Day 10 was a full one!
As the parts list continues, I decided it was time to verify what parts I needed to build the cabinet. That meant going through the cabinet hardware and cleaning it. Since the cabinet was in such sad shape when the game arrived, it was clear that I would need some cabinet hardware. I have parted out numerous WPC games over the years and have a pretty substantial amount of extra hardware - however, the common stuff is always missing or damaged, so I had to determine if I truly had what I needed.
Photo album begins here:
http://gallery.myhomegameroom.com/gallery/proto_cftbl_progress/DSCN1551First matter of concern - Creature was the 6th game to have playfield slides - and the earliest games had a slide system that was slightly different than the later games. Instead of the nice, robust metal plate that goes underneath the pivot nuts, Creature has 4 washers. This doesn't allow the playfield to slide as easily as the metal plates, and allows for the cabinet braid to get torn up pretty easily. Also, the game had incorrect hardware on the pivot nuts, so I wasn't sure at the beginning if I had the right pivot nuts, or enough of them.
You can see in this photo
Someone has replaced the forward shooter size pivot nut carriage bolt with a leg bolt. That just won't work. The ground braid is also frayed or torn on both sides. It can't do its job.
This is the pivot hardware that came out of the game
So, I'm missing one carriage bolt.
I found some of the flat metal plates I mentioned in a parts box
Actually have 4, but only 2 are pictured. I've got numerous other games that require the same upgrade when they get restored, so I had better locate some more of these.
Some other hardware I need has been located too, along with spare pivot nuts.
I cleaned them all, and stuck them all in the tumbler, as I am constantly finding games where the pivot nuts fell off, and it seems that they are the only games I get that the operators vacuum out - as the missing pivot nuts are always missing.
Not pictured is the remaining hardware for the head hinges - but I found enough parts to put the Creature back together.
As pictured, the head pivot hardware is incorrect.
But, that is easily fixed.
I've also rounded up enough hardware to build up a set of the correct early fliptronics opto boards. I haven't found my stash of optos, but I intend to replace all 4 optos as they are often flaky or intermittent on games the age of this one. I want to be able to put the opto boards in, and have the game ready to play. Also, I don't have a lot of spares of this style opto board, so I need to get these right. I'm a stickler for original boards in my games, I have plenty of the newer style, or could upgrade to aftermarket boards, but I don't want to do this.
I'm going to need a new or good used cabinet speaker!
The mirror has been broken. Luckily, I have a spare
Projector is filthy
Coin door looks like it has potential..
In general, a lot of American collectors don't like to refurbish their original coin doors - many collectors consider container games to be of lesser value than domestic games that have never left the country. Strange as it sounds! I've always thought condition was king, and price was determined by condition - but that's a rant that I'll save everyone here. Granted, this game was quite rough to start with - but when you like prototype games, they don't just grow on trees. So, you take what you can get.
I put the original doors back on games when possible - assuming I can make them clean up reasonably. This game's door looked like it wouldn't be too bad, fill a couple holes in the front, a fresh coat of paint, and reinstall. However, initial appearances are decieving.
When I turned the door over, most of the back hardware was gone, and the harness was cut up and mostly missing!
I spent 4 hours on the coin door alone - and combined parts from 4 coin doors to make this one nearly complete. But more on that later!
Here's something you just don't see very often - a WPC printer kit.
These were a rare option installed in most prototype games when they left the factory. They were available for operators to purchase, but that didn't happen very often. Basically, it's an additional backbox board that installs either on top of the fliptronics board, or in the corner of the backbox where the fliptronics board would go if the game were so equipped, along with another board to be mounted in the lower cabinet. These allowed an operator to print a report - if you've played with a lot of WPC games, you have surely seen the option to print, and perhaps wondered how you'd hook the printer up. I've also been told in rare circumstances, taxing authorities may want printouts of game revenue. And, in a few cases, the printer ports were used to link games - you can link 2 NBA Fastbreaks, or 2 or more Hot Shot basketball (WPC redemption) games.
For those on the techie side, rarely were these used with actual printers. Typically, the game designers would go to wherever the game was on location for test, and hook up a laptop and establish a null modem session and dump the data to their laptop, then take it back to the office to review things to determine how many extra balls the game gave out, how long ball times were, etc, and changes were made. One interesting change made to Creature - the flippers were moved apart. I've been told by the game designer that the European operators determined that ball times were too long, so they spread the flippers a bit to make the game more difficult.
So, how do I know that my game should have one of these? 2 giveaways
1) The spacers that the board in the head mount to are still installed
And if you look real close under the shooter, you can see where the lower cabinet board was installed
What happened to the original kit? That, I don't know. Someone somewhere in its life removed it. Maybe they were troubleshooting something and decided it was not necessary, perhaps they stole it for another game, perhaps something broke. But, I wanted it back.
So, where does someone find such a kit? I searched for this for several years. I have a substantial network of resources from my years collecting. I have contacts at most of the former WMS distributors in the US that are still in business, and have been known to locate items that were just considered gone. Stuff like NOS wired playfields, plastics sets, game specific parts that are always broken yet never available, etc. That didn't pan out. I tried every pinball parts supplier I know - also didn't pan out. Various newsgroup and forum posts yielded nothing. Apparently, that showed my desperation, as one kit popped up on eBay from a seller in Denmark - for $500 USD. I wouldn't pay that. OK, I *would* have paid that when the game was done, but I would've moved on to another game before this one, as I don't have $500 in disposable hobby income right now. I bought my Indiana Jones and my Addams for less than $500 total! I even asked my friends at Illinois Pinball - and they could find nothing.
Then, something strange happened - for my birthday, my wife took me to the Illinois Pinball sale to do a little shopping. Admittedly, it was just a *little* shopping, as I'd been unemployed for some time - but she recognized that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and that once the parts were all loaded up, the only chance I'd have to see them would be buying them once cataloged and placed online by PSP. So, we headed over for the afternoon, and I had a budget of $100 USD for anything I might buy. After a couple hours, no printer kits found - but I did get some goodies I wanted, and had a blast looking around and chatting with Aussie Tim and James from Pinball Inc. I mentioned to them that I was looking for a printer kit - and a friend had mentioned it to them earlier too. I got home, and later that night, I found a picture of a printer kit in my mailbox. Apparently, they found not 1, but 3 printer kits and spare parts, while going through parts.
Collectors in Australia will be very pleased once these parts get cataloged and online, I promise you that Americans did not find and purchase *all* the treasures. And I know that things were being unearthed daily - but anyways, I made another trip to Illinois and bought all the printer kit goodies that were turned up. I have a friend who needed a couple, and I got the spare parts with hopes that I can turn them into another complete printer kit if I can locate parts down the road. Protos are often missing these printer kits. They were not 'cheap', but definitely were 'reasonable'. And I'll always be grateful to Tim and James for turning them up!
So, anyways, back to the coin door. I sent a good friend who has a fair amount of parts an instant message and discussed what coin doors he might have around. He thought he might have something, but I decided to see what I could do first. So, I gathered up all my 'parts' coin doors of this style, and even a couple that might be salvageable. I had already torn the door down to figure out exactly what I needed - an error that ended up costing me some time. I finally found a pretty nice 2 slot US door of the same style with a mostly intact harness. I got the door off my other CFTBL, which is also a 3 slot export door from Germany, to make my own wiring schematic, as the ones in the manual are for domestic games, and that doesn't have everything I need. The domestic doors are missing the wiring for the 3rd coin slot - specifically an orange wire with a red trace. I removed the tubing covering the wire harness to expose the harness and determine what I needed to fix or replace.
So, after looking around, I decided that it should be pretty easy to add the missing lamp in, and replace the missing wire for the 3rd coin slot. But, I am a stickler for details - couldn't be just any 3rd wire or extra lamp, the parts had to be original, and the wire colors had to match.
I removed a lamp socket from a parts door
Along with the purple and white with purple trace wire from the original game harness
Though you may not be able to tell from the photo, I pulled the wrong wire - I pulled the orange with brown trace wire instead of the orange with red trace wire. I pulled the right wire after the picture was taken, then had to grab more orange with red trace wire from yet another coin door to make a splice, because the wire wasn't long enough.
Then, I had to rebuild the coin door, because I couldn't figure out how long to make the wires without the parts attached to the door. Here's a photo of my working the harnesses together into 1 harness that looks original and is complete:
I carefully spliced the orange with red tracer wire in 2 spots, both of which could be easily hidden - because I didn't want the splice to be obvious, and the wires had to be the correct color. Once the harness was completed, I realized I had a slight problem - while the harness came out of the black plastic tubing that protected the wiring, it didn't want to go back in. My solution was hardly elegant, but was functional. I found a piece of music wire - one that I use to make new linkages for the eyes in Funhouse and Roadshow - and passed it through the tubing, as it is solid, and then taped each wire to the music wire, and pulled them through 1 at a time.
The door is nearly complete. Once it's complete, I will tear it down again, tumble and polish the hardware, give it a fresh coat of paint, install new coin chutes and reject buttons, then reassemble. I'll find some way to fill the holes in the coin entrance, too.
As you can tell from the photo of the front of the coin door, the finish is somewhat worn, and the holes are pretty obvious.
There's another small hole at the lower right corner of the coin entrance bezel - above the lock and slightly to the left - but it's barely noticeable and I didn't even see it til the door was torn apart - so it won't get filled. The door is too thin in that area to make a good looking repair. And, I bet 9 out of 10 people wouldn't even notice it.
