Hot Wheels Pinball Machine Topper
In 2023 my friend purchased a Hot wheels Pinball machine, so I proceeded to need to make a "proper" topper for the machine.
Topper Completed.
Being that it's an official logo, it was pretty easy to google around and get an official SVG so that you don't have to deal with a rasterized image.
Next I imported the file into Fusion 360, and moved it about to sort out all the scaling and sizing of the actual 3d Print. Luckily Fusion likes SVGs so it's pretty easily to separate the outlines.
I created a background layer that was broken up into 3 pieces so it could fit on the bed of my printer. I extruded it 30mm, which was enough that I could have a deep top layer to locate the letters, but also enough room in the back so that I could store electronics. The grey locator piece to the top left of the flame is simply a peg that could be placed in-between the pieces to reinforce the positioning of the pieces during the glue-up.
i gave myself plenty of room to store electronics, as at this point I wasn't sure how "lit" I was going to light this logo, if at all.
Next, I extruded out the letters. This is where the problems began and, why with this idea I was working with, probably should have been adjusted at this point. My idea was to have the letters "floating" in front of the background with a strip of LEDs behind the letters lighting the background.
The primary issue I was running into was the method of actually getting the LED strips behind the letters. As you can see, I can get 1/2 of the letters with plenty of room for mounting, however, in lieu of utilizing a bespoke solution with some individual 3mm LEDs(which would have been the better solution), I made the decision to hole out the final 4 letters and route the strips along the inside wall of the letters.
At this point the 3D model was looking good and I was able to push it off to the printers.
I started off initially with a smaller size (flush snips for scale) only to realize it was gonna be REALLY small. I think I bumped the size up like 250%. At this point, the final 4 letters were printed in the same style as the original 5, and didn't have the backs holed out as I hadn't tried mounting any LED strips to them at this point.
All assembled it looks pretty good!
I added a line of these rope "edge" lighting along the outside edge of the Logo.
The rope edge lights worked out really well in separating out the logo, but since I hollowed out the inside of the last 4 letters, it caused significantly more light bleed than I wanted. At this point I had spent far too long on this and needed to get it out the door. If I can get my hands on a photo of it with the lights on, ironically, it actually looks better since it doesn't have any light bleed. Overall, I learned a lot and really like how it turned out, despite the flaws.
