Coyote Blog

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.

I am taking a shot at refurbishing my pinball machine.  It is called Eight Ball Deluxe (EBD), made by Bally's in the early 1980's.  It is the machine I played the most in college, along with defender (probably a future purchase).  The 1980's is kind of a lost generation in pinball, as manufacturers got cheap for a while and quality suffered.  1980's machines also lacked the charm of the earlier electro-mechanical machines with the mechanical scoring, but also lacked the complication and sophistication of later machines.  As a result only a handful of machines from the 1980's are on this top 100 list, and EBD is the highest rated of these.  I personally like the older machines and don't really care for all the flyovers and whirling doodads.

Anyway, I have steadily repaired this machine so that it works reliably but the playfield is old and worn.  At first I sort of liked the antique look of it but have decided to do a complete overhaul including a new playfield.  On the left is the old playfield (I have stripped all the bumpers and such from the top) and on the right is the new one.  In the following two pictures you can really see the wear on the old playing field.

In the following two pictures you can really see the wear on the old playing field.

Below are the two playfields flipped upside down (the new one is in a pair of bicycle repair stands that let me rotate it freely to work on both sides).  The trick of course is to move everything from the old surface to the new one.  In the process, everything mechanical will be cleaned and rebuilt and most of the lighting will be replaced with LED. And about a zillion electrical connections have to be made correctly.  This does not show it but since these were taken I have most of the lighting in place now and have rebuilt the flippers and one of the drop target banks.  Some folks go all-in and tumble and polish all of the parts, but simply ultrasonically cleaning them and replacing key elements like the actuator coils is enough for me.

The Internet even after all these years constantly amazes me.  The depth of the online pinball community is incredible.  Every part you see (including the new playfield of course) can be bought online, often from multiple vendors.  There are whole chat rooms dedicated just to this one particular machine, of which only about 8000 were ever made and which has not been manufactured in 40 years.  I can ask an arcane question like what is the screw thread on the flipper coil brackets and will get 4 answers in a couple of hours.