Coyote Blog

I have put off dealing with the large drop target assembly, but finally it was time.  It is now cleaned up and in pieces. I hope it goes back together.

I am still thinking about how I can systematically engage with this administration without it becoming a full-time job.

So in the mean time, pinball restoration!  I moved everything to the new playfield and completed about 200+ solder joints.  I fired the thing up, with some trepidation, inserting one fuse, testing, and then another fuse, with the General Illumination fuse first and the solenoid fuse last.  After finding just a few shorts, and a few swapped wires, and one drop target where I reversed input and output on the sensors, everything is mostly working.  After these photos were taken I get the pop bumpers installed and a few other details like the coil that puts the ball in play.  Next up siderails and all the playfield details.  I still have not cleaned up the huge 7 drop target monstrosity that is really the core of the game.

Not sure that anyone cares about these updates, but posting them helps me stay on a path of steady progress.  As a reminder, I am refurbishing an early-1980s vintage Eight Ball Deluxe pinball game including the installation of a new playfield.

Progress has been faster than I had feared, mainly because of a deep well of internet resources for working on pinball games in general, and this machine in particular.  Also because of a pretty good supply base of parts for these vintage machines.

I began by removing all the electromechanical parts from the old machine -- like the flipper mechanisms, thumper bumpers, and the drop target arrays -- and totally disassembling them and cleaning them.  Some folks who do this kind of thing employ tumblers and polishers to get all the metal parts gleaming but I have mostly eschewed that -- a vinegar bath to remove rust combined with some ultrasonic cleaning and a bit of steel wool is enough for me.  I will say that I can't believe it took me to age 62 to discover impact drivers, though really this is the first time I have really worked much with metal (rather than wood) assemblies.  I had frozen screws in some of these assemblies I soaked in Liquid Wrench and the equivalents for days with no luck, but got turning in 5 seconds with a few hammer blows on the back of the impact driver.

I did not have to move any of the many many many bulb sockets because I was going with LED for most lights (using Yoppsickle boards) and even when I wanted bulbs I was changing the socket to accommodate bayonet-style bulbs rather than the insane wedge style things that were standard.

As you can see below most of the mechanical assemblies and switches, with the exception of a few rollover switches still to be done, are in place.  All lights and sockets are in place as well as the power busses for the lights.

The one missing assembly is this bad boy, an enormous and very heavy combination of 7 drop targets and 6 standup targets behind them.  I am a little intimidated by this and, like the other parts, am going to film its disassembly so I have some hope of it going back together correctly.

As for the wiring, the entire wiring harness has been de-soldered from their connections and tagged.  Something in the ballpark of 200 connections excluding the power bus.  All the wiring is one big wiring harness and is now free and will be lifted and dropped onto the new board as soon as a few last things are installed.

Next up, a sh*tload of soldering. Hopefully it will all work again some day.  The one thing that has me a bit paranoid is orientation of the diodes on the switches.  Pinball machines of this era use a polling scheme where switches are in sort of a matrix, with the machine polling a column of the matrix at a time.  If the diodes are wrong on each switch, chaos ensues.

For a variety of reasons, I was pretty late going out to find a Christmas tree and did not actually begin the search until last Sunday  (I had a conference the week before and my kids were not in town and it is not that much fun to shop for trees without my kids).  Anyway, it turns out that there is some sort of Christmas tree shortage, at least in this area.  All my go-to inexpensive spots (the grocery store, Costco) were out.  The usually high-cost tent location at the plant nursery had trees but double and triple the usual costs -- starting at $250 for a 6 foot tree.  I am a big supporter of allowing price "gouging" during shortages and in this case the pricing mechanism worked just fine -- I passed on these trees at this price, presumably allowing someone who valued these trees more than I to find some still available.

Finally, I went to the Home Depot and they were apparently out as well - they were just selling some miscellaneous branches to people to wanted to make wreaths.  But way in the back was one tree -- and a tall one at that, at least 9 feet.  No one had wanted to buy it because it looked like something out of Dr. Seuss -- it had nice foliage at the bottom, then a completely open 2 foot gap, then nice foliage, than another large gap, etc.   Anyway, my daughter the artist and the undisputed right-brain flag bearer in the family, immediately loved it and insisted I buy it.  The guys there thought they were out of business and did not even have their price list any more.  I said, "hey guys, no one wants this, you have to give me a discount."  We agreed on $40 and we had a tree.

It turned out great.  The large gaps in the tree have become more of a feature than a bug, allowing a 3D ornament display impossible on normal trees.  It is tall and thin and looks great in our tall room.

Then, on the same day we had our tree adventure, we realized that no one had done anything about a Christmas card.  It was always my job in the past to design the card, but last year I passed the mantle on to my daughter.  But we had not explicitly assigned responsibility this year so nothing got done.  At this point my daughter disappears into her room with her laptop for what we supposed was a nap.  But she exited two hours later with our card design.  She didn't have all the fancy Wacom tablets and such she had at art school, only the trackpad on her laptop, so she said she just used the circle tool a lot but to my eye it came out great, and allows the Coyote family to continue its 25+ year run of never buying an off-the-shelf Christmas card.

I think the table I built for our new hobby room came out pretty well.  Having only really done woodwork on speakers, I am most comfortable working with mdf so this is mdf with an alder veneer to match the cabinets in the room.  Because I knew the slab of marble (a scrap we found at the stone store on discount) was going to be super heavy (something like 400 pounds) the table is built super solid.  I will say that modern design is much easier to build than something antique-looking - really this is only rectangular boxes and frames so it was pretty easy.

Taking in account the over-designed pedestals that are 3/4 inch mdf with interior baffles, this whole things weighs almost 500 pounds.  I observed to my wife, who wants to use it as a cutting table, that it would make an awesome beer pong table.  Perhaps when she is out of town we will have a coyoteblog get-together to try it out in that mode.

Next up, I finally have  small room to do my model railroading in so I will be boring you with updates on that particularly geeky hobby.

Postscript:  Yes, I run parks and I like model trains, like Ben in Parks and Rec:

• Ben is a fan of model trains, Game of Thrones (his eBay username is "Tall Tyrion Lannister",a reference to a character from the franchise), Batman (he purchased a Batman suit when he joined Donna and Tom for Treat Yo Self), Star Trek (he writes Star Trek fanfiction, and had expressed a preference for Captain Picard over Captain Kirk), Fringe, Harrison Ford, Twin Peaks, Homeland, and Star Wars (among other things).
• Ben is a "nationally ranked" player of Settlers of Catan

I am comfortable with all of this except perhaps for the preference for Picard over Kirk.