How to make DIY pinball flipper coil cooling fans

Flipper coils get hot and lose power. It’s a fact of life in modern pinball games, the longer you play, the weaker the flippers get. Eventually this weaker power starts to effect your game. Ramp shots become harder to acheive, targets get hit with weak shots and accuracy declines.

By adding fans near your flippers, you can remove some of that built up heat and improve performance.

You can buy flipper cooling fan kits on Pinball Life or elsewhere but be prepared to shell out $80 or more for some 3D printed plastic brackets, $10 fans and some wiring.

Or you can make them yourself. Here is how I did it with just a couple of 40mm x 10mm 5v fans, a few Lego pieces and some cable ties.

Now I have my game room set up to cut the power off when I’m not playing. So I don’t mind tapping into the service panel for my fans. The service panel power is always on if the pinball machine is plugged into a live outlet.

So with this arrangement, the fans will run all the time if you leave the outlet on. But this set up makes it a lot simplier to find power for your fans and you don’t have to tap into a circuit board for power. It’s a lot less permanent. Sell the game and simply move it to another machine.

Parts List