Building my Own Pinball Cabinet

Like a lot of people, I first started playing pinball at university in the mid-1990s. Our college bar (shoutout to Clare Cellars) had a pinball table in the corner by the entrance. The most popular game there, as indeed the world over at the time, was The Addams Family and I sunk countless coins into that machine. But since leaving university, my interest drifted to other things.

Over the years, I discovered Visual Pinball, a software tool to simulate a pinball machine on your computer. Whilst this was a fun way to pass some time, the limitations of trying to play a portrait-oriented game on a landscape-oriented computer monitor always broke the illusion for me.

More recently, I built myself a computer and furnished it with a beautiful 27" IPS high-refresh screen, which can also rotate into portrait mode. One idle day I re-installed Visual Pinball, twisted the monitor around and instantly saw that there was real potential here to make something far more immersive. I started reading around and discovered the world of virtual pinball cabinets: these are real world, physical cabinets built to house a monitor to represent the playfield, and often with screens in a backbox to replicate the actual game backboxes of physical machines. Building one of these seemed like a lot of fun.

But I Can't do Carpentry

I am pretty handy with computer software, more than capable with computer hardware. But I struggle hanging a picture straight, let alone building a large wooden cabinet that has to be measured and put together very precisely. The main options for woodword-challenged types like me are two-fold:

1. Buy a fully-built cabinet and have it shipped
2. Buy a flat-pack cabinet that has already been cut, routed and is ready to be assembled at home

The first option didn't appeal: part of the attraction here for me was the fun of putting everything together and designing the internals just how I want. On top of that, the cost would have been very high: not just paying for the machine itself (around $3000) but then also the shipping would have been prohibitive: most of the vendors are based in North America or Europe, so the fees to bring an assembled cabinet to the UAE would probably have doubled the cost.

Option 2. seemed more feasible, but again the shipping costs would have roughly doubled the cost. So whilst a flatpack kit costs around $400, the shipping to the UAE would have been another $300. For that amount of money, it seemed to me that I could pay a local carpenter to build one for me.

So that became my next idea: design my own cabinet, then give the designs to a carpenter to cut and assemble. I started designing my own cabinet, using Sketchup Free, custom sized to fit a 27" playfield. However, as I matured the design I still felt like I was missing an opportunity to add a skill (basic woodwork) that might be useful for other things in future. So after some back-and-forth on the Virtual Pinball subreddit, I signed up for a woodworking introduction at the local (and only) maker space in the UAE.

After some basic introductions to table saws, routers, drill presses etc, I thought I could probably mash something together, leaning heavily on the kind folk at the Makerspace to help me where needed. So I began my pincab construction adventure.

The Build

There is heaps of information on how to do this online, but often spread all over the place. There are a few handy build guides (as this is intended to be) and they were certainly helpful, but I feel that it may still be of use for me to record how I built my machine, particularly as I come from a place of zero woodworking skill which I feel may be a fairly common situation for many people. So I'm going to record the process of putting together my own pincab, step-by-step.

Where to start

It's simple, you start with The Bible. This is a ridiculously comprehensive manual for anyone who feels like building their own virtual pinball cabinet. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Read it, then read it again.

My build

Once that was done, I started planning my own build. A pinball cabinet is not a small project - there are a lot of components, often coming at some significant cost, so you can't really afford to leap right in without a bit of planning. And planning is a speciality of mine. The entire process went through a number of phases:

1. Research: basically, reading the Bible over and over, and scanning the VPForums and VPUniverse cabinet builders forums for ideas, inspiration and tips.
2. Specs: figuring out what main things I wanted to have (kind of the Front-End Engineering & Design stage)
3. Design: the detailed design, setting cabinet dimensions, developing a cutting plan (Detailed Engineering)
4. Construction: implementing the design and building the cabinet
5. Fitout: once the cabinet was built and painted, putting all the components inside and connecting them up

These steps are all set out in the table of contents in the top right of this page, but if you want to start in order, click here for the first step: deciding what I wanted, and what I didn't.