Inspired by a picture of a reconfigurable pinball table, Beth Sallay set out to build her own. As you can see in the video above, she has pulled off the goal quite admirably. The gameplay seems fun and it is fully reconfigurable.
The most difficult part of this is getting the flippers to work. Though there are several methods floating around on the internet, her method seems to be quite elegant and robust.
even though her flippers seemed to be pretty tough, she didn’t foresee exactly how tough a crowd of kids can be on something like this. It was debuted at the Utah Arts Festival and she says that she had to keep replacing broken flippers. You can see that in this environment, kids can be rough on things.
You might be tempted to watch this video and get frustrated with the kids being rough on it, but listen to what Beth says:
These boys on the end made me cry. They played on it for three of the four days. They showed other kids all of the tricks, how to get up the ramp and hit the bell. The best way to work the flippers. One got fillmed for b roll for the local news and I watched him get nervous but I was so happy for him. I wanted to tell their parents how grateful I was but couldn’t without sounding like a crazy person. My first big project and they made it so wonderful.
They also made me realize I needed a backboard. I sat in between two pinball tables with marbles occasionally flying by my face. Not cool, well, pretty damn cool except for if any of then accidentally hit me.
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