The Pinball Diaries

Tah-dah!

Took a little while but went pretty smoothly. The funny thing is the wires were stiff enough that they pretty much fell into their old positions on their own.

Next, I plopped it into the machine:

Then I realized I missed one solenoid:

This is what the old playfield looked like at this point:

One giant interconnected mass of stuff. Unless I wanted to and re-wire an re-solder everything (which I didn’t) it needed to all get transferred at once. So, I went over the entire thing, and whenever I encountered something that was screwed to the playfield (a switch, a lamp socket, a cable harness) I wrote a number on it, and then wrote the same number on the corresponding dimple(s) on the new playfield.

Here’s the new playfield with the numbers:

Next I unscrewed everything from the old playfield. It looks much worse than it is:

Next I cleaned and transferred the rest of the solenoids and their assemblies. Here you can see where I awesomely broke one of the pop-bumper nail/screw things. I rule!

Here’s the new playfield with all the solenoid stuff mounted:

Got my flipper rebuild kit from Marco Specialties and some fresh coils, ready to rebuild the flippers. Note the mismatched old flipper coils:

After rebuilding the flipper mechanisms, mounted them on the new playfield. Here is the first:

After thinking about it for a bit I decided to try a different approach with the G.I. wiring. First I mapped out where the wiring needed to go on the new playfield with a black marker, using the old playfield as a guide. Like so:

Then I made a second pass, stapling down wire as I fed it directly off the spool. When I reached a lamp socket I cut the wire and stripped off about an inch, and then started laying down another piece to travel to the next socket.

Then, I made a third pass, mounting and soldering all the lamp sockets, including the pop bumper lamps. Here it is with the G.I. almost all done (plus some lamp circuit boards and miscellaneous parts that were trivial to transfer):

I started replicating the wiring on the new playfield. This was not very much fun: hunching over the playfield measuring out a piece of wire, stripping both ends, stapling it to the playfield, and then soldering. I got about this far and then decided to try and figure out a better way to do it.

The next step on the new playfield: putting down all of the G.I. wiring. Not looking forward to this because the wiring is stapled, without insulation, directly onto the playfield. In addition, the lamp sockets aren’t really mounted, they’re just soldered directly to the bare wire. Blech, messy.

Here’s another not-so-great photo showing the G.I. wiring stapled to the playfield. Williams must have saved a few bucks doing the wiring like this.

Time to start work on the new playfield. First step: hammering in nice shiny new T-Nuts in all the spots the old playfield had ‘em.

Next step was to remove the old playfield from the cabinet to start transfering things to the new one. A little nervous about this step. Big catastrophe potential.

It actually turned out to be not so bad. I marked all the connectors in the backbox so I’d know where to hook ‘em up again, disconnected them, and then just lifted the thing out. Here you can see the old and the new side by side. If you click to enlarge the picture you can see all the shiny new T-Nuts in the new playfield.

The cabinet, sans playfield:

In my spare time over the last week and a half I managed to removed most of the pieces from the top of the playfield. Knowing I was going to have to put all these pieces back in a month or two after I’d forgotten where they went, I took picture of each piece as I took it off, stuck it (and any related screws) in a Ziplock bag with a numbered Post-It, and then wrote down the number and the name of the piece. As you might imagine, this was very tedious.

After sitting in the corner of a pinball machine for 14 years, light bulbs can get pretty dirty. These were under the spin-out ramp:

Roughly 70 ziplock bags later the playfield surface was almost totally clear. There were a few posts where the screws had basically bonded to the T-Nuts under the playfield and the only way to get ‘em out was to destroy either the screw or the T-Nut or both. Pain in the butt.

As well as upper surface playfield parts, I removed the major mechanical components from the underside of the playfied. Here’s a shot of the underside with most of them removed (as well as the big center lamp circuit board). One nice thing about this was that it made the playfield significantly lighter when I removed it from the cabinet.

Here’s the new playfield. It’s got the artwork, the dimples, the big mounting bracket T-Nuts, and that’s it.

Since it was gonna be a while before I was ready for the new playfield (like a couple weeks), I layed it on the floor and piled a bunch of other playfields on top of it to make sure it was nice and flat. Whether this had any effect whatsoever I have no idea. The observant among you will notice that is a CFTBL playfield on top (face down).