Well i got sick of it not being finished and hooked in over the last couple of weeks - a bit hard to remember as i didn't document heaps or take a heap of photos. But pretty much in terms of stripping and cleaning, got the playfield bare, spent a while with Nifti, shellite and magic eraser getting rid of all the filth such as below
Then cleaned all the bits and pieces, rebuild flippers etc. A lot of the mechanisms (particularly the ramp lifter at the back had grease applied at some stage, and were almost completely seized with dry grease - so plenty of time getting rid of this and leaving things unlubricated as they should be.
Spent a lot of time on the boards, making sure everything was right.
Ended up blowing the 602 Fuse after a while on the display driver board - turned out to be the DMD being faulty - so in went a brand new one!
Also could not get sound at all out of the machine - after a lot of searching and frustrations, it turned out to be the connector on the cabinet speaker was corroded/filled with gunk so much that it wasn't making a connection - so the signal wasn't getting around the circuit. So put a new connector in, plus a new cabinet speaker. After that, i was getting a crackling/distorted sound, so put another sound board in from one of the other project machines, and got some impressive fireballs from the tantalum capacitors - C21, C26-C29, C46 and C47 - after i replaced all them, i got full volume with no ability to turn it down! Replaced C18 and it was all good.
Also had a dead TIP102 transistor on the power driver board that was not allowing the trough coil to fire a ball - replaced the TIP102 and its pre-driver transistor, and works perfectly.
Cleaned the whole wiring loom with Nifty, and put new flexi coil on most of the wiring and tidied it all up a lot better.
I also painted the supercharger cover in chrome paint which made a huge difference
Also made up a new laminated cover for the ball launcher
After that, put most of the cab bot together
Then got the playfield half back together before putting back into the machine (so i could test switches etc as i installed them)
At this stage when i put the supercharger ramp in, i was getting an opto error with two of the optos, traced the issue to the opto driver board, and put a new LM339 chip in to sort it out and all worked sweet. Its much easier to test things as you rebuild it, rather than find an issue, then have to pull things half to pieces just to access it!
Then spent some time playing with LEDs to get a decent effect - ended up with a combo of mainly greens and whites in the GI, as well as some reds - again, easy to experiment with the playfield partially rebuilt
Then pretty much all came together well from there
After that, time for the first game - and managed to get redline mania on ball 1! So pretty happy with that.
Game plays very fast, sounds great and flippers are great with all new components
