I like the idea of hosting pinball related 3D files in our archive. I have recently been talking to a friend who is printing hard-to-find parts as well as printing his own mods and the quality of his 3d prints blew me away.

What about copyrights? Are they a factor if you share models that you model yourself?

And what kind of file formats are we talking about? I imagine a playfield protector is a different format (2d) vs a 3D printed popbumper cap?

I think this is a fine idea, but what is wrong with Thingiverse and Printables ?

My general issue with Thingiverse is the poor search functionality, even with the exact thing title you often won't find what you are looking for. Even if Pinside didn't host the files it would be great if there was a way to link a file on one of the general sites to a machine on Pinside so that people could find it. Maybe add a new subforum so people could share their work in a new thread that could be linked to games. It would be easy to use Pinsides advanced search to filter on that subforum if you want to look for pinball related maker items. That would let Robin leverage the great work/site he has already built without having to deal with hosting large maker files.

I understand this, one bad apple could spoil the bunch.
The last thing Robin and Pinside needs is some jerk to upload WMS/Gottlieb copyrighted materials and then have lawyers banging down the door!

The playfield protectors sound great, and if it’s just the clear overlay, there is no way it could be copyright because it’s not using Gottlieb® materials, it’s just a shape.
It will probably require moderating, or some sort of review process for files uploaded if Pinside hypothetically allowed it.

I can’t imagine the users of this website will upload so much that it would be an overwhelming workload on a reviewer or two.

Another suggestion if for Robin, if you proceed, don’t forget to put some limit/cool down on uploads so some rando doesn’t join and just start hammering the website with 10k uploads

Your concerns about Thingiverse, and even Printables, have merit.

But they also have features that would be difficult to replicate on Pinside. Not impossible, just a lot of work for Robin and anyone else working on the site.

I like your idea about just linking to the actual hosted content elsewhere. To some extent, this already exists, but it could be refined. For now, you can search a pin's "club" thread for "thingiverse" and "printables" to e.g. find 3D models (and, I guess, SVG files?) related to that pin. There is also a thread for 3D printing generally here.

But it would be more accessible if there was a way to provide cross-linked references to sites like that in the machine database on the site. I.e. on the page for each pin in the database, include a list of links (possibly with an image documenting each link) that are relevant to the machine. Ideally, these would be managed on a multiple-machine basis, i.e. for any given link, the person adding it could specify multiple machines it relates to. Some parts may apply uniquely to just one machine, while others may be useful for a whole range of machines, due to their use of common parts. (The specific examples that come immediately to my mind are parts I made for my Rush machine, where one works only for that machine, but the other could be used in just about any modern Stern machine.)

This approach also likely would address the possible concern of dealing with copyrighted material, since none of the materials would actually be hosted on this site.

In general, as long as there is no artwork, no logos, and no sculpted items that could be considered decorative rather than functional (ie, the genie on TOTAN), pretty much everything else should be in the clear.

Parts can be covered by patents in some cases, but anything older than 20 years has expired.

This is getting into the weeds just a little bit, but it's relevant and important too. Illustrator does not export SVG in a format most programs expect. As such it will often import at the wrong size. I'm adding an image with a technical explanation of why.

But the short version is this: Illustrator's SVG format is not a reliable way to share information that is a specific real-world size. Someone could use your file to cut a playfield protector and find it doesn't fit, depending on the chain of programs used to do it.

The following is an excerpt about making PCBs from SVG images, but it applies to anything else too:

FaqJ25sUUAEym3o (resized).jpeg

It applies, units in Illustrator aren't actually a fixed concept, you can switch between them at will, they won't change the SVG scaling. Let me show you. This Illustrator file was set to inches, and I exported an SVG with the following dimensions:

illustrator (resized).png

Then I opened it in Carbide Create, a program for exporting tool paths to a CNC. So perfect example of taking someone's Illustrator file and turning it into cut paths to make say a slingshot or ball trough or inserts etc.

This is what Carbide Create shows me on importing that file:

carbide (resized).png

As you can see it's off by the exact same scale factor discussed. 96/72=1.33 and 10/7.5=1.33

I can correct for that if I know to look for it, but just importing someone else's SVG I'll have no clue. Which is why if this idea takes off I don't recommend using SVG as a format. It's an unfortunate issue Adobe refuses to fix because they don't want to break backwards compatibility.

I would export to DXF. DWG is technically a proprietary format, and DXF is open source. As you noted many programs can read DWG, but DXF will have broader compatibility.

Scaling is already an issue on thingiverse, I’m used to dealing with that.

It would be cool to be able to pull up a game here and see a list of printables for it. I guess youd need another area for files that aren’t game specific.

Also need to think about file validation of the uploaded files for whatever formats you support.

The problem is .svg is a generic format, and you don't know what program created it. So it might have been made in Inkscape and be the right size, but you thought it was from Illustrator and make it 33% bigger and it doesn't fit.

This is why Adobe really should just get over themselves and fix it.

That said, it would be smart to include dimensions for things so that people could sanity check. Annnnnd, that's how this all starts getting complicated.

Wouldn’t most people use STL? Either way, I run into this scaling issue all the time. I’d think if I found a file and was confused by the scale I’d just try contacting the person that posted it, like on Thingiverse.

FYI there is a thread already on here dedicated to 3D printing. I’ve shared files on there previously, linking to thingiverse.

More recently it has turned into more of a how to use 3D printers for novices, and none of the shared design files have been indexed, so it’s a bit of a mess.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/3d-printing-sharing-thread-lets-better-the-hobby

STL is for 3D objects, we're discussing 2D ones, like laser cutting playfield protectors, which is what this thread was started about.

This is honestly kind of a huge undertaking because there are so many different formats and things people might want to archive.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. Allow STL, SVG, DXF, whatever. As said above, people are sharing these already as dumb links in a thread, so this is just a welcome upgrade (that I hope happens). Handling these other formats is no different than handling uploaded images. All you have to do is verify the contents aren’t malicious.

It's my opinion that this is a bit of work to take on, but I'm not the one undertaking it, Robin would be, so I'll just let him decide what makes sense unless I can answer a question, in which case I'm happy to do so.

Centralized resources are always nice.

I think that approach sounds fine. At a minimum, it would require a new subforum where all of the posts could live. There are some tech subforums now that theoretically could be appropriate, but it seems to me it would make more sense to have a dedicated one, to keep everything clearly in one place, as well as avoiding the other forums getting cluttered with these types of threads.

Each thread could link to the machine(s) for which the design/part would work.

The other feature request I would have, would be to add some kind of "machine group" field to the machine database on the site, so when someone designs something that will work for any EM pin, or any Stern Spike 2 pin, or any WPC95 pin, or whatever, the thread's link could be to that machine group instead of having to enumerate every single pin that it might apply to.

This would mean updating the existing database -- something that could be handled by the community, rather than falling on the site maintainer -- so that each machine can be linked to the group or groups to which it belongs. I don't know how database maintenance is handled right now, but presumably there would be a way to view the list of groups, to view a single group's page that shows a list of all the machines in that group, and to see the group memberships for any given machine on a specific machine's page. Membership in a group could be modified either in the group page, by adding a machine, or on the machine page, by adding a group for that machine.

Then a forum search could be performed on a specific machine, and it would return any post that specifically links that machine, or any group that machine belongs to. Note that this feature would benefit across the entire site, not just for this particular application.

I grant that a) the suggestion is still good even without the additional grouping feature, and b) implementation of the grouping feature is likely significantly more effort than just adding a subforum. But it would also improve the site significantly across the board, as well as enable important post-finding abilities.