Homebrew Pinball: Parts, Suppliers and Where to Get Help

You have a design, or at least an idea. Now you need a ball trough, forty inserts, a controller board, twenty metres of wire, and someone who will tell you why your flipper is buzzing.

This is the sourcing half of homebrew pinball — where the parts come from and where the people are. Everything below was checked in September 2026; where a shop or forum was unreachable or looked stale, we say so rather than pad the list. If you have not read the first half, start with what it takes to build a machine from scratch.

Start with salvage

The most consistent advice in the homebrew community is also the least glamorous: buy a dead machine and take it apart.

A rotted-cabinet donor gives you posts, screws, ball guides, lane guides, flipper assemblies, a wiring harness, and — most valuably — an education. Builders who have done it are emphatic about the last part: taking a real playfield apart teaches you how the geometry actually works in a way no diagram does. And a beaten-up cabinet is far cheaper than building one from plywood.

Where to look: the classifieds on Pinside, the Flipper-Kleinanzeigen section of Flippermarkt in Germany (the busiest pinball marketplace in Europe, with new posts appearing by the minute), Flipjuke in France, and eBay. If the electronics are dead but the machine is otherwise whole, that is a restoration rather than a donor — our guide on repairing versus replacing a board is the fork in that road.

New parts: North America

Marco Specialties — the deepest general catalogue in the hobby, and the one most builds end up ordering from at least once. Worth knowing they sell a Homebrew White Wood Playfield Designer's Kit — a dimensioned layout template plus a geometry set — for about $40, which is a genuinely sensible first purchase.

Pinball Life — of the big suppliers, the one that has taken homebrew most seriously. It runs a dedicated homebrew section covering ball guides, cabinet assemblies, displays, electronics, playfield assemblies, stand-up targets, switches, wire by the foot, and — critically — playfield inserts in every shape you will need: arrows, arrowheads, bullets, diamonds, hexagons, lightning bolts, ovals, rectangles, rounds, shields, squares, triangles. It also manufactures its own mechanisms; an eight-ball trough assembly is around $110.

The Pinball Resource — Steve Young's operation, serving the hobby since 1977, with unmatched depth in NOS and reproduction parts, manuals and schematics. One caveat: it is a phone-and-email business with no shopping cart and a dated website. Call or write; do not expect checkout.

Planetary Pinball — holder of the Williams/Bally licence, and therefore the source for licensed plastics, playfields, backglasses and decals. Cointaker in Pennsylvania is the other big general supplier, strong on LEDs and mods.

Trident Pinball deserves a mention as the most homebrew-specific vendor we found: a complete DIY kit bundling a pre-configured MPF machine, a FAST Neuron starter bundle, power supplies, a pre-cut whitewood with trough and flippers fitted, wire colour-matched to the schematic, and Discord support. At the time of writing the FAST version is sold out with a four-week lead time, so check availability before planning around it.

VirtuaPin sells a flat-pack WPC-style cabinet — CNC-cut American maple, holes drilled, corner blocks and braces included, around $370. It is still a woodworking project needing clamps, glue and a nail gun, but it removes the hardest measuring.

New parts: Europe

European builders save a great deal on shipping and customs by staying on this side of the Atlantic.

• Flipperteile.de (Pinball-Network, Germany) — long-established, German language, free German shipping over €60, live stock quantities.
• Pinball Center (Germany) — large catalogue with proper category structure for playfield parts, bumpers, drop targets and flipper assemblies. Note the address: it is pinball.center, not pinball-center.com.
• Ministry of Pinball — despite the very English name, it is Dutch, based at Ter Aar in the Netherlands. Machines, parts, mods, euro pricing.
• Flipperwinkel (Netherlands) — same-day dispatch on weekday orders before 16:00. Do check their notice board before ordering, as they post holiday closures.

The German pinball association also maintains a directory of pinball shops, which is the best onward pointer if none of the above carries what you need.

Getting circuit boards made

Small-run PCB fabrication has become absurdly cheap, which is why so much homebrew and repair hardware is now open-source: publishing a design costs the author nothing, and building it costs you the price of a takeaway.

Service	Based	Indicative entry price
JLCPCB	China	from about $2 for 5 boards
PCBWay	China	from about $5 for 10 boards
OSH Park	USA	$5 per square inch, 2-layer, 3 copies
AISLER	Germany / EU	from about €14

For European builders, AISLER is worth the premium purely for avoiding a customs wait. All four take Gerber files, and most take KiCad or Eagle files directly.

3D printing

Brackets, toys, spacers, mounting plates and cosmetic parts — not flipper mechanisms, and not anything a ball hits hard.

The best current library is the pinball tag on Printables, which carries a healthy mix of genuinely functional parts (drop targets, ball guides, fan adapters, flipper buttons, leg protectors) alongside the ornamental. Thingiverse still has a pinball tag but is widely considered stagnant; start with Printables. Pinside also runs long-lived threads where builders share free STLs.

Where to ask for help

English

Pinside's Homebrew Pinball forum is the first place to go and, honestly, the only one you strictly need. It carries hundreds of topics and tens of thousands of posts, with new activity daily. Four threads worth reading before you post anything:

• The Homebrew Channel — the de facto index of who is building what
• Minimum parts to build a whitewood — running since 2014 and still the canonical costing thread
• Getting started — mechs
• DIY playfield art methods

The Pinball Makers wiki is the single best free reference for building, and deserves more attention than it gets: construction, design, artwork, playfield specifications, and hardware pages for CobraPin, OPP, P3-ROC and FAST. It is community-edited and explicitly aimed at hobbyists with CNC routers, laser cutters and 3D printers.

PinWiki is the counterpart for repair — nearly five hundred articles of manufacturer-by-manufacturer troubleshooting. Two honest caveats: use the www. prefix, and note its main page has not been substantially edited since 2020. It is an excellent repair reference, not a current build guide.

VPForums and VPUniverse matter to homebrew for one specific reason: Visual Pinball is where a lot of builders test a layout before cutting wood. Tilt Forums is excellent on rules design and competitive play, which is useful when you are writing your own ruleset.

Other languages

• German — Flippermarkt. Both a forum and Europe's dominant pinball marketplace, with tens of thousands of threads and posts arriving by the minute. Use the /forum/ path; the bare domain misbehaves.
• French — Flipper France. Running since 2004, with over 24,000 discussions and 350,000 messages, and sections for electronics repair, restoration and tuning. Flipjuke is the companion marketplace.
• Australia — Aussie Arcade's Home Brew Pinball Projects forum. Small but high quality, and the source of the most rigorously costed build log we found.
• UK — Pinball Info. The main British forum, with a scattering of homebrew build threads.

We looked for an active Spanish-language pinball forum and could not verify one; if you know of it, tell us and we will add it. The Italian scene's long-standing reference is Tilt.it, which is superb on Italian manufacturers — as we found writing about Zaccaria and Mr. Game.

Chat, and an honest warning about it

The real-time hardware communities are mostly invite-gated, which trips people up. FAST Pinball runs a Slack for its users, joined by emailing the company. Multimorphic runs a "pindev" Slack described as the place custom and commercial pinball developers help each other, joined by emailing their support address. Neither has a public link.

MPF itself does not run a Discord or Slack, whatever you may read elsewhere. Its official channels are the MPF Users Google Group and GitHub Discussions.

Build logs worth reading before you start

The Pinball Room documents one builder's journey in stages — ideation, playfield prototyping, populating a playfield, cabinet and artwork — including a custom that took four years. FAST Pinball's video hub collects tutorials and the PinDevCon talks, a conference specifically for people making pinball machines. Both are free, and both will save you money.

FAQ

Where do you buy parts to build a pinball machine?

Marco Specialties and Pinball Life in the US carry the broadest catalogues, with Pinball Life running a dedicated homebrew section including playfield inserts and wire by the foot. In Europe, Flipperteile.de and Pinball Center in Germany and Ministry of Pinball and Flipperwinkel in the Netherlands avoid transatlantic shipping and customs.

Is it cheaper to salvage parts from an old machine?

Considerably, and it is the community's most repeated advice. A dead donor machine supplies posts, guides, assemblies and a wiring harness, and a beaten-up cabinet costs far less than building one. It is also the fastest way to learn how a playfield is actually assembled.

Where can I get a custom PCB made for a pinball project?

JLCPCB and PCBWay in China are the cheapest, from a couple of dollars for a small run. OSH Park manufactures in the USA at $5 per square inch for two-layer boards, and AISLER manufactures in Germany from about €14, which avoids customs for European builders.

Where do homebrew pinball builders ask for help?

Pinside's Homebrew Pinball forum is the main English-language venue and the Pinball Makers wiki is the best free build reference. Flippermarkt serves the German scene, Flipper France the French, and Aussie Arcade has an active homebrew section.

Does Mission Pinball Framework have a Discord?

No. Its official channels are the MPF Users Google Group and GitHub Discussions. The Slack communities that exist belong to hardware vendors — FAST Pinball and Multimorphic — and both are invite-only by email.

Can I 3D print pinball parts?

Yes, for brackets, toys, spacers and cosmetic parts. Not for flipper mechanisms or anything a ball strikes at speed. The pinball tag on Printables is the best current library of shared designs.

Sources & further reading

• Pinball Makers wiki · PinWiki
• Pinside — Homebrew Pinball forum
• Marco Specialties · Pinball Life homebrew section · The Pinball Resource · Planetary Pinball · Cointaker
• Flipperteile.de · Pinball Center · Ministry of Pinball · Flipperwinkel
• JLCPCB · PCBWay · OSH Park · AISLER
• Flippermarkt · Flipper France · Aussie Arcade homebrew · Pinball Info UK