I like projects …
I don’t know if you know this about about me but I do love to do projects and who else has built a pinball machine coffee table?
I don’t own any tools or anything so doing most of this shit is a huge pain in the ass, but sometimes, just sometimes I get inspired to make something cool.
This is one of those times.
Back story.
I was out meeting someone to buy some beer tap handles one day and I didn’t like what the guy had. (all 3 of the taps were glued to a display, I wanted them to use in my basement bar)
Since I wasn’t taking them he offered me this pinball machine play field as well as the back glass from a Flash Gordon pinball machine.
I didn’t know what I would do with them, but I bought them.
Step 1
The first thing I had to do (aside from mounting the play field in a frame – that was already done) was to cover up the ‘underside’ of what would be the table. All of the wires still worked and I didn’t want to have to deal with pets or children getting up in there so I made a plywood bottom and put it in place.
Step 2
The next challenge was legs.
I didn’t know how I was going to stand this thing up but I knew I had to put some sort of legs on it.
Just so happened my neighbors were moving and had a coffee table out in their trash. I knew immediately that it would fill my needs when I saw it.
I went down the street and brought it back to my shed. The legs were held in place by a wing nut attached to a long bolt that was inside the leg itself. I decided to cut the tops off the legs and then use the left over ‘stumps’
Once I had the legs cut down I removed the god awful green paint and stained them to at least not totally clash with the rest of the pinball machine table.
Finally!
Once I had the table standing the last thing to work out was the top, the glass top specifically.
The play field didn’t come with one so this was always something I knew I would have to figure out. I decided to build a wooden frame that would hold the glass as opposed to trying to mount the glass directly to the frame of the table. I also imagined putting hinges on this wooden frame (although I didn’t end up doing this) to enable the lifting up of the glass in case the lights ever did end up getting wired and you needed to say change a bulb. Or perhaps some basic storage.
In the picture on the right you should be able to see where I used this special tool (forgot the name) to ‘knurl’ into the wood and basically the glass was flush with the wooden frame. This frame and glass then sat on top of the table.
Ta Da!
I ended up selling this table when we thought we would be moving to the west coast (and basically sold EVERYTHING only to NOT end up moving). It’s too bad, I had a lot of fun bringing this thing to life and miss having it around to be proud of.
-- Downs out.
Hi there,
I'm Mike, welcome to my little corner of the web.
Hope you like what you see here, please leave me a comment whether you did or not. 
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