The Pinball Diaries

I declare the playfield disassembly complete. Playfield is ready for some major cleaning.

I installed the new ball trough without any trouble. Here you can see the old and the new side by side:

Note how the new design uses rails as ball guides instead of flanged metal. Hopefully they won’t be prone to divots like the old one. Here you can see the divots that developed on the old one, causing the balls to get stuck:

I thought this was the dirtiest coil sleeve I had ever replaced until I discovered that the original part (WMS #03-7067-5) is black:

That’s not to say that the entire assembly wasn’t filthy. The blue rubber bumper plug (WMS #23-6702) had developed a black flaky crust:

Also replaced the left troll carriage (WMS #04-10763.1) without any trouble. The bottom ring that attached to the armature had popped out a little bit. Just that little bit is enough to make the whole thing jam up against the housing and get stuck. Here you can see the new and the old side by side:

And the old one looking from the side:

It looks like the right-hand troll had the same problem at some point and somebody repaired it:

Perhaps I should make a ‘Non-doofus Previous Owners’ category.

Removed all 3 pop bumpers. The skirts are cracked and chipped and the entire playfield area is filthy. One of the purple caps has a chip out of it as well.

I hate working on pop bumpers. They’re such a pain. Plus you have to break the metal leads of the lamp socket to disassemble it. Who’s idea was it to take bare metal and staple it to the playfield and solder stuff to it?

Lest a few days go by without me placing an order…some stuff from Bay Area Amusements:

• A couple blank coin doors. Several of mine are all ratty and I wanna see how these blank ones look.
• Some Novus #1
• Some pop bumper skirts, WMS part #03-6035-7. I conveniently ordered the wrong color.
• Some pop bumper lamp sockets that have wire leads instead of bare metal straps.
• Purple pop bumper caps, WMS #03-8254-18

• Some bumper bodies (WMS #03-7443-5) and bases (WMS #03-6009-A5) ‘cause it never hurts to have some extra on hand, right?

The new ball trough arrived from Marco Specialties. Looks good. I’ll post pics when I install it.

Making steady progress clearing the playfield.

Started disassembling playfield of Medieval Madness for some major cleaning/shopping.

Now that Shadow is good to go, I moved Medieval Madness to the “shop” area for some much needed work.

Shop goals:

• A bunch of switches don’t work, fix ‘em.
• Rubber is old and cracked, replace it all.
• Bunch of bulbs are out, replace ‘em.
• Everything is really dirty. I mean, even for a pinball machine. Clean it.
• The red plastic star posts are all covered with Millwax and look crappy. Clean or replace.
• Left flipper is weak. I think the bushing is broken. Fix it.
• DMD has major burn-in. Replace.
• Left troll doesn’t pop up. Bracket is broken. Replace or fix.

• Balls get stuck in ball trough (divots?). Replace or fix.