That's How I Roll! (Skeeball build)

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thatpurplestuff:
Saturday 3/14/09
We played makeshift Skeeball tonight while drinking beers with our buddy Sean. We were taking turns bouncing rubber dog toys into the rings, and it was surprisingly fun. It actually motivated me even more to get this thing built.

thatpurplestuff:
Monday 3/16/09
My 3” white birch balls just got here today, and I’m stoked. These things are going to work great.

The wood for the rest of the Skeeball machine was expensive. $130 later and I *hope* I’ve got all the wood I need to get the frame of this thing built. I honestly think I winced a bit when I ran my card at Home Depot. Surprisingly, the Girlfriend-Outrage-Meter was only about a 4 when I told her how much I spent… I was expecting at LEAST a 6.5.

thatpurplestuff:
Thursday 3/19/09
I have the middle holes for the score section drilled out, but I don’t know if I’m just not reading the plans correctly or what but I can’t nail down the exact location for the 100 holes. Tomorrow is Friday, and I really want to make some headway this weekend.

Since I didn’t get much done today, I figured I’d write about what would like to get done at some point. I would love to get RandyT’s software running on this thing, but at some point I would also like to take this machine to another level. Having a 2-player game on one ramp would be the first thing I would like to make. Another option that I thought would be pretty killer is to wire each hole with RGB leds, and then use an LEDWiz to control the lighting effects. In this manner, I could have a bonus mode in Skeeball, where every once in a while a random hole would light up and if you hit it the ring your score counts for double or something. For those familiar with the dart game 301, I also thought it would be cool to make a skeeball version (310?) that would have players competing to see who could be first to get the exact score of 310… if you go over you lose whatever points you rolled. Not sure how this would work with the ball release, but I’m just thinking out loud. This is also all big talk from someone who was never a good coder, and hasn’t done anything coding related in over 6 years. We’ll see.

thatpurplestuff:
Sunday 3/22/09
So I spent all day Sunday drawing, redrawing, and otherwise agonizing over the dimensions of the part of the frame that holds the scoring section. I knew that the scoring area is attached at roughly a 45 degree angle, but each time I drew out the frame my angle never ended up anywhere close to that. I was at the end of my rope and I figured I might as well try to get a hold of UncleT and ask for clarification on a few items.

This guy is awesome.

Just a brief timeline for you… I sent him an email at nearly 11pm and he responded within 5 hours. He was so quick that I didn’t even have time to respond before I left for work. On my lunch, I wrote a reply asking him about the areas that I was having difficulty with and by 6:30pm I had the answers in my mailbox, along with a zip file containing 11 pictures of the areas I asked him about. I’ll say it again: This guy is awesome.

So anyway, here I am on Monday night messing with Sketchup and I think I’ve got the angles ready to rock. I’m pretty awful using Sketchup, so I think I’m just going to use it to get the basic shapes of the frame and then just draw out everything on the MDF that I’ll be using.

thatpurplestuff:
Thursday 3/26/09
I bought fake wood vinyl for the ramp and scoring section. Some Skee fans may think it’s a bad idea, but for my budget it was by far the best option. To get the legit cork is upwards of $150, and I spent just over $30 and it will cover both the ramp AND scoring sections. It is cleanable, padded underneath, and will be perfect as a cushion and sound-dampener.

On to the ramp. I was expecting the creation of the hop-ramp to be surprisingly unpleasant, and I wasn’t pleasantly surprised.

Getting the initial curve wasn’t too bad after tracing out UncleT’s pictures and then plotting them on vinyl. I have access to a vinyl plotter through work so this may not be feasible for many people, but it was really nice just sticking the exact angle to the wood and then cutting around it. Finished it with a sanding and I ended up with a nice template to flush trim with. Now the fun part.

I’ve logged 3 hours with my jigsaw / router table and I’m a little over halfway done. I lied earlier… this part of the build is not fun at all. I have a garage covered in a fine toxic dust and I’m the proud owner of a broken flush trim bit. I’m not sure if I was pushing against the bearing too hard while guiding it along the table or if it is because I have relatively cheap Denali bits. Either way, breaking a bit the first time it is used is not good. Also, wearing the face mask and eye protection for that long was really smothering and I was dying by the end of it.

The good side of all of this is that it was more time consuming than difficult. Cutting out a rough cut with the jigsaw and then running it through the router table with a template attached was actually really simple. If it wasn’t for the nasty, dangerous dust that MDF creates this technique would be awesome. One thing I would do differently (I will do it for the last 11 pieces) is that I was really lazy in lining up the dowel holes, and it actually has made a few pieces a TINY bit off. A light sanding will make everything even, but if I hadn’t tried to save time with the dowel holes these things would all be perfect. Anyway, 15 down and 11 more to cut!

My girlfriend and I are going to a surprise party in Sacramento on Friday night, but I’m hoping to have the hop-ramp done on Saturday and maybe (?) make some headway on the actual frame of this beast on Sunday.

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