Safecracker playfield supports

Hacked something together today.. support brackets for the playfield of my SafeCracker pinball machine.

On almost every machine of this type the playfield is bent - this is because there are some very heavy assemblies mounted to it (the drop target banks), and also because the supports on the sides do not run over the whole length, on each side they stop to make place for a rubber ring.

I had read about this in the past on RGP, someone has even made custom support brackets. But these are quite expensive ($150 or so) for just two pieces of metal..
so this afternoon I was thinking if I could make something myself.



Here you see the playfield is not perfect flat anymore. It's not too much, I've seen pictures of peoples machines that are warped much more.

Searched a bit in my basement and found unused aluminum pieces from an Ikea Kvartal curtain set.
About an hour of work to measure everything, drill holes, cut away pieces, and I've installed a piece of metal on both sides of the playfield.




It may not look like the most professional solution, but it should keep the playfield from warping more in the future..

btw one of these is is 365 photo 18 :)

SafeCracker high scores

Same old story.. busy with a lot of things, it's winter so I don't come much in my (at the moment still) unheated gameroom.

Last month we did move SafeCracker back into the house !
So I get to play that game again more often.
I have it now for about 5 years but never actually had a high score on it. Maybe once or twide I could enter my initials as far as I can remember.

So now I have a new goal - playing the game until I get my initials in the highscore (and maybe GC ??).

Reading RGP I find out I'm not the only one who has this problem.. the game is hard and challenging. It plays very fast but also needs to be tuned correctly. The ramp and cellar shot are quite difficult to make on my machine (only around 1 in 4 times it makes it, the other times the pinball rolls back down the ramp and almost drains) and these shots are crucial to get a high score.

I started first aiming to get a highscore on the Assault the Vault game.
Put a magic token it and start the multiball frenzy..
The trick to get a high score in this part of the game is to aim for the lower left set of drop targets, the cellar and the ramp. I don't bother shooting the pinball up towards the bumpers anymore..

In the past I usually got around 3 million points. Last week I finally got over 5 million using this strategy and could enter my initials. Great !
This weekend I played a few more games and got 7.8 and 7.9 million points. Excellent !

Next goal is to achieve a highscore during the regular game.
The wried thing about this is that first time I played a SafeCracker (somewhere in 2001 or 2002) at someone elses house, I immediately got an excellent score on it and could enter my name (had 5.5 million if my memory serves me right). All this without knowing what I did, how the rules were, ... that highscore even made me doubt if I would search for a Safecracker pinball machine to buy or not, as it seemed an easy game. (boy was I wrong, now I did learn its rules) Must've been beginners luck..
Anyway I'll first see if I can tweak the right flipper so the cellar and ramp shot can be made more consistant. Once it is, that GC score must become mine !