Next came the fun part… reassembling the playfield! All of the posts were cleaned one at a time by securing them in an electric drill with one of the post screws, and spinning them while carefully holding a piece of Nevr Dull polishing wadding against them. This worked really well for getting them nice n shiny. The ball guide rails were also polished up to a nice shine using Nevr Dull as well. The bumper assemblies were rebuilt using new coil sleeves and bumper skirts and bases. New flipper bats and bally flipper bushes modified to fit, were used to rebuild the flippers. I also hand fabricated new linkages out of fiberglass circuit board material, two pieces glued together to double the thickness. These seemed to work well… I’ll have to wait and see how long they last though.
The plastics were flattened using my heat gun and clamping technique, some of them were a bit crappy looking so I might try scanning and reproducing these later on. I also added extra pieces of wood under the edges of the to arch plastics, as they originally had nothing there except a post and a screw on each side, because they were badly warped, and I thought something extra for them to be attached to would help prevent them from warping again. New rubbers were fitted before the plastics went on.
Each and every lamp socket was removed and repaired while the underside was being worked on. The bases were soldered, the insides cleaned using a 3/8” drill bit in a cordless drill and the connecting wires soldered directly to the middle pin of each lamp socket.
The lower ball trough components were removed and polished. Also I removed and repainted white wooden guide rails. The 1st pic below was taken prior to these being done.
2nd pic below show the decals that were made for the spinner, and before and after pics of the instruction card apron. The apron was first sanded back with 400-wet/dry sandpaper, wiped down with Prepsol and sprayed in automotive acrylic primer. Then after the primer was dry it was sanded back smooth and sprayed in white acrylic, as was the spinner before having its decals applied. Mylar was used on the spinner rather than clear lacquer to protect the artwork.
As mentioned before the apron decal art had been done previously for my Stingray machine so these had only to be printed and carefully applied, (after priming and painting the apron of course!) before receiving a few coats of clear lacquer. The join where the two decals meet is noticeable, but it’s not too bad… it looks way better then it did before I started! There is no room for error applying these decals… it’s very difficult to line the two up perfectly… especially where the joins are clear, i.e. no colours printed. When I did my Klondike apron, because the decal was mostly black, it was easy to hide the join by running a sharpie pen over the join.
