Williams Firepower 1980

[deadlydave]

I went very close to putting a hole through the PF 
Take care drilling holes on the backside of shooter lane where the wood has been routed !

There is a few mm of play where the flipper bushing comes through the playfield, I fixed the flipper assemblies so the bushes were hard to back of this hole, so as to give the ball a smooth path from guides onto the flippers and eliminate the bump as discussed in another thread.





Had to put a bit of time into the roll over stars, used a knife to trim the clear coat as per the CPR website, but found the star inserts sat to high when they were down, I used a dremel with a cylinder shaped grinding stone to grind the base of the playfield inserts, I think the clear coat had built up the bottom seat. Still not totally flush but the plastic is very thin and fragile looking so did not want to push my luck..





Like most Firepowers, my stand up targets in front of the flippers were a mix of parts and had taken a beating. I have replaced the six targets with the enhanced versions from PBR, they are really solid looking and should hold up well, I was not sure about the bracket though, as only the two fixings and they would be very close to edge, with no give in this heavy duty enhanced target. Ended up making some brackets out of 30mm ALU angle I had, no doubt it's overkill but I'm happy. The other targets were still ok so I just replaced the the bullseye target.




All coming together well, I'll get the wiring loom back on in the next couple of days and once that's done there won't be too much left to do.

[pinnies4me]

Nice, making me keen to get mine started.

What's the part number for those targets? I should replace mine as they are a varied collection of colours like a lot of games.

[deadlydave]

Part No for Enhanced Red Targets is WLL-A14691-4E

[humpalot]

Part No for Enhanced Red Targets is WLL-A14691-4E

The enhanced targets just use data east target brackets.

http://www.rtbb.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=28_194&products_id=2707

[goodolddays]

Looking great Dave .
Did you redo the spinner as it looks new ?
Are you going to put decals on the centre targets (available from www.firepowerpinball.com)

I'm still worried about drilling into my new playfield   

[Strangeways]

WOW - Looks better than new !

[ktm450]

Very nice 

[deadlydave]

Looking great Dave .
Did you redo the spinner as it looks new ?
Are you going to put decals on the centre targets (available from www.firepowerpinball.com)

I'm still worried about drilling into my new playfield   

Hi Dave, the target spinner is original, I touched up some of the black areas.
I've got the target decals but was going to wait till all back together to see if I will put them on, I probably will as the Reds on the targets look different shades due to reflection from the colours on the playfield.

I'm using a 5/64 drill bit for most of the pilot holes, for the underside I only have 10mm protruding from the chuck so I cannot go too far (watch out for shooter lane !), for the holes drilled from the top i use some tape to mark the 10mm on the bit.
A lot of the dimples underneath are a little out so you have to dry fit and drill to suit, I check against the original as I go, trying to mount the stuff closest to PF first and work back up, all the big coil brackets will go on last but have already drilled the holes.

I think the biggest chance of a cock up will be mounting the various switch stacks as the screws are different lengths depending on the size of stack, I will hopefully do these before I have too many beers 

[goodolddays]

Really appreciate all the advice Dave 

[Retropin]

That PF looks bloody nice!!!

[TUF-427]

Great work Dave looks fantastic  thanks for sharing all the tricks and traps in this swap!

[deadlydave]

Great work Dave looks fantastic  thanks for sharing all the tricks and traps in this swap!

Cheers Tuf, happy to give a bit back to this forum that I have learnt heaps from. 


Now here is a big trap to avoid !!

Be very careful with the screws that fix the cable saddles via posts onto the PF. I measured one before starting to fix and saw that the screw would only be about 1/8" short of piercing the PF, made a mental note to not over tighten these and just nipped up, well after fixing about a third of these down I filipped the PF to check something else and was horrified to see a slight distortion in clear coat where I'd fixed the screws 

It was not really obvious but when I looked across the PF in a critical light you could see a small distortion , could not feel any bumps and no sign of split or anything. I backed screws of a turn and continued on, making sure to leave all saddles a bit loose. I flipped it over for another look tonight and the clear appears to have settled down, it was harder to see the distortion, will post some pics of this in next day or two, but hopefully by then there won't be much to see ...

Here's a pic of the offender..





Here's a pic of the loom ready to start putting back, what a mess lol.





I'm making steady progress and should be getting close to finish by the weekend.
I have referred to photos I took before the swap a million times, make sure too take lots of pics!
Used a heap of those snap lock bags to store all my parts/screws etc, all marked up, which has made the swap easier.

Cheers
Dave





 

[pinnies4me]

Love your work Dave, thanks for the tip regarding the loom screws. 

[goodolddays]

Love your work Dave, thanks for the tip regarding the loom screws. 

+1 ... I assume the only explanation re the loom screws is the repro playfield is slightly thinner than original ?

I wonder if Sunking had this same problem ?

[deadlydave]

Thinking back, i recall the originals were a bit loose as well.