocks. This breaks the machine down into three main pieces.
Here's the back cabinet leaned up against the wall. You can see the amusingly thick cable bundle that comes out the bottom of it.
This freed everything up into loose modules. PC, back cabinet, front cabinet, control panel, back wall, and rotating playfield.
What I thought was going to happen at this point was that everything I'd been working on for all this time would go from looking basically done, to basically a pile of parts, and I figured that was going to be a depressing setback. I thought it would feel like losing ground, and kill the sense of momentum, and be depressing, and that I'd really have to push to keep going.
That didn't happen.
There's a ton of tasks I've been unable to do while the machine is assembled that have been piling up. I've been blocked on more and more things that require this disassembly before I can do them.
If you've played many computer RPGs...
You know that effect where you move to the next big area, and suddenly you've got like twenty new quests to pick from and everything is abruptly opened up?
It feels like that. There are a -ton- of things I can do from here that were blocked until now.
It's not depressing at all. I am suddenly stoked. So stoked that I did a bunch of work, and now you're going to get a long post about it.
The TV tray is now free of the machine; it has so far been a giant solid rectangle of metal. The back of the playfield monitor has some air circulation vent holes in it, and I don't want to block them, so I spent a while estimating positions and doing layout. This looks weird because, remember, the monitor mounts at a 3' angle to the face of the plate, so it's intentionally crooked as part of the cancelling 6' playfield trick with the crooked axle.
Here's the beginnings of the layout, on the solid rectangular 1/4" thick aluminum plate.
I drilled holes in the corners of the vent-holes-to-be, then jigsawed between them with a metal cutting jigsaw blade. This works pretty well, but if you go too fast it melts aluminum into the teeth and hangs up, so you gotta go easy on the variable speed trigger.
Here's the roughed out hole.
It's ugly, but I just wanted to remove most of the excess material, because I'll be milling it from here.
It took some creativity to clamp a piece of metal bigger than my mill in my mill, but I was able to clean up the holes nicely. Here's a shot from the first passes with a big endmill. I used a smaller endmill to get closer into the corners afterward.
The angled lines along the bottom edge of the plate, I cut with my bandsaw.
Here's the revised mounting plate screwed to the monitor so you can see the alignments. The vent windows are tilted 3' off the plate, which makes them square to the monitor. The new cuts along the bottom follow the raised center section of the monitor, then swing up to make it easier to connect or disconnect the video cables, then swings back down on a 45' to catch the bottom screw in the side axle bracket.
I'm now no longer blocking any of the vent holes in the monitor. It looks like I am, on the upper right, but if you look closer you'll see there's two depths of mismatched vent holes - the outer case has more grill than the component beneath it does, and I miss almost all the actual holes there in the second layer.
While I had this plate out, I drilled and countersunk the six holes for the counterweight slide rail. After a bit of file-based hole nudging between the plate, the shims, and the rail, I was able to get the alignment to work and the countersink machine screws to engage the T-nuts inside the rail.
Here's the thick side of the three precision tapered 6' shims that angle the counterweight rail against the plate, installed.
You can see the counterweight rail is aligned to the TV, not the plate, and is nicely aligned to the vent hole on the left, not the 3' offset angle of the top edge of the plate.
The 3'-by-3'-cancelling-6' playfield incline trick is cool, but it makes working in this area a special kind of pain. Everything is intentionally crooked.
Now that the rail is installed, I can put it all together.
This is most of the rotating playfield monitor assembly.
From this side:
you can see one of the reasons for the weird shape of the 4-weight carrying upper arm - it has to go under, then reach around, the 1/4" shaft that the actuator that rotates the table pushes and pulls on. It can adjust from this close in to the axle, out to flush with the end of the rail.
The lower/front/1-weight-carrying arm is differently shaped, because the constraints of its design are that it has to knife thinly in between the flightstick and the steering wheel when the control panel retracts up under the pinball table. It can also slide along the rail, from in here to out flush with the outside of the rail, and the weight can move up and down on it by changing holes.
This isn't quite the entire rotating playfield assembly - there will be a big aluminum-cased linear actuator back here too.
The yet-to-be-built red 7/16" thick plywood side skirts that carry the flipper buttons and run along the sides of the pinball machine, up against the sides of the rotating playfield monitor, will be mounting to the ends of the counterweight adjustment rail - it is precisely centered to and aligned with the playfield monitor, though it looks off center and crooked as compared to the plate.
Long post, thanks for bearing with me. There's so many things that might be next that I'm not even going to predict which one I'm taking on in the next post. I am, however, now feeling really confident that this is not going to die a quiet death of broken momentum.