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.