Author Topic: Fishtales rescue  (Read 3422 times)

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Offline robm

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Re: Fishtales rescue
« on: January 30, 2013, 10:34:07 AM »
Started by fixing up the main cabinet.

First issue was there was a strip of timber at the top that was originally chipboard that had all swollen with moisture (see sitting on top), rippped this out and put a new piece of pine in



The rear of the headbox was all swollen as well, so bashed it out with a hammer and cut a new sheet out for it


There were plenty of chunks missing and parts of the cabinet delaminating, so went through quite a bit of builders bog patching up these holes and also extending the delamination as far as i could so that it didn't happen again in the future.

See this pic for an idea of the stuff i had to fill



This is the first application of bog, prior to sanding - its important to get into this stuff after about 1/2 hour as it sets rock hard and you will have a lot more work of sanding if you leave it too long


Here is a pic of one side of the cabinet with bog in the large holes (rear of cab) and fine filler in the tibmer grain and small scratches



After all that has been done and sanded plenty, i hit it with spray putty - not sure that this is its intended application (more for auto body work), but i think it works OK at filling in all the fine areas that i might have missed with the other applications - the pic below it the headbox with the new back installed


I also decided that the base was too far gone, so bashed it out - a pic of the cab with the first coat of black for the inside



Then it got too hot in the shed, so i decided to grab the playfield and bring it inside the house in airconditioned comfort!

[COLOR="silver"]- - - Updated - - -[/COLOR]

So in terms of the playfield - here are a few unglamourous shots







Basically threw the playfield in my home made rotisserie and started pulling all the bits off.  The only issues i could find were one coil that had its wires clipped off and the only reason it was having problems was that its bracket was a bit bent, making the plunger difficult to move up and down.  Other than that, the rear of the playfield is very very clean.  Rebuilt the flippers, pulled all the light PCBs off and washed them, checked all other mechanical components and linkages etc, and everything seems to be pretty good - although i won't fully know until i power it up and do all the necessary tests.

The backboard of the playfield was absolutely hideous with possum crap and everything all over it - the pins on the small PCB were stuffed.  So a new set of header pins and plenty of scrubbing ahead...





After a bit - it all came up great!


After everything was stripped, i put all the small metal parts in the tumbler for a few days to clean/polish up.

Cleaned all the ramps, plastics and posts etc, then moved onto the fun part, getting into the playfield


So with a mix of shellite, metho, nifty. magic erasers and plenty of rags and elbow grease you can get a very satisfying result



Then i got the treasurecove polishing kit out, and polished it all up





With everything clean, i'm now at the stage of repopulating the playfield.  Easiest way is to go through all the photos i took of pulling it down in reverse order. 

I've started putting LEDs through the machine - if you have a few machines and/or LEDs, its great to organise them by colour and type in this sort of case - heaps better than sifting through ziplock bags all the time!