One of the great things to me about EMs is the racket they make when being played, so a functioning chime box is essential.
This afternoon's job was to strip, rebulid and install Disco's. There had been some sort of major trauma so a couple of coils had burnt out - so burnt that the nylon tips in the plungers had melted, way beyond being being usable in fact to being unrecognisable.
I stripped the chime box down and couldn't resist giving the striker plates a bit of a polish and they do look a lot better. I had bought replacement coils from PBR but stupidly forgot to include sleeves and plungers or tips. The exact parts aren't available locally as far as I can work out. PSP had some sleeves which whilst not quite as long as the originals looked like they'd do but I couldn't find replacement
plungers or nylon inserts locally. I wandered aimlessly around Bunnings looking for anything about the right size and made of nylon but couldn't find anything so I ended up using a cut down rawl plug. The plungers have an internal step machined into them and the blue plugs are a pretty tight fit. I ended up putting a small chamfer on the end going into the plunger and used a hammer to tap them into position. You can feel when they seat on the internal lip - I then tightened the small self tapper screw that I had started prior to installing the plug. This seemed to lock it all in place.
Soldered the new coils in, cleaned and reassembled everything and installed and was greeted with glorious sounds in the test game - not sure if the neighbours will be quite as enthusiastic.
