The Pinball Diaries

A little play-testing found that the ball gets wedged under the left slingshot.

Adjusted the rubber so there wasn’t any slack at the bottom and now it’s fine.

I had to hunt around for a bit, but I found it. Can you spot the ground short?

Well, in case you can’t:

Nothing says “Check out that pinched wire!” like a blurry photo:

Woo-hoo! Looks nice.

All new rubber, shiny new blue posts and lane guides, and NOS ramps and “Spin Out” assembly (from ebay). The ramps were a pain to get into place.

I’ve started putting everything back together on top of the playfield. This involves going through all my little ziplock baggies in reverse order and using all the photos I took to help me remember where everything should go.

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: