Dirty Harry

I’m finally ready with the reassembly of the playfield. The last two issues was the wire loom to the gun and the left slingshot that didn’t work.

 

The left picture is the old wire loom and two wires have already been replaced since before and there are still problems with it. It's much better to make a new wire loom instead of trying to repair the old one. I made the new one as a copy of the old one but if I was to do it once again I should use half the length of the shrink tubing. It doesn’t need to be as long as it was from the beginning. 

 

 

A broken link was the reason for the slingshot problem. A funny thing is that the return spring has come lose and I can’t find it in the game. It seems like somebody found it and removed it without finding out from where it came and fix the problem.

 

 

What’s left to do is to take a look in the back box. I can see from the outside that half of the lights behind the translite are black, so there is probably a connector problem inside. The game is also supposed to have a reboot problem but I haven’t seen that happen even though I have played it quite a lot. Changing batteries is also a prioritized thing to make sure avoiding acid damages.

Dirty Harry

The reassembly of the playfield went well until I came to the point where the left diverter was about to be put back. Before I took the playfield apart I noticed that the diverter pinched the ball if it came through with a little slower speed and it wasn’t released until the ball search kicked in.

I thought it should be an easy fix, the shaft had probably come lose and it was just a question about releasing the lock screw and move the diverter arm back a bit. But I was wrong, the diverter arm isn’t round where it is locked at the underside, so there is no way to adjust it. When looking closer to the assembly I realized that there isn’t any end stop for the plunger in the released position, so what’s stopping the plunger from falling out of the coil sleeve?

 

The stop is where the actuator arm meets the bottom of the slot in the plunger. The bottom of the slot had been quite worn after 20 years of gameplay and that allowed the diverter to open up a bit to much. There are also some wear at the actuator arm. You can see it as a little notch where the arm met the plunger in the picture above.

 

There is quite a difference in the distance of the bottom of the slot to the E-clip at the plunger. The solution was to tap out the roll pin and turn the plunger half a turn and tap it back again.

 It’s not 100%, I’d like to have had diverter back a little bit more. The little bit extra it is open now is probably due to the notch in the actuator arm. But it will probably take another 20 years until it is so worn that it starts to pinch the balls again. There was also another problem with the diverter. The rivets holding the diverter arm to the shaft was a bit lose causing the diverter arm to point down a little. This caused the diverter arm to sometimes catch in the opening in the ramp once it was opened and then it didn’t close when the coil released it. Fastening the rivets cured the problem.

Dirty Harry

I have made some progress with the Dirty Harry during the week end. I have disassembled the playfield to a point where I can access all areas that need to be cleaned and waxed. The playfield is already quite clean so there has already been a lot of job done at the game quite recently, but some areas was still very dirty.

This is the point where I stopped the disassembly and started the cleaning and polishing. During the job I also removed the posts for cleaning and put them back again. Once the polishing was done I replaced the rubbers and started the reassembly.

 

I found some rust at the playfield, both at some metal posts and at the two ball gates in the top of the playfield. I used the glass bead blaster to clean it off and then polished the parts. They are not as brand new but they looks a lot better than before.

 

 

  This is the current state of the playfield. It has new rubbers and all metal ball guides has been glass bead blasted and polished before being reinstalled at the playfield.