Flipper mechs, what's the deal?

jar155

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I don't proclaim to know it all, and I'm no engineer, but doesn't it seem like there could be a lot better way to design flipper mechanisms? It seems to me that something that rotated rather than plunged would cause less wear and tear and would stay stronger and more consistent. Maybe I'll need to do a mockup of what I'm trying to say, but every time I rebuild a flipper I think that the design was destined to have issues from the get go.
 
I'm not so sure...

How are you going to generate the energy to rotate the mechanism?

You're still going to need to stop the flipper abruptly at the end of stroke so you're still going to have some kind of stop mechanism that will wear.

I would like to see a mock up but currently I'm pretty sceptical.
 
Atari tried that with their earliest pinball machines by using "rotary solenoids". It was a dismal failure and they went back to normal flipper coils and assemblies that the other pinball manufacturers use.
 
Atari tried that with their earliest pinball machines by using "rotary solenoids". It was a dismal failure and they went back to normal flipper coils and assemblies that the other pinball manufacturers use.

Ah, cool. I'd like to see how their produced parts compares to my mockup idea. I'll need to draw it up in Illustrator after work, but I imagine it's a similar concept which seems to have already been proven a bad one. :D
 
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