Time for an update I think.
The last thing I wrote here about this project was regarding the apron design.
I have not solved that problem yet, but many others…
I ordered a widebody lockdown bar, only to realize that the playfield is too wide (super-widebody, anyone?), so I’ll have to cut that one up and lengthen it at some point in the future.
I considered making a new playfield, but I eventually opted to keep this one.
Mounted the upper playfield temporarily.
The lane dividers have been replaced with yellow Williams-style ones, I think they look better…
Doing some polishing work on the bumper rings, the left one is polished on the picture.
I designed a small led-board in diptrace, and had them manufactured by iteadstudio.
It’s really just a pcb for connecting cables to a WS2812B addressable led.
(Oops, I forgot the capacitor)
It looks good (colours look a bit off in the picture though)
A new, corrected version, was sent to itead, and then the leds and capacitors(120nF) were soldered on.
I also designed some solenoid drivers, they are just mosfets(currently 75N06) and some resistors.
A parallel to serial shift register (74HC165) is used to read the switches.
A box made out of wood, for casting a plaster mould for the Drop Zone-VUK-trough.
It broke when I was a little too forceful removing the wooden box, but it should still work.
The idea is to heat a sheet of plastic, and then vacuum form it over the mould.
Built a frame for holding 2mm polycarbonate-sheets.
It’s two frames made out of 12mm MDF, held together with some wing-screws.
The vacuum table is three layers of MDF, where the bottom has a hole in the middle for the vacuum, the middle is a frame, and the top is filled with 256 holes
Heating with a patio heater.
The result was not good. At all.
I even tried heating from both sides, but the result was the same.
So I abandoned the vacuum forming (at least for now, I am going to need to vacuum form the cyclone and skyride ramp later on, but one problem at a time)
So I bought some steel sheet and cut out some troughs instead.
Ta-daa!
Drilling some holes for opto switches.
Mounted on the playfield…
…and wired up.
Printed a light guide for the P,A,R,T and Y letters.
And this is how the playfiled looks now.
Most of the stuff is wired up, and the main issue now is the programming.
I have a thought of running most of the code on a Arduino Mega 2560, we’ll see how well that works 
And here is a little video of the attract-sequence: