Homebrew Pinball: What It Takes to Build a Machine From Scratch

At some point in a pinball obsession, a particular thought arrives: I could build one.

Some people mean a virtual cabinet — a screen in a pinball-shaped box. Some mean a retheme, where an existing machine gets new artwork. Homebrew means neither. A homebrew is a complete, original, physical pinball machine: real wood, real coils, real steel ball, rules nobody has played before, built by one person in a garage.

People do finish them. Not many, and not quickly. Here is what the path actually looks like, and what it honestly costs.

Why anyone does this

Rarely to save money — as you will see, it does not. The reasons builders give are more interesting than that.

You want a theme nobody will ever licence. You want to design shots rather than learn someone else's. You want to know how the machine works all the way down. Or you have restored enough machines that the mechanisms have stopped being mysterious and the only frontier left is making one.

It is closer to boatbuilding than to a weekend project: a long, absorbing, occasionally maddening thing that some people love precisely because it is long.

The path, in order

Every build runs roughly the same sequence, and the order matters — skipping ahead is how projects die.

1. Concept and rules. What is the theme, what does the player do, what makes it fun on ball three?
2. Layout design. On paper, in CAD, or simulated.
3. The whitewood. A bare plywood playfield with the shots cut and the mechanisms fitted, no art, no lights.
4. Iterate. Play it. Move things. Play it again. This is the real work.
5. Artwork and the final playfield.
6. Cabinet.
7. Wiring and electronics.
8. Code. Which is never finished, only abandoned.

The whitewood is the whole game

If you take one thing from this article, take this. The whitewood — a bare, unfinished playfield — exists so you can find out whether your layout is any good before you commit to artwork you cannot change.

As the Pinball Makers wiki puts it: "the first iteration of a game will not have any artwork or lighting as the purpose is to test the layout, flipper shots and the overall feel of the design."

Useful numbers from the same source, because guessing these wastes wood:

• Playfield stock: 17/32" plywood, sanded on top with the inserts fitted to a finished 1/2". Cabinet-grade, minimum seven plies, ideally nine, with a hard birch face.
• Inserts sit 1/4" deep.
• Playfield sizes across manufacturers run from about 16½ × 41½ inches to 27 × 51¾ inches — pick a standard and stay on it, because parts and glass follow the standard.
• Flipper geometry to the WPC standard: 1/2" holes, centres 7 inches up from the bottom edge, flippers 6 13/16" to 7 inches apart. Get this wrong and nothing else you do will feel right.

A first prototyping whitewood can be built for well under $200 in materials — a sheet of plywood is around $15 — though that figure buys you a board to test flipper geometry on, not a playable game. Builders are near-unanimous that good Baltic birch beats big-box plywood.

Designing the layout

There is no single tool, and the community is refreshingly unsnobbish about it. Free options in regular use: Inkscape for vector layout, Fusion 360 (free for hobbyists) for CAD, SketchUp, DraftSight for 2D drafting, GIMP and Krita for art, Tinkercad for simple 3D, and Freesound.org for audio. Builders with access to Solidworks like it specifically for assemblies with hinges, which makes mechanism design far easier.

The clever move a lot of builders make is to prototype in Visual Pinball first — laying the shots out in a simulator and playing them before cutting anything. It will not tell you how the machine feels, but it will tell you within an hour whether a shot is even reachable.

And a note of humility from the design threads: "there are no rules to playfield design, especially with homebrews."

Artwork and the playfield surface

This is where amateur and professional practice genuinely diverge, and where a lot of first builds look homemade.

Commercial playfields have traditionally been direct-printed, historically by screen printing — a process needing specialist equipment, many screens (one builder counted "upwards of 17" for complex art) and semi-toxic inks. It is, as the community bluntly puts it, "beyond the average garage builder."

What garage builders actually do:

• A printed overlay — artwork printed on vinyl or mylar with adhesive, laid onto the wood. The consensus favourite: "the overlay really is the best choice for a hobby maker."
• Masking and airbrush, for a more hand-made look.
• CNC paint-pen plotting, if you have the machine.

For protection, instead of spraying clearcoat — which is a real skill with real chemistry and a real chance of ruining your artwork — many builders lay a 10 mil polycarbonate sheet over the top. It is reversible, it is forgiving, and it does not require a spray booth.

Mechanisms

Flipper assemblies, pop bumpers, drop targets, slingshots, ball troughs. Three routes, and most builds use all three.

Buy new. Suppliers make these to order — an eight-ball trough assembly runs about $110, a pair of flipper mechanisms $80–90. Reliable, and the fastest way to a working machine.

Salvage. The most-repeated cost advice in the hobby, and the most-ignored: buy a dead donor machine. As one builder puts it, "you learn so much when you take a look at a used playfield. And all of the parts you can use, the posts, screws, assemblies, guides." The same applies to the box: "a beat up used cabinet is far cheaper than building one." Used populated playfields turn up under $1,000, sometimes far under.

3D print. Brackets, toys, spacers and non-load-bearing parts. Not flipper mechanisms, and not anything a steel ball hits at speed.

The controller: the one real decision

Everything above is woodwork. This is the bit that makes it a pinball machine, and it is the choice that shapes the whole build.

The software almost everyone lands on is the Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) — an open-source Python framework for running real machines, actively developed, with a stable release in April 2026. You describe your machine in configuration files and write game logic in Python.

MPF then talks to whichever hardware you choose:

• FAST Pinball — the Neuron controller and its I/O boards. Commercial, well supported, the most common choice for new builds. There is also a "Retro" line for driving System 11 and WPC machines.
• Multimorphic P-ROC and P3-ROC — P-ROC (around $485) drives an existing WPC or Stern machine from a computer; P3-ROC (around $190) is the one for a new build, and explicitly does not do switch matrices or DMDs.
• Open Pinball Project (OPP) — an open-source hardware design originated by Hugh Spahr, supported in MPF, with boards sold by third parties. CobraPin is a well-regarded OPP-derived controller published on GitHub.
• LISY — the odd one out and worth knowing about. If you own a classic Gottlieb System 1 or 80, a LISY board makes that machine MPF-compatible. You can develop original rules on a playfield you already own instead of building a cabinet first. The project's own note is honest: only MPF itself runs on the Pi, not the media controller, and it recommends a Raspberry Pi 3B or better. We wrote about the wider LISY ecosystem separately.

The consistently good advice from experienced builders: learn the software before you buy the expensive hardware. MPF runs in simulation on a laptop. Find out whether you enjoy writing pinball rules before spending £700 on boards.

What it actually costs

Real numbers from builders who counted, rather than estimates.

One Australian builder logged every cent of a FAST-controlled machine built between December 2017 and May 2018 and landed on $4,153.80. A European builder reported roughly €4,200 for a first machine and €3,000 for a second, the saving coming from salvaged electromechanical parts. Another builder, on a more ambitious head-to-head design, reported "far north of 10k."

The community's own rough breakdown:

Item	Typical
Controller boards	$700–1,000
New mechanisms	$500+
Finished playfield (CNC, inserts, art)	$250–500
New cabinet	$750–1,000
Wiring	$500+
Professional artwork	$500–1,000
Display, audio, plastics	$300–700
Total, realistically	$1,000 to $8,000

And the line item everyone forgets: tools. A 3D printer, a router or CNC, a decent soldering station, possibly a welder — $2,000 to $5,000 if you are starting from nothing. That is not part of the machine, but it is part of the bill.

What it actually takes in time

This is the harder currency.

The fastest well-documented build above took about five months — and that builder was experienced, focused, and mostly waiting on international shipping. At the other end, one documented custom took four years from concept to completion, and builders commonly quote anything from a year or two up to five or ten.

The failure mode is not money. It is the eighty-percent wall: the machine plays, the shots work, and everything left is artwork, wiring tidiness, sound and rules polish — months of unglamorous work with no dopamine hit at the end of each session. Garages everywhere contain a whitewood that plays beautifully and will never be finished.

If you want to improve your odds: keep the first design small, buy rather than fabricate wherever you can, and show it to people. Build threads that get replies get finished.

Where to start this weekend

Install MPF and get a simulated machine running. Read a build log end to end. Buy a dead donor machine and take the playfield apart to see how a real one is put together — that afternoon will teach you more than a month of reading.

Then, when you are ready for parts, suppliers and people who will answer your questions, we have collected them in a companion piece: homebrew pinball parts and where to get help.

FAQ

What does homebrew pinball mean?

A complete, original, physical pinball machine designed and built by an individual — not a virtual cabinet with a screen, and not a retheme of an existing machine with new artwork.

How much does it cost to build a pinball machine?

Realistically $1,000 to $8,000 depending on how much you buy new versus salvage. One fully documented build came to $4,153.80. Budget separately for tools, which can add $2,000–5,000 if you are starting from nothing.

How long does a homebrew pinball machine take to build?

The fastest documented builds run around five months by an experienced builder. A year or two is normal; four years is not unusual. Most abandoned projects fail in the final twenty percent — art, wiring, sound and rules polish.

What is a whitewood?

A bare plywood playfield with the shots cut and mechanisms fitted, but no artwork or lighting. Its whole purpose is to test the layout, the flipper shots and the feel of the design before you commit to artwork.

What software runs a homebrew pinball machine?

Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) is the mainstream choice — open-source, Python-based, and compatible with FAST Pinball, Multimorphic P-ROC and P3-ROC, Open Pinball Project hardware and LISY boards.

Can I write custom rules for a classic machine instead of building one?

Yes. A LISY board in a Gottlieb System 1 or 80 makes that machine MPF-compatible, so you can develop original gameplay on a playfield you already own without building a cabinet.

Sources & further reading

• Pinball Makers wiki — construction, design, artwork and playfield references
• Pinside — the Homebrew Pinball forum
• Pinside — minimum parts and cost to build a whitewood
• Pinside — homebrew costs, with builder breakdowns
• Mission Pinball Framework
• FAST Pinball
• Multimorphic — P-ROC and P3-ROC
• LISY project — MPF support on classic Gottlieb machines
• The Pinball Room — a documented multi-year custom build