Well you can knock me down with a feather !

[carl lawrence]

Well i have been cleaning up my fish tales and i have noticed that one of the pop bumper have had a repair done to it ..

so as i was cleaning the other one that i had taken off. I was thinking "have i got any of these brackets myself ?"
Then i thought "well i have an old gorgar playfield that i stripped back sometime last year ". However there is 13-ish years differance to a fish tales and a gorger.....


or so i thought there would be

So that has got me thinking ,what else has not changed after along time apartop
bumper brackets and balls ?

 

[kevlar]

Coming from an engineering background I often think ' there has to be a better way of doing this ' with regard to pinball mechanisms. The answer is usually yes there is, but these things are built down to a price not to last forever. But still....

 

[stoptap]

First rule of product design, 'what can I carry over from previous products'.

 

[andy]

First rule of product design, 'what can I carry over from previous products'.

Well if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Playfield glass has been a standard size (other than widebodies and so on) since......when? The 1950's?

 

[Moonraker]

Well if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Playfield glass has been a standard size (other than widebodies and so on) since......when? The 1950's?

Good luck with fitting 50's playfield glass. The games have changed in size quite a bit over the years.... You're probably looking at 1970's onwards.

 

[Replay]

As it happens I have just bought a game made in 1950. Playfield glass size is identical. Gottlieb 50's and 60's glass is same. Only thing is, if you find original it is untempered and sharp as hell!

 

[stoptap]

Well if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Playfield glass has been a standard size (other than widebodies and so on) since......when? The 1950's?

If it ain't broke.......fix it until it is.

 

[Mfresh]

I can't remember where I read it (maybe Pinball Magazine?) but one of the great BW designers was talking about how there is a need for continuity in staff at pinball manufacturers because every time a new person comes in they reckon they can design something (like a pop bumper) better, but 9 times out of 10 whatever they suggest has been tried before and failed for some reason. So new staff need to be shown "how things are done round here."

I guess that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thinking is not conducive to innovation, but maybe manufacturers haven't wanted/needed to innovate. Things may change now with more competition though...

 

[stoptap]

I've worked in product design and there is a fine balance betwixt innovation and tried and tested.
If you have an established assembly that is tooled and proven, any design change would have to offer significant benefits to warrant a change.
There is practically nothing that can be done to that pop bumper bracket design to improve it. So as a company if you were to look at the pop bumpers the first place to look would be the lamp sockets and wiring.

 

[Jay Walker]

Apart from adopting a (slightly) more reliable wedge-base bulb holder in 1987, the previous major change to the Williams Jet Bumper was to alter the plastic body so that the ring and its two rods could be lifted out once the bumper cap was removed. That was in 1974, when bumpers tucked in under ramps and raised levels were still un-thought of.