Flash

This game has been a work in progress at the workshop for over a year now but the agreement was no hurry and as cheap as possible. Someone had been working on the game before I got it, there had been a lot of work done to the electronics and the rubbers seem to have been changed quite recently, but there was a lot of things that hadn’t been taken care of.

 

 

The playfield was disassembled and all pieces cleaned and polished. I first planned to replace the roll over stars with new since the original was so incredibly dirty. But the new one I ordered wasn’t properly white, they were more like translucent and it didn’t look right at the playfield. So in the end I cleaned the original stars and put them back at the playfield.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The upper flipper bat wasn’t the original Williams type was changed it to a new one. Also the ball guides at the top 1,2,3 and 4 lanes have been changed to new blue guides and the three flipper return springs was changed for new ones.

I ordered new decals for the spinner and the drop targets. The spinner was cleaned to bare metal, primed and painted white before the new decals was attached. The drop targets were a bit more troublesome. The targets in the game were red instead of the original blue. To save money I painted the red targets blue before applying the decals. It’s not a perfect color match but it is best I could do with standard colors. Ordering a can with paint of a better match would have cost almost the same as ordering new blue drop targets.

The back box was incredibly dirty, both at the light board and the inside. Cleaning this was almost two days of work. Maybe a job not necessary to do but it looks so much better if someone opens up the back box to look inside. As you can see at the pictures of the inside someone had already installed an external battery holder. All I did to it was to extend the cables a bit since it was quite tight and added a connector to allow the CPU board to be removed without unscrewing the battery holder. The back box was also attached to the cabinet using pin bolts with nuts bot at the upper and under side. This made it very hard to remove the back box since I had to reach inside the cabinet and hold the nuts. This wasn’t a problem as long as the playfield was outside the cabinet but to make things as they should be I replaced the pin bolts with original bolts and T nuts.

 

The inside of coin door and the lock down bar receiver was quite rusty and it took almost two days of work to clean and polish them. I also installed a switch to the coin reject button to add credits to the game. The coin lock out coil was removed since it isn’t needed for home use and it might make a hum and noise.

 

 

In the end it turned out to be a nice game. The only downside is that there is mylar at the playfield and a couple of plastics cracked. The mylar could be removed but I didn’t want to since it’s not my game. It has been attached when the playfield was already starting to get worn and there is a risk that paint will follow it off and leave me with a lot of touch up to do. The cracked plastics are available bot at Ebay and new and can easily be changed later on if the owner want.

Demolition man

The Demolition man is finally back together again and has been picked up by the owners.
The playfield was really dirty but come out quite good after cleaning and waxing.

All visible screws and all metal posts were cleaned using the drill and chrome polish compound. It’s a quite time consuming job but it gives good result and is well worth the time spent. Metal parts like wire gates and similar was cleaned in the glass bead blaster and ball guides was cleaned and polished manually. Plastic parts were cleaned in hot water with dishwasher detergent and a tooth brush, also quite time consuming but well worth the job. I couldn’t find new orange lamp covers so I cleaned the old ones. In the end I used only five of them, for the lamps by the cryo claw. For the other lamps that originally had rubber covers I instead used colored lamps.

 

 

The ball guide behind the upper flipper was missing and I made a replacement using a ball guide from a scrapped game.

The cryo claw ramp was repaired by a previous owner. The huge blob of glue was quite obvious when looking at the playfield. I formed a piece of sheet metal in to a cover, which also helps to strengthen the repair a bit.

When I changed the lamp in the ball launch button and got it lit I saw that the insert of the button was shattered, probably due to players slamming the button instead of pushing it. I made a new insert using the laser printer which I laminated and cut out and placed in to the button.

There were a few issues by the cryo claw. The most annoying was that the ball wasn’t released when pushing the buttons at the handles, I had to energize the flippers or wait for a while to get the ball to drop. Even if the game was turned off the ball was still hanging in the magnet for 10-15 seconds before it was released. I couldn’t detect any magnetization in the ball or the core of the magnet coil. Maybe it would have helped to change the magnet, but I didn’t have any such coil on hand. The only solution I found was to create a small distance between the coils core and the ball using a piece of tape. Once the tape was in place the ball was properly released when the buttons was pressed. Also the ball was stuck by one of the exits of the ramp, which was fixed by carefully warming the exit and press it a little bit downwards.    

 

Also the left ramp was deformed at the exit causing the ball to fly over the wire form and drop down at the playfield, or even over the flippers to the out hole. Also this was fixed by carefully heating the exit and pushing it down a little bit.

 

 

The last thing to fix was the battery holder. An odd thing with this game was that someone had already soldered the cables for an external battery holder but then just insulated the cables with tape. All I had to do was to connect the new holder and transfer the batteries over from the old one.