Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PinBox 3000 Review”.
Hey, i’m donald bell projects editor with make magazine, and today i am super – excited to be building the pinbox 3000. This is a do-it-yourself cardboard pinball machine kit that you can customize and paint and detail and make just how you want i’m going to let you know how it all goes together all right now, overall, i have to say that assembly went smoothly for the pin box. The instructions were clear and well organized and what really helped – and it’s easy to miss this in the instructions, is that the pin box folks go over the entire assembly on video over on their youtube channel. It took them around 43 minutes to assemble one pin box, but their pros for me took around two hours, but i was also taking a lot of breaks to set up different camera shots. I think a beginner could probably nail it in around an hour and a half, but that’s just to create the blank slate once it’s assembled.
You then have to switch into your own creative mode and design your own custom, playfield honestly for me once i finished putting it together, i walked away and had some lunch and then i let my kid go crazy, decorating it when he got home from school, which He loved doing i designed my own play field a few days later and i guess that’s worth mentioning that the basic kit comes with two play fields that you can swap out, and i really like that feature so that you can design variations or have two kids Design their own take on it or just know that you’re gon na learn a lot after designing the first one and do a better job on the second one. Anyway, back to the assembly. Most of the work goes into creating the base of the machine that the playfield slots into the guys who came up with this really did a great job of creating a solid base. And it’s all done without glue. There’S no glue and there’s no tape with all that slotting and folding. The overall construction felt like a cross between origami and putting together ikea furniture.
I enjoy doing both, so this was a good project for me. One secret for creating a really strong, solid, cardboard machine are these plastic rivets. These are called mr mcgroovey’s rivets. Each side is identical and they just push together. It takes a lot of force to get them apart, but they do come apart if you need them to these are included with the kit. I was also impressed by the cardboard mechanics that they engineered with only a few rubber bands as resistance.
They created the ball launcher and the flippers and the action is really nice on both. Also, these mechanical elements are attached to the playfield, not the base, which is kind of cool, so that you can make custom flippers and unique launchers for each game. If you want to alright so here’s the machine all assembled and ready to be customized, but even as a blank slate of cardboard, it’s a great feeling to shoot the ball around when you’re done and it’s nice when a project has a payoff. The second you’re done.
Constructing it now, here’s also what it looked like when my son got a hold of it and gave it a make magazine design because he’s awesome and he honestly couldn’t put it down and he had a lot of fun customizing it. So that’s the pinbox 3000. It’S a very satisfying project, it’s more solid than you’d think for it being made out of cardboard and you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of it, especially if you have kids, you can pick one up on makershed.com or you can search the internet for Pinbox 3000.. You .