Pinball Update
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.