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    Trash and Treasure, Pinball Style

    Crap Box Parts Trash And Treasure
    Recently I came across an awesome pinball blog called Enter Your Initials. It is run by a fellow pinball hobbyist in Melbourne and has a lot of posts about his machine restorations, pinball adventures and miscellaneous advice. In particular, I read a series of blog posts about his collection of Crap Boxes; boxes of used spare parts bought from pinball retailers and dealers who had removed them from parted-out and restored games. 
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    Doctor Who mini playfield edge repair

    1992 Bally Doctor Who
    Having repaired a couple of Doctor Who (Bally, 1992) machines, I've found that the Time Expander mini playfield always needs to be rebuilt. There are two main parts to this:
    1. Rebuilding the mini playfield (and main playfield, if necessary) wood edge;
    2. Rebuilding the mini playfield gearbox and cleaning the entire assembly.

    This is a small write-up of how I approach these repairs and what the end result looks like.
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    WPC display driver board integrated circuit replacement

    Circuit Board Repair
    Up until recently I had been putting up with some strange display issues on my Doctor Who (Bally, 1992) and Judge Dredd (Bally, 1993). Each game worked well enough but there were artifacts on the display that should not normally be present. Since I was about to sell the Doctor Who, I decided to finally figure out the issues with both display driver boards. I also figured it would be a good opportunity to write a general instructional post about integrated circuit replacement on a circuit board.
    Picture

    The WPC dot matrix display driver board.

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    Trident

    1979 Stern Trident
    Picture
    Trident (Stern Electronics, 1979) was my first foray into classic solid state (SS) game repair for a customer. I had bought Stars (Stern Electronics, 1978) a little while ago and while I hadn't restored it yet, I had done a lot of reading about common problems, the boardset, and playfield mechanisms. While I initially wanted to work on Stars as my first classic SS restoration, a customer approached me about fixing his Trident so I decided to bring this one back to life first. He had actually asked about selling the machine to me, but instead decided that he wanted to have the game repaired so he could play it again. As this wasn't a full game restoration, this blog entry will be shorter and will cover only the more interesting aspects of the repairs.
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    A Tale of Two Fish (Fish Tales)

    1992 Fish Tales Williams
    Picture

    I have to admit, Fish Tales (Williams, 1992) is never a game I had thought seriously about owning. I had seen it a few times but the theme threw me totally off. I hate fishing. So it stood to reason that I'd never like a pinball machine based on fishing, and I never paid Fish Tales much attention. It just happened to be that there were two Fish Tales machines in the lot I purchased during our pinball road trip. I figured I would restore them both and sell them on.

    This restoration post is a little different from the others. Both of the Fish Tales games were very similar in appearance and condition, but each had their own issues to troubleshoot. I restored these games at the same time, swapping parts between the cabinets as necessary and they were both finished at around the same time. So I didn't take many pictures of the individual machines. Instead, I'll deal with both of the machines in this single post. The pictures are a mix of photos from both machines, but as they were both so similar, it doesn't really matter.
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    Johnny Mnemonic

    1995 Johnny Mnemonic Williams
    Picture

    Johnny Mnemonic (Williams, 1995) was another machine from our pinball road trip. Fiona and I had tackled all of our previous restorations at a leisurely pace. We'd generally start tearing a machine down for cleaning, clean and repair the parts as necessary, and then put them all back together whenever we had a chunk of spare time. As of late, we had not had that much spare time to devote to pinball. Our last restoration of Doctor Who (Bally, 1992) took us several months because we were so busy with other things going on. It's a little frustrating to have a machine sitting in pieces for so long, not being played. With this restoration, we decided to try something different. We both freed up our Easter long weekend and devoted it entirely to restoring Johnny Mnemonic from start to finish. So come Friday afternoon, we turned our phones off and got to work. Just like the restored machine, our work this time around was fast and furious.