Trash and Treasure, Pinball Style

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. 

​"What a cool idea", I thought. It's good that these parts, some of which are perfectly usable, can get put to use in a machine instead of being thrown out. So many pinball parts have been difficult (or impossible) to obtain in the past. It seems so wasteful to throw out usable parts that may not be readily available at some point in the future, or are perfectly serviceable after a good clean. I can understand why retailers don't bother cleaning these parts and using them themselves. It simply takes too much time and effort to make it cost effective. Luckily for people like me, time is no big deal if it means we can get a few parts on the cheap for future restorations. After you restore several machines like I have, you being to appreciate the importance of having a good stockpile of parts to use. Every machine will need one part or another, and having them clean, serviced and on-hand allows you to drop them into the game and continue with the next part of the restoration.
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The story of the first and second box of crap...

I love a good treasure hunt, so I can totally understand the thrill of buying these apparent piles of crap. Naturally, when the opportunity came up to buy a few of my own "crap boxes", I couldn't resist. Pinball Spare Parts Australia's eBay store listed six boxes at once, all containing a myriad of parts, and each weighing approximately twenty kilograms. That's a lot of parts!

The first box immediately looked useful because it contained a stack of pop bumper caps, flipper bats, pinballs, and coils. All very useful parts which can be reconditioned and put into use. There was a bunch of large white rubber rings, which I didn't particularly care about, and a smattering of unique parts from various games. There seemed to be a lot of pop bumper parts as well as some flipper assembly components, plastic posts, and playfield plastics.

The second box was interesting because I could recognise a few unique parts straight away including parts of the upper playfield from Popeye Saves the Earth (Bally, 1994) and the subway ramp from Demolition Man (Williams, 1994). Plus there were a range of flipper parts, switch assemblies, Data East pop bumper assemblies, coin mechanisms, and assorted plastics. There was twice the number of rubber rings as in the last box, too.

All in all, I could use a lot of the parts from both boxes in my current machines and future projects. I ended up winning them both; woohoo!

Crap Box 1: bought for $18.49.

Crap Box 2: bought for $10.50.

I've ordered plenty of pinball parts before, but nothing quite compares to receiving a combined forty kilograms of parts at your doorstep on a Monday morning! One thing you need to be aware of when buying these boxes is that you aren't magically going to receive a box of clean, incredibly useful parts, all of which you will find a use for. Every part is at least a little bit crappy. Either it's worn, it's dirty, it's broken, or a combination of all three. Don't expect to get parts you can use straight away; it simply doesn't work that way. With forty kilograms of parts, there are hours and hours of sorting, cleaning, repairing and disposing of parts to do. But if you're into this kind of thing like I am, that's part of the fun!

I'll skip the boring pictures of crappy, rusty parts, some of which I threw out anyway. I sorted each box into categories such as lamps, pop bumper parts, coils, and the like. Then I assessed all of the parts in each category to decide if they were worth refurbishing or not. This depended on the parts themselves. For example, most of the lamps were working fine and cleaned up very well. Most of the leg levellers, on the other hand, were bin worthy. Below are the parts I managed to clean and refurbish successfully after discarding the crappy ones.

Lamps and Lamp Sockets

Cleaned and working incandescent lamps.

Clean and working lamp sockets.

I love lamp. They're a ubiquitous pinball consumable so it pays to keep a huge stockpile of spares. Most of the lamps in the boxes cleaned up well and worked nicely. I threw out about ten all up. Most of the bulbs were 44 style bayonets, with a small handful of 555s. There were even two 89 flashers, a single 906 flasher, and two white LEDs. I don't know why the LEDs were in the pile because they worked just fine. If you're after an assortment of used, mostly working lamps, Pinball Spare Parts Australia also sell 500 gram bags of them on eBay.

​Almost as ubiquitous as the bulbs themselves, lamps need sockets to sit in. If there's a problem with the lamp and the bulb itself is in good order, the socket is usually to blame. Most of these sockets were in average condition with some minor tarnishing present. Most were for 44 bulbs, with a couple of 906 sockets as well. Some had corroded more seriously. I threw out the finicky ones and those that couldn't light a bulb consistently. The most time consuming thing about refurbishing these sockets is removing the old solder and wires connected to them. These looked like they were cut out of machines, wires and all. You need to remove the old stuff before reinstalling the sockets into another machine. It took a few hours to clean these up with a soldering iron. If you're lazy, or you don't want to clog up your desoldering device too quickly, you can heat the solder and fling it off, but beware you are flinging molten metal around. Exercise caution!

Flipper Coils

Some of the flipper coils before and after refurbishment. The coils on the left have not been refurbished and still have European wrappers.

I could see quite a few coils in each parts box before I bought them and these were the most valuable parts in the boxes in terms of their usefulness. After all, every pinball machine needs coils. Four or five were disposed of because they either had broken windings or melted to the coil sleeve. A couple of these coils originally had wrappers on them with some kind of Slavic text. These were obviously removed from European import games. It was interesting to note that a few of these coils still had brass coil sleeves in them - even newer coils from modern games. This is a big no-no as nylon sleeves allow for smoother action and don't chew up the coil plunger. I replaced all of the wrappers after cleaning the coils. Some of the coils, such as those with European wrapper text, had no part numbers or designations on them. I figured out what type of coils they were based on the coil's resistance, measured with a multimeter. Using a coil resistance chart, you can make an educated guess on which type of coil you are looking at if you also take into account coil size, number of lugs, and other physical features.  Most of he coils were WPC-era, with a couple of Data East ones. ​
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A coil removed from a European game with a brass coil sleeve and melted plastic body. The body detached from the end of the coil when I tried to remove the sleeve, bringing the coil winding with it!

Flipper Bats

One of the most useful parts in the boxes were flippers. Surprisingly, most of the flippers were fully intact, but dirty. There was a good mix of original Williams flippers, including some shorter lightning flippers, a couple of original Capcom flipper bats, and a couple of unbranded or off-branded bats. All the bats had rubber stains and other marks on them and needed a good scrub to get them clean. In the end, I had to resort to scraping the perished rubber off some of the bats using a knife, a nylon scourer (the non-scratch kind, preferably), and my own fingernails. If none of that worked, I hit it with a fine grade of steel wool. This dulled some of the plastic a little, but using Novus would bring them back up to a shine. It took a couple of hours, but I finally got them all clean. I sold most of these flippers on to other people so they could use them in their own projects, and kept a few for my own spares. Cleaning these is definitely not worth the effort for a $5 part, but I like to reduce waste whenever I can.

Unique Assemblies and Parts

Miscellaneous playfield parts and assemblies.

There was an assortment of random playfield assemblies and parts, most of which were broken or seriously dirty. I plan on giving any of the broken or damaged stuff away and selling the rest. The cabinet parts, shooter rods, and flipper opto parts are useful to have as general spares. There were some diamonds in the rough, too...

The curved plastic ramp is a damaged subway for Demolition Man (Williams, 1994). With a few rivets, I may be able to turn it into a usable part for my own machine.

The Bluto head and ship plastics are from Popeye Saves the Earth (Bally, 1994). Cool parts to display on the workbench. 

The motor bracket and gearbox assembly are from The Machine: Bride of Pinbot's face turning motor (Williams, 1991). This is a unique and hard-to-get part, and the gearbox seems to rotate like it should, so I'll keep this for when someone needs to replace the assembly.

The inlane guide plastics with hands on them were from Hurricane (Williams, 1990). The CRANE drop targets are from Last Action Hero (Data East, 1993). Both perfectly serviceable.

The small black motor and gearbox were the elevator assembly from a Pinball Magic (Capcom, 1995), and the blue lamp PCB was also from the same game. Very hard parts to find.
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Playfield assemblies for flippers, slingshots, pop bumpers and more.

Some of the most useful assemblies were those in the photo above. With a nice clean and a some new parts, I was able to rebuild four Williams/Bally flipper assemblies, two Sega flipper assemblies, Williams and a Capcom outhole kicker assemblies, two Capcom slingshot assemblies, a Gottlieb pop bumper, two Capcom coil mounting brackets, a Williams ball popper assembly (part no. D-11335-1), and parts for three Data East thumper bumper assemblies (minus the housings, which were all broken). The flipper assemblies required the most work. The mounting plates for two of the WMS assemblies were caked with old Loctite and coil dust. These needed to be sanded down with sandpaper to get the crud off. Otherwise I just needed a few screws, new bushings, and some new coil brackets. The fourth mounting plate was missing some of the threads for one of the coil stop screws, but an extra nut worked well in its place. The Sega mounting brackets had issues at the coil stop ends. One had broken at this point before and had been welded back on - poorly. The other was cracked at this point and was about to separate. The Capcom slingshot assemblies were quite good after a clean, but one had been welded back together previously. A third slingshot assembly had to be thrown out as part of the bracket had snapped off. As well as the complete assemblies, there were a bunch of still-serviceable flipper parts that I put into my spare parts supply.
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Unknown kick-out hole.

Unknown scoop and subway.

Unknown ball guide.

There were also a few metal playfield parts including scoops, subway ramps, ball guides and other assemblies. I couldn't identify most of these as I had not seen them before, but they had been well used, with multiple welds, breaks, and bends in them. Most of these could probably be returned to service. I gave most to a friend of mine who will use them in building his homebrew machine. 

Playfield plastics

Miscellaneous playfield plastics.

I love finding playfield plastics and trying to figure out which game they come from. Most of these were broken with screw tabs missing, blown out screw holes, or chips here and there. These will go into my (huge) broken plastics collection. Some were intact so I will sell these on.

​It was interesting to note that most of the plastics came from The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (Williams, 1991), and Junkyard (Williams, 1996). The rest were from NBA Fastbreak, The Addams Family, World Cup Soccer '94, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and others.

Pop Bumper Parts

Pop bumper caps.

So. Many. Pop. Bumper. Caps. I have more pop bumper caps than I will ever need in my lifetime. I will keep a small selection of these and sell the rest on. About a third of the caps has blown out holes or slight cracks in them, while the rest of them were in good condition after a clean and light polish. Red is definitely the most common bumper cap colour. There were a small number of yellows, blues, teals and transparent caps in the mix, too.
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Plastic pop bumper parts.

And where there are pop bumper caps, there are wafers/skirts and pop bumper bodies. The wafers are useful, even if they are slightly chipped, as most games have a pop bumper or two that is partially surrounded by areas not accessible by the ball. So if a wafer is damaged on one side, you can simply turn it 180 degrees. Note that this only works if the ball won't be able to get to the damaged wafer area. If it can, a new wafer is needed. Pop bumper bodies are always handy to have, as well as lamp sockets to fit them. There were a couple of pop bumper rod and ring assemblies among the parts as well, which were cleaned and tumbled.

Plastic Playfield Posts

Playfield posts, lane guides, flasher domes and spacers galore!

I don't remember how many hours I spent cleaning each and every one of these goddamn posts, but it was a lot. I guess I have a problem when I spend so much time refurbishing parts that cost less than $1 to buy, but I get a kick out of bringing them back to life. Posts are a pain to clean because perished and dry rubber or wax often gets into the cracks and crevices and needs to be scraped out manually with a needle. Most of the posts were WPC-style translucent posts, but quite a few were faceted Gottlieb posts and there were a bunch of finned Bally posts. Also in the mix were some flasher domes, lane guides, and nylon spacers. Needless to say, I have enough of these to last a lifetime!

Standup Target Switches

It was fun to try and figure out where all of these standup targets were from. A few were from Junkyard (Williams, 1996) as they had unique decals to identify them, but most of the others were generic, standard coloured faces. I had been holding out hope that I'd find a translucent red rectangular target for my Johnny Mnemonic (Williams, 1995), but no luck in this case. Also in the batch were some slingshot leaf switches. These all cleaned up well with a damp rag, and the switch contacts were all tested for continuity. A few of the switch contacts were dirty and did not pass continuity tests until they got a more thorough cleaning. I kept a small assortment of targets and sold a large number of them on to others.

Coin Mechanisms

There were five coin mechanisms in the box of various types. Some were plastic and some were metal. None of them were configured for Australian denominations. These had obviously been removed from container machines imported from Europe. Most of the stickers indicated the mechanisms took Euros or Spanish Pesetas, but some of them I could not decipher. Either way, I had no use for these mechanisms in my own machines. I ended up giving them away to another pinball hobbyist who was going to try and convert them to take Australian coins. Good luck to him!

Rubber Rings

Some people will say that you can never have enough rubber rings. I wholeheartedly disagree. I definitely have too many. I'm constantly giving them away to other people because I have too many. There were a lot of large (3-4") rings in this lot, most of which were too big for most of my machines. So, I'll keep flogging them off to other people until they're gone!

​The story of the third and fourth box of crap...

The crap box story doesn't end here! I was pretty happy with the assortment of parts I managed to use and keep as spares from my first two crap boxes, so a couple of years later I bought some more. These next two boxes were bought direct from PSPA's website. They were slightly smaller boxes, but still packed with parts (about ten kilograms each). The difference here was they they were mystery boxes. I had no clue whatsoever what was going to be inside them. "What the heck", I thought, and ordered a couple. Once they arrived, I cracked one open and took a quick look. I recognised quite a few parts, but there seemed to be bits of actual rubbish in there, too. 
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The view when opening up the third crap box...

Since going through the process of the first two boxes, I found it easier to lay everything out on the table from each box so I could sort the contents of both of them more efficiently. This made the process go a little quicker. In terms of the actual crap (rubbish) that I found in the boxes, there were rubber clips, an old computer mouse, and some rusty bits of metal. These bits went straight into the bin. Otherwise, there were a lot of serviceable parts in the boxes, so I began the hours and hours of labour in cleaning up each individual component. 
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Contents of Crap Box 3.

Contents of Crap Box 4.

Like the first two boxes, there were various common components which I won't really describe in detail here, such as flipper coils, flipper bats, pinballs, shooter rods, flipper assembly parts, various bits of cabinet hardware, and some plastic lamp covers and playfield posts. But there was some particularly interesting and useful stuff here, too.

Nuts and Bolts

By far the most useful things to come out of these two boxes were the screws, nuts, and bolts. Heaps and heaps of them. Plenty of common sizes such as 6/32 and 8/32 bolts and nuts, playfield woodscrews, and longer woodscrews for elsewhere in the cabinet. I don't think I'll have to by any fasteners for a while! I had to throw some of this stuff out as it was too rusty or dirty to save, but most of it cleaned up just fine after a wipe with a wet rag. There were a few good leg bolts in amongst the lot, too. ​I have used some of this stash on almost every machine I've worked on, and it continues to be useful! 

Wiring and Electrical Components

Wiring harnesses and cables.

​Some interesting bits of electrical stuff were in this lot. First, some lengths of cabling and original Williams harnesses, some of which were still wrapped in the WMS-branded plastic bags. Cool!

​There was also a good quality Happ power supply (still working), some Williams coin door test switches, and a couple of ribbon cables. These are always handy, so into the spare parts pile they went. 

Unique Assemblies and Parts

A wild gearbox appears!

​There was a gearbox in one of the boxes which drew my attention straight away. It looked just like the gearbox for the Deadworld on Judge Dredd (Williams, 1993). I was in the process of restoring my own Judge Dredd machine, and realised that it was indeed the same motor. Nice! Plenty of useful gearwheels in there! This will be an extremely valuable part in the future as these gearboxes become harder to find. 

There were also some random playfield plastics from Addams Family (Bally, 1992), half of the gun plastic from Dirty Harry (Williams, 1995), and a spinner from an unknown game. Cool bits to keep in my spare parts pile for anyone who ever needs them.

And that's the end of the crap box saga! I don't think I'll be buying any more for the foreseeable future, as my spare parts stash is full and I don't want to end up with a hundred of the same style plastic post again! I think this was a good exercise in recycling and reusing parts which just needed a little bit of effort in order to be brought back into service. This is what pinball is all about for me: keeping pinball machines alive and learning how to use the parts we have to their absolute maximum. Parts won't be readily available to buy forever, so having some in reserve and understanding how to clean and repair minor problems with pinball assemblies will be very useful in future years.