A retired software engineer going by the name “Tony the Pinball Wizard” has successfully created a pinball machine that is almost entirely 3D printed.

This machine was made to be shown off at the 3D FilaPrint stand at a 3D printing trade show. And quite the display it is, as the finished product used no less than 85 different types of filament.

But that’s only one of the impressively large numbers that went into the machine. Just to design the prints Tony spent more than 200 hours in OpenSCAD creating 181 unique pieces, which joined the more than 550 separate parts which ended up being needed. We assume the difference there is either parts he found online and didn’t need to recreate, or ones he had already made for other projects.

With the design stage done it was time to 3D print everything. This took a whopping 1 200 hours (that’s 50 days), and that time doesn’t even include failed prints. This used eight and a half kilometres of filament. You know your 3D print is serious when you need to measure filament use in kilometres.

The electronics under the playing field are equally impressive. The full parts list includes a collection of solenoids, motors and LEDs all connected up to three separate Arduinos. The two Mega and one Duo Arduino are needed to provide enough interface ports.

This is just scratching the surface of this incredible project. if you want to dig deeper into the nitty-gritty (and maybe commit to building one yourself, god help you), Tony has provided a provided a build log you can follow.

If you’re more interested in just seeing and hearing more of the machine, check out the video below or this gallery showing off each element in detail.

[Source – Stereoscopy News Via Hackaday