70s Pachinko Machine Hopper / Ball Collector by nanoforge

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a very specialized part that hopefully will help someone else as well.
I came across this japanese pinball / gambling machine on craigslist one day a few years ago. After building a stand for it and fixing up the electronics, I struggled for years to find a perfect hopper for the steel balls that the machine uses as game tokens. I tried all sorts of plastic containers, but they were either unstable or the balls bounced right out and onto the floor.
So having access to a 3d printer, I believed I could design and print the perfect solution! Above is the result. The design was modified with a dremel in the pictures as i made a few mis calculations when making adjustments to the width so it was printable. I have updated the STL file with the dremel changes so it should be good to go if you have a similar pachinko machine.
I'd imagine its completely useless for any other purpose, and takes aprox 12 hours to print on the ditto +. But hey, 3d printing is all about sharing so i figured, why not! the machine was meant to be mounted in a wall, so I would assume anyone who purchased one of these machines would have the same problem I had with the balls falling all over the floor.