Mimic's Sister - Shapeshifter

[wp34]

That is seriously impressive.  Nice work Laythe. 

[bperkins01]

Very nice..   

[J_K_M_A_N]

Incredibly badass! Amazing work. I cannot wait to see this one done.

J_K_M_A_N

[Arroyo]

This is like watching one of those HBO shows where each episode feels like a cliff hanger. I wanna be able to hit the next button and get to the end.  It's got to have felt good to get those pieces together, looking awesome.

[Vigo]

I never knew I needed a creepy looking bottle of methanol until just now.

[Laythe]

Thanks everyone.

This is like watching one of those HBO shows where each episode feels like a cliff hanger. I wanna be able to hit the next button and get to the end.

I want that too!  Somebody give me spoilers - tell me how this turns out, because the suspense is killing me.

I never knew I needed a creepy looking bottle of methanol until just now.

My jar of creepy looking alcohol is worse than PBJ's - his only MIGHT make ya blind.   

(In seriousness, it's handy stuff - helps clean things and then evaporates off without residue, which is great surface prep for epoxies.  Takes sharpie marks off metal absolutely effortlessly.  Removes adhesive gunk decently well.  Worth having.  The jar was even creepier before I labelled it - I hate having Mystery Shop Chemical lurking around.  This is my second try at a label, now laminated under tape, because did I mention it dissolves sharpie marks?)

[Vigo]

Thanks for the Methanol tip. I like the way you think. I currently use a lot of acetone and isopropyl, and consider them a few of my secret weapons. Cheap and effective. I'm always happy to add some off-market chemicals to my toolbag, so I am going to have to give methanol a go and see what it can do. Where do you get yours? Just reading online, it sounds like yellow bottle HEET fuel additive is pretty much methanol. Might be my best bet to try it up front.

[Laythe]

I was gifted this jar full from a drum of it at my uncle's shop, so I'm afraid I'm not much help on sourcing.  I've been using the same jar for many years and I'm about halfway through it.

HEET should work.  You might also be able to buy methanol from a go kart track or RC car type hobby shop.  It behaves pretty similarly to isopropyl but it doesn't seem to me to pull as much water out of the air and self-dilute.

[Vigo]

Awesome! Good to know. I will probably start with a bottle of HEET. It will probably last me a while. 

[BGoulette]

You're all probably already aware, but just a reminder that methanol is absorbed through the skin: ultimately, your body converts it into formaldehyde. (I used to use yellow HEET for alcohol stove fuel before switching to denatured alcohol [~95% ethanol with just enough methanol to blind you if you try to get hobo-drunk off of it]).

 

[Laythe]

Good reminder, BGoulette!  Appreciated!

Rubber gloves are a good idea, for sure. 

I've gotten some on my skin before; it evaporates fast like alcohol does, so it feels cold.  That evaporation tends to help limit your exposure somewhat, if it's a small quantity.  There's a pretty good paper on it here if you are curious to dive into the details. 

That you see test methods in there like this:

"Franzblau et al. (1995)...  ...dermal study:  One hand of each volunteer was placed in a beaker containing neat methanol for 0, 2, 4, 8, or 16 min. Blood and breath methanol samples were taken immediately after the exposures and at 12 additional time points during the first 8 h after exposure. Blood methanol concentrations peaked at about 45-60 min post-exposure and averaged 11.3 mg/L. Breath methanol concentrations peaked at about 15 min post-exposure and averaged 9.3 ppm. The authors stated that exposure to one hand (440 cm2, <3% of body surface area) for 16 min resulted in blood methanol concentrations similar to those observed following inhalation at 400 ppm for 8 h...  The authors reported that the exposed hand was often temporarily whitened in color and appeared very dry. That effect was most marked after the longer exposures..."

That says to me, absolutely don't stick your hand in the jar for 16 minutes! - but if they're willing to do that to human volunteer lab subjects, then touching a damp rag probably won't kill me.  (That said, people have gone blind from contact skin poisoning with it, I found a citation on a painter who'd dumped about a gallon of it on his clothes and went blind from that.)

Good to point out the risks.  I was remiss above in not doing so.  You probably should wear gloves; I don't always, but I probably should, too.

I also learned from researching this, that MEK is way *less* dangerous than I thought it was, so thanks for starting me reading down this particular rabbit hole!   

[blueznl]

Impressive...    Subscribed.

[Laythe]

Thanks, blueznl. 

I've a small bit more progress to show.

Mockup v3.0 is now cobbled together enough to let me work on some of the software details and test out the ergonomics of what I've got planned.

The basic idea of this machine and the front-end I've written for it is that it normally sits there like a vpin cabinet.  You select pinball games from the backglass, using the flipper buttons.



The furthest game to the right, just after Xenon, is "Cockpit games".



When you pick that, by mockup v4.0 the actuators will reconfigure the machine into a driving cab.  I am far enough along in the current mockup 3.0 that it's convertible, though the conversion currently involves removing a prop stick and rotating the playfield by hand...



Once rotated, you select games from the playfield screen using the wheel, the wheel's shifter paddles, the shifter dpad, the flightstick, or the flightstick hats.  Pick a game using a flightstick trigger, the gas pedal, or any of the wheel or shifter buttons.

Games look like this:



I kind of love the way the polished paint reflects the game screen off the sides.  You can also see how the cockpit mode speakers are set up for good stereo separation in this mode. 



The furthest right option among cockpit games is Pinball Games - that will in the future prompt you on the playfield screen to get out of the chair, which it will verify via an occupancy button under the upholstery springs.  Then it will prompt you on the backglass display to push Launch Ball, to confirm you've walked around the cabinet, at which point it will proceed to do all the actuator-based transformer robot things to get back to pinball mode.  Presuming everything works as currently designed and that I can pull this all off, of course.  There will be some limit switches verifying the monitor rotation, chair position and control panel position so the front end can query the current status of the machine, since you might turn it off in either mode; when it wakes up, it'll have to figure out what it is, so it knows how to proceed from there.


I'm chuffed by the playability and ergonomics of Mockup v3, at least if one is careful enough not to dislodge the precarious leaning tower of mockup - so I'm starting the layout of the real control panel parts in plywood now.



My plan is to build the control panel shelf, the towers that attach it to the linear bearing trucks, and enough of the deck to mount the gear shifter.  (The shifter doesn't belong out on the right inline with everything as shown in the above mockups, it'll be lower and further from the screen.)  Building all that will then let me test how solid the panel feels when constrained by the linear bearings, and that will inform the design from there - whether it needs additional locking pins, or a rail on the floor to stabilize things more, or if perhaps the tight tolerances of these beefy overkill rails are already enough to make it feel good.

I spent hours messing with x360ce and got it working - I now have a virtual software xbox controller that can inherit any axis combination from the flightstick, throttle, pedals and wheel, which I'm using to map up games like Redout that otherwise wouldn't support this crazy rig.

The arcade classics like Afterburner are as good as I thought they'd be.  I've been playing with some sims and PC games as well - Redout on a flightstick and pedals with a giant screen in your face is fun.  Everspace is also a big winner in this format.

Still a long way to go, but I've got a plan of attack for the next couple months worth of steps I think.

[MiteWiseacre]

Nice, I bet you can smell victory now.
I hope the oversized driver cooling fan makes it into the final build

[Arroyo]

[Laythe]

Nice, I bet you can smell victory now.
I hope the oversized driver cooling fan makes it into the final build

Thanks!   Hahaha, no, the fans won't be making it in, I just needed some shims of about that height and they were laying around.

Smelling victory... from here, I only need to build the modular removable back wall, the midshelf, the cable via access plate, the counterweight arms for the playfield, hang the weights, finish the actuator bushing, mount the playfield actuator, finish designing and then build the PC-encasing doghouse, buy the actuator for that, design the floor, build the floor, build the sliding chair rails and locking system and drive system for that, build the side skirts for the playfield, hang the flipper buttons, route all the wires, configure DOF, mount up the flipper solenoids, and wire up the audio switching relay, the actuator switching relays, paint a bunch more panels, install some T-molding in the arcade half of it, paint a few more things, do some extensive wire routing and then disassemble and reassemble the whole thing into it's final location.     Practically the home stretch. 

It is coming along though.  I think this is maybe the halfway point or so.

Luckily I have no deadline beyond my inevitable mortality.  It's okay that this is going to take a long time.


I have however just roughed out the real cockpit control panel, and updated the mockup accordingly.



The shifter actually belongs a bit lower than this, further right, and further forward.  The coin door belongs under the shifter.  This is the approximately correct layout of the VR view buttons, the throttle, the wheel, the flightstick, the pedals, and the correct seat that will become part of this machine.  The whole control panel will eventually slide in on the linear rails and tuck under the playfield.

[JudgeRob]

Wow, looking great! Nice job with the monitor rotation. 

[Laythe]

Thanks JudgeRob!

I'm now working on building the sliding cockpit control panel structure. 

To help people orient, that imagine all of this is under the flightstick, just to the right of it, in the previous picture.

Much of this is engineered to wrap around a Logitech G25 shifter.  So, I started with an H-shaped panel that just barely fits around the body of the shifter.



I want the shifter sunk as far forward into this structure as I can get it, because it'll hang out a little in pinball mode even like this, and because I want it tucked up under the panel a little for the sake of visual integration. 

That means the front panel also inlets the shifter body. 

I like to do things like this iteratively - I start with a cut I know is too shallow, but that lets me start the pieces going together so I can see how it needs adjusted.



This fits around the body of the shifter, but not far enough yet.  But by approaching it gradually, I can nudge it left and right as needed to be sure the edges of the front panel meet the edges of the top deck.



Just a little more to go, here.  It's fairly quick to nibble bits of it away on the bandsaw as needed.



Here, I've got a fit I like.  The shifter has to be able to front-load into this assembly in the end, so there's a small amount of necessary clearance, but I think it looks alright.


The upper structure gets a bit complex.



There's got to be room on the right side for the linear bearings and rail, it's got to flare out at the bottom to run almost against the rear/right legs of Shapeshifter to make interior room for the actuator and the PC side by side, the top has to be at the right height for the control panel shelf you saw earlier to sit on, and the top back edge has to taper down to clear the rotating playfield monitor. 

I'm also going to want the second coin door centered here on the arm.  This is the over-under coin door I modified way back on page 1, about 11 months ago.



There's not a whole lot left of the front panel after cutting away a coin door hole in it, but I think it should still be plenty strong by the time I'm done.

This is where I am right now:



Finally, that coin door gets a home!

The black button should actually be red or yellow, but I ran out of spares on hand.  It is going to be the "Exit Game" button for cockpit games.

There will be one 3/4" thickness of plywood on each side of this structure - or at least, it will look like there is, it gets complicated, you'll see.  So, it'll get a little wider.

The board on top here is just a placeholder to show about how much the real control panel will overhang the gear shifter.

It feels good to be fabricating plywood parts again.  I'm sure I'll be back to cussing when I'm doing all the surface prep and paint on them, but this part is great fun.   

[Mike A]

You are more in my territory now. Graph paper and wood.
This project is a ton of work. Kudos for plowing forward.
I wasn't too sure about this project when you started. I figured you could pull it off, but I had my doubts about the concept in general.

You have made me a believer. The only thing that can wreck this project for me is if it doesn't make the Transformers "transformation" sound effect every time it switches back and forth between modes. I need to see a video of that when it is done. Of course you could just mix that effect into the video and I would never know.... or would I?

[Laythe]

Thanks, Mike A!  It's a weird project for sure, I'm glad to hear I've won somebody over to it.  I won't let you down on the sound effects - I have a couple planned, and that's absolutely one of them.


I'd like to share a detail I came up with that I'm sure has probably been done, but that I hadn't seen before.

My cockpit-side control panel is going to have a whirling playfield monitor swinging around behind it, so I need some clean cord routing to avoid disaster.
The flightstick has 2 wires, the steering wheel has 4, and the throttle has 1.  They're all going to be mounted on top of the control panel deck.  Some of them have rather large plugs.

So, my solution is to cut round-bottomed grooves in the back edge of the panel the width of the wires, at a depth equal to the T-mold barb plus the cable width.

Here's the notches for the wheel.



The idea is, the cords route through these, then the rear line of T-mold snaps in and holds them in place.  Here's the throttle illustrating the idea.



The vias don't have to be big enough to pass the bulky plugs.  I can peel the T-mold later to pull a device if I need to replace something.  Given I'll be using black T-mold on the back stripe, I think it'll look decently slick as a way to transfer the cords to the underside of the panel where I can route them out of sight.  They'll all use these vias to get to the underside, then run to the right and into the console.


Most of my recent work has been on the console that shrouds the PC.  This will be the right side of the control panel; it houses the shifter, the coin door, the game exit button, the right side linear bearing rail trucks, and houses the 14" throw linear actuator that retracts and extends the control panel assembly from under the pinball table.



This is still missing a bit of the structure, but it's coming along.  I'll be radiusing the top and bottom corners to match the sides after they're both attached.

I didn't want to modify the G25 shifter, in the interests of making replacing it someday if I have to at least a little more possible.  This view shows the crazy weird inletting necessary to sink an unmodified G25 shifter in like it was built in.  It loads in from the front and attaches via the factory three-point clamps.

The right side panel, I'm holding on by hand... because this is only half of it. 



It's going to be a laminate of 3/4" plywood and 1/4" hobby plywood, to buy me another half inch of internal width so that I can cram both the PC case and the linear actuator inside completely.

(I did all these cutaways with a dremel tool.  At this point I'm feeling like I maybe am to a dremel tool what Yamatetsu is to frog tape and an exacto knife.   )

Looking up the bottom of the open-bottomed console, it looks like this:



The actuator rides on the left edge (here looks like the bottom), the PC will ride on the right edge (here looks like the top).  The actuator ram and the hardpoint I built for attaching it clears the clamps on the shifter by a hairsbreadth, they kind of wrap around each other.  The PC will come as far forward as that half-inch deep notch you can see at the top.  There should be a whole eighth inch of clearance between the actuator and PC, and between the PC and the sliding cover...  if I did this right.

Sometimes tiny details bring me disproportionate joy. 

I was thinking the exit game button would be yellow to match the pinball exit game button, or maybe red.  I had a spare black button of the same type.



Fiddling around, I realized, switching the red plunger into the black body makes something that totally matches the shifter.



This whole console is going to be the same grey the pedals frame is, and the black rim should contrast nicely against it.

At the lower right corner of that picture, you can see the 1/4" plywood going on the right side.  There will be two 80mm intake fans there to help make up for the computer case being half boarded up.  I'll have quite a bit of bodywork to do on this whole console assembly to make it look nice, but I'm pretty happy with how it's coming together so far.

My current push is toward getting this thing ready to glue the control panel to it and slide the whole drawer in - the next time I get to play with the mockup, it'll be on all this and mounted on the bearing rails instead of balanced precariously on top of box fans.

[Laythe]

You can see that the console and cockpit parts have T-molding grooves. 

In researching this project, I was surprised to learn:
  There are nearly no pinball machines with T-mold.
  There are nearly no arcade machines without T-mold.

This is true even when Williams was making them both out of the same factory floor at the same time.

I have no idea why this is!

But, I think it'll be a neat detail to build Shapeshifter both ways, as appropriate for the part of the machine it goes with - the arcade bits have it and the pinball bits don't.

It's probably going to be black, on grey panels.  That'll look good.  Since it's cheap, I also bought white to match Mimic, red to try pulling in the upper color, and chrome to go with all the exposed metal; I'll probably try them all.

[J_K_M_A_N]

I love when I see "NEW" next to this thread. So amazing. Can't wait to see more.

J_K_M_A_N

[Nephasth]

In researching this project, I was surprised to learn:
  There are nearly no pinball machines with T-mold.
  There are nearly no arcade machines without T-mold.

This is true even when Williams was making them both out of the same factory floor at the same time.

I have no idea why this is!

Arcade machines have exposed edges, pinball machines' exposed edges are only on the head, which is where you'll find t-molding on the ones that have it (i.e. modern Sterns).

[Laythe]

Arcade machines have exposed edges, pinball machines' exposed edges are only on the head, which is where you'll find t-molding on the ones that have it (i.e. modern Sterns).

True, but you could build an arcade cabinet with fingered corners like pinball boxes have, I think - the exposed edges were a design choice that they made there.  Or, you could build a pinball box with exposed edges and corner blocking like an arcade cabinet has - but I guess fitting the legs would cause a problem.  I wonder if that might be what forced the fingered corner joinery, and then that drove the finished-edge head to visually match?

Good counterexample on modern Sterns, I didn't know about those - I was thinking of Pinball 2000 cabinets as the only ones I thought had t-mold.



Meanwhile, more progress to share.

In my last post I showed how the actuator that pushes out or stows the control panel fits near the gear shift.  The anchor point where the ram attaches to the plywood should be strong, as it's going to take some load.  Here's what I wound up with:



The ram of the actuator bolts in via the threaded hole, and then the other nine holes with countersinks are for wood screws.

This is a pretty thick piece of aluminum, equal to the distance between a flat of the ram out to the round actuator housing; that gets me all the thickness for threads that I can get, and minimizes the cantilever on the bolt going through the ram.  (Plus, I figure if I'm clamping the ram against this, then I'm also pre-tensioning the bolt, and getting some help from clamped together friction too.)

I worked out exactly where it ought to go - and changed my mind a few times, so you see some extra lines here - then transferred the screw hole positions with the points of the wood screws.



I didn't think to do this before gluing up parts of the box it goes in, so installing it requires drilling some holes pretty close to the inside corners of that structure.  I did my predrilling for the screws with this 90' head on my dremel, it does a good job getting into places like this.  I wrapped the bit in aluminum tape as a depth mark, because these screws should only go about 90% through the plywood, not all the way.

Here's the holes.



I roughed the back of the bracket up a ton with a scribe, wiped it down with methanol, swept off the plywood, mixed up a batch of devcon 2-ton epoxy, slathered the back of the bracket with it, slapped it down and immediately ran the 9 screws into it.  When I torqued them down, epoxy squeezed out just about everywhere.  A useful knifemaker trick - you can clean that up with methanol before it cures, and it does a pretty good job.

As installed:



I now trust this point of attachment - at least, it's the strongest thing I think I can make that still clears the gear shifter and doesn't use up any extra length front to back.

To visualize how this will articulate - the round body of the actuator remains stationary, it'll be attached to the back wall of the frame.  The hexagonal ram will extend 14" further out of the round body, and all the wooden structure here will move with it.  Pictured is fully retracted.


In a prior post I talked about the big forstner holes gone almost terribly wrong that I managed to fix up alright.  I got the stainless steel faceplate made up and mounted over that:



This'll carry 2x DB15s and 2x DB25s for things that need to get into and out of the back cabinet.  I'm going to flip the genders on the matching pairs, so that you can't connect anything in the wrong place.

One DB25 is finished - it runs to the front cabinet, carrying: switch signal and lighting for coin1, coin2, start game, launch ball - additional switches for the 4x pinball inside-coindoor admin buttons, the exit game button, and the coindoor open switch, doubled wires for the driving mode left speaker that lives in the front cabinet,  common ground and common +5v, for about 20 conductors of the 25 used there.



The plugs kinda match the faceplate.   The next run will be a DB15 run to go to the moving control panel carrying: switch signal and lighting for start, 4x VR view buttons, and coin1, additional switch for exit game, common ground and common +5v - that'll completely fill that, 15 of 15, but that's all I need in the moving part of the control panel.

The other remaining DB25 and DB15 are going to be for things like limit switches to see when moving parts have arrived where they belong, locking pins to lock the control panel in place, the actuator to rotate the playfield monitor, pinball solenoids, and such like that.  Figured it was better to have headroom than run short.



Next I did some work with my dad on the audio switching setup.  I've now got the 12v relay in the backbox wired across one of the Ultimate I/O 1A drivers, and it flips the amplified audio out from the headbox speakers for pinball mode, to the identical but differently placed lower speakers for cockpit mode.  That way, stereo left-right remains correct regardless of which mode you're using the thing in.  My custom front-end turns that pin on when you go between pinball games and cockpit games. 

It was ridiculously gratifying to hear that thing CLICK and the sound switch speakers under my software control.  Works perfectly now.  That gives me some hope that driving the actuators might be similarly achievable.


One last bit of fabrication to close this update out with - I've been working on the area of the VR buttons, left side of the control panel, and I find I'm redesigning it a bit on the fly. 

In CAD, it seemed like the VR buttons should be visually centered under the throttle - that'd look intentional and nice.  But now that I play with mocking it up, I think that's a bit troubling with regards to legroom, as it might kind of encroach.  So I'm pushing the VR buttons as far left as I can, as far up as I can, and a little bit in under the front edge, where they should still be completely visible, but should be as out of the way as I can get them.

I want the flat control panel to attach as a roof over all this, so I decided to build this part upside down clamped to a glass plate - hopefully that'll guarantee it's fairly flat.



I glued and clamped all this up, then chased it around with a machinist square, nudging things straight.  I figure I can probably get it off the glass, even though the wood glue dripped on it in the corners - we'll find out.   



In efforts to get them as far out of the legroom as I can, I've reduced the VR button plate quite a bit from what it used to be, and also beveled the bottom edge.  I plan to put a big radius on the plywood sides as well.



Soon, I hope to slide this VR assembly onto the left rail, the gearshifter/PC/actuator/console onto the right rail, bridge between them with the control panel, and make all of that stuff permanently one big piece with bearing trucks on both ends.  I really want to see how that all looks and fits and slides.

[Mike A]

You can never really own too many different sizes and shapes of clamps.

We are working on opposite ends of the spectrum right now with our projects.

You are working with Lego Technic, and I am working with Duplo.

I enjoy watching your progress.

[Laythe]

You're right about clamps.  Most of my mid-size clamps are still tied up holding the temporary scaffolding boards between the front and rear cabinets, so I've got "small" and "awkwardly large" remaining.

I've been enjoying your project thread and running commentary as well.   

[Arroyo]

As always great to see your progress Laythe.  You continue to baffle me with your design, solutions, and execution.  I can't imagine how many hours you've already logged and how many specialized pieces you've created.  Truly raising the bar here, nice work.

[bperkins01]

Nice work sir.  Great progress.  To own machine tools..... 

White Vinegar also cleans up uncured epoxy very nicely if you run out of the other stuff.

[Laythe]

Nice work sir.  Great progress.  To own machine tools..... 

White Vinegar also cleans up uncured epoxy very nicely if you run out of the other stuff.

I didn't know that!  Thanks for the tip.  I'll give that a try.   

[Ond]

I like how you use plywood for building your cab. It's a much nicer material to woodwork with than MDF in terms of dust and toxicity. It has its challenges though with splintering and warping and exposed grain.  I admire your patience in getting the material to conform to your design as well.

[Laythe]

Small update:

I like me some reinforcing fillets.  In this case, they are a little complicated by the fact that the coin door attaches via these screw-down levers, two per side.  (Optionally one on top, as well.)



So, I made some triangular strips with half-depth square cutaways to clear the clamps.  I also used my belt sander to make a long inside radius on a triangular strip to go into the corner behind the actuator.

Gluing and clamping the fillets around the coin door wasn't too bad...



But I had to get a little creative, and dig out whatever was heavy in my metal stockpile to gravity clamp the one that goes behind the actuator.



This done, it was time to attach the right wall.  This got some bodywork to begin hiding my lamination job of thin to thick plywood.



All of this was a mad rush to get the left and right sides of the control panel assembly ready, so that I could start measuring out and mocking up...

This.



This is pretty close to the final shape of the cockpit control panel, minus the box fans. 

Ignore the vertical prop stick wedged up under the VR view buttons - that's just to hold things up, it'll go away after the next step.
Also, ignore the total lack of cable routing, I've got a plan for how that's all going to go that'll get it pretty clean.



I am so stoked by this.  Absolutely chuffed.

I need to very carefully, very accurately measure out parallel on the slider rails, then measure the control panel centered into the cabinet and straight, and then I'm going to glue the top board of the panel to the top of the VR button assembly and to the top of the gear shifter assembly.  Then that whole thing slides out, hopefully true and square and smooth, and I can do alllllllllll the bodywork to it.

I feel like the box on the right (enclosing the PC and actuator) kind of feels like the transmission tunnel of a car.  The VR buttons on the left turn out not to interfere with my legroom, though I'm glad I trimmed them back like this; the corners will get a large radius to them.  It's got a nice cockpit feel, to me, and entry and exit access and legroom will be pretty good once I get that propstick out.

It's just great, for the moment, to get to feel the actual dimensions and ergonomics of the thing.  It's very different to sit in it and touch it instead of poking at a CAD model and hoping.

[MiteWiseacre]

Did you cover how you’re going to compensate for the angle of the screen?

[Drnick]

Did you cover how you’re going to compensate for the angle of the screen?

Yes he did and the answer was both genius and complex.  Read page 5 

[Laythe]

Hehehe.  Thanks, Drnick!

Yes, what he said.   

[MiteWiseacre]

Went back to page 5, my god man! 

[Laythe]

Went back to page 5, my god man! 

Hahaha, thanks.  This thing's an undertaking, for sure.

I've finalized the width of the control panel assembly by gluing it all together while located between the verticals, so it is what it is now. 

That means I can pull that whole thing off and start on the bodywork on it.

Bodywork begins again!

There was one spot near the bottom where I bit a big chunk off with the router while cutting the T-molding groove.      So I built that back up out of bondo and sanded it down; I think it won't show and no one but us will know.



In the background of this shot you can see I also sanded down the foot of the console that hovers above the ground to a nice radius to match the sides. 

I also cut the same size radius into the top of the console, along the corner where the gear shifter mounts, on either side of the shifter.



I plan to run two strips of T-mold along the sides of the gear shifter in the narrow neck.  I knew that'd be a tricky install in the end, so I cut clearances the shape of the T-molding crown in front of the slots;  I can stab the T-mold through these holes as a tight but doable fit, then fold them back with cutaway spines to follow the angle of that panel.


From this view you can see I've sanded the side panel that carries the fans pretty hard - this slides closely along the aluminum leg of the back cabinet, and to have a clearance for primer and paint, this area may also have to get a thin paintjob.  This is a zone of concern.  At absolute worst, I'll install some .060" aluminum shims under the bearing trucks, slide the back cabinet another .060" away, and use that space for paint - but I'm not sure if it will come to that yet.  I can still get away with that because I haven't made the back web or the mid-shelf yet, and those will be the other things that really set the intracabinet distance in stone.

This ends up being an interesting chunk of wood, so I'll try to show a few angles of that.

Here's a view looking through the cockpit-side coin door, at the internal lug for the fans.


The tricky bit here is that the fans, and their wire guards, have to be below flush because of the aforementioned leg clearance, and I want them removable as well.  So, they slide up from the bottom in this view, along the thin plywood, until the H-shaped flange on their top corners wraps around this lug you see between the holes.  The holes are tight enough that they stay put without any screws, but I'll be putting the top two screws in through the wood as overkill.

The round holes you can see behind the gear shifter are going to be for wire routing, there will be service loops pinned in here to accommodate the control panel moving 14" forward and backward when Shapeshifter changes modes.

Looking up from the bottom of this open-bottomed structure reveals a bit more of the internal craziness going on.


The tab of plywood on the lower left that sticks in 2" is to form a shelf for the linear actuator to sit on when it isn't connected to the back wall, and is also the leftmost limit for the 6 3/4" wide PC case to not quite touch as all this slides around it.  To clear 6 3/4" of PC on the right, you can see the step down to the thin plywood.  Going thin there gives me a good 1/8" of free clearance on both sides of the PC as this shell slides around it.  At the upper right you can see the joint of the thin and thick plywood and how they overlap.

My reinforcing fillets around the front corners can be seen at the top, with notches for the coin door attachments.  The bit of aluminum at the upper left is that L-shaped anchor for the nose of the actuator to push this whole assembly by.

I think I can reach everything in here to prime and paint it.  That'll be fun.


On the other side, you can see I was indeed able to lift that VR view button frame off the glass and attach it.


I've got some bodywork to do here to fair all the lines together, and I'm going to radius the lower corners to make it a little friendlier on the knees if you do manage somehow to bump it.  I may build a thin lid for this that covers the switches, but given it's the underside of the panel in a place you have to lay on the floor and look up to see, that's not my top priority for the moment. 

My current priority and work-in-progress can be seen at the bottom of the VR box; I've glued in a second piece of plywood for reinforcement, but mainly as a spacer, because I'm going to make a long standing rib that goes under the control panel to make it form a T profile, running between the screws of the linear bearing truck, across the center, and connecting to the gear shifter tower.  That will stiffen up the center of the panel even more, and provide some real strength to help hold the distance of the front and rear cabinets precise given that this is kind of structurally the right wall of what would normally be a pinball table box.

To mount that, though, I want it back in the machine, because I'm more comfortable attaching things that might alter the dimensions a bit when I can verify the positions are all correct with regards to the TV swing and rotation.

On the software front, I'm currently having an annoying fight with the Logitech G25 profile software under Windows 7.  It doesn't appear to work.  It runs, you can give it settings for pedal axis combining and wheel rotation limits, globally or per game, and launch a game through the profiler directly, and it does absolutely nothing to change ANY of those settings.  I can change the rotation limit using the two-middle-buttons-plus-top-button direct hacks, and those work, but the profiler software never does anything, which I can verify looking at the windows game controllers test dialog. 

[harveybirdman]

Next level craftsmanship my man. 

[Laythe]

Thanks, harveybirdman!

I've got some dead time while I'm waiting around for glue to dry. 

It occurred to me I hadn't shown the control panel stowed, yet.  Until I get the back wall built, and the counterweight bridge, the TV still needs a prop stick to support it, so ignore that board on the left, but otherwise:

Here's how it looks with the control panel retracted.  The rail comes out right next to the gear shifter on the right, and the center console comes back to just at or slightly behind the aluminum leg of the back cabinet.

The seatback and gear shifter will break the plane of the legs slightly, but from my testing it looks like they'll all be completely invisible from the pinball player position, so they shouldn't be a distraction at all.


The piece I'm waiting on glue joints over is a bulkhead to connect the left and right structures a bit more rigidly.  There was a little bit of flexibility in the center deck, you could twist it when it wasn't connected to anything else, and that means it isn't quite as overbuilt as I like to overbuild things.  So, more structure!

This is the new bulkhead:


The hollow ring on the left will be part of a shelf to slip the wireless keyboard onto, within reach of driver or pinball player but out of the way of both.  The notches at the top are wire passthroughs.


The underside of the control panel looked like this, previously:


There's a little scrap of 3/4" plywood under the steering wheel clamps that is just a placeholder, but from this view you can see how the only thing carrying load between the VR button box-up on the left rail, and the console-shifter box-up on the right rail, is the flat deck of the panel. 


I specifically wanted to install this thing while the panel was in the rails, so that lock the rail-truck to rail-truck distance in exactly as it should be rather than distorting it with this piece out on the bench.  That made snaking it in while covered in glue and subsequently clamping it a challenge, but here's how this area changes with the new bulkhead installed:



The bulkhead is about two inches off the back edge of the control panel, so it's forward ahead of where kneeroom might be any kind of issue.  Unseen on the right, it swings down to the right of the T-molding stripe but all the way down to the deck on the console, so it's attached along top, right and bottom, there.   It's glued to the panel along it's top edge, it's glued to the vertical truck-carrying left wall, and it's glued to the rear web of the VR button box. 

That should, I think, stiffen everything up quite a bit.  Now it's properly overbuilt. 

When this dries, I'll be pulling it back out of the machine, and beginning the bodywork in earnest on it.  I'm actually looking forward to it - I bet that feeling lasts two or three hours in to thirty hours of bodywork...


Also, I'm no longer sure this whole assembly should be the grey of Mimic like the pedal box is.  Looking at the red-over-black of the machine, red-over-black-over-grey is maybe not the right answer.

Any opinions? 

I'm starting to lean toward painting this whole thing black, and blacking out the pedal box as well. 

T-molding options will be white, red, chrome or black. 

When I get closer to painting time, I'll probably photoshop all the options up and see what people think.

[Arroyo]

+1 for all black.  If it’s meant to be in disguise until protracted, then keep it hidden.

[Nephasth]

Blacker than the blackest black... times infinity!