Medusa

This is another game I did in the workshop during the winter. It came in for cleaning of the playfield and new rubbers and a non-working upper right flipper. The non-working flipper was suspected to be due to a loose cable but instead it turned out to be the EOS switch, bad connection and therefore no current through the high-power winding of the flipper coil. The EOS switch is the right one in the picture below. The left switch turns of the light under the lower flipper once the flippers are actuated. It turned out to be a bit tricky to find a replacement for the switch but at the end I found one at a dealer in Holland.  And since the right one was bad I also bought and replaced the left one.

Next thing of the todo list was the drop target unit. It had a target that didn’t reset properly. This table had been glued together at some point in time and the return spring had eaten its way through the glue used to repair the loop where the spring was hooked to the target, so a new target was needed. Another of the targets had a quite badly worn printing so also this one was replaced with a new one. Working with this unit while it is still in the playfield is almost impossible but luckily it’s easy to unplug it and take it out.

 

 

The speaker had been replaced in the game and connected by screw terminals. I just couldn’t leave it like this and made a proper connection of the cables.

 

I had some problem with a playfield lamp that most of the time didn’t work and this was caused by an unsoldered ground wire. This problem has been in the game since it was produced, interesting that no one had found and fixed the problem earlier.

 

The rest of the cleaning and re rubbering was made in a hurry during a couple of evenings due to the owner had a trip booked past my part of the country and had the possibility to pick-up the game. And of some reason I didn’t take any photos of the finished game. But the playfield was cleaned and reassembled, the coin door was disassembled and polished and the shooter polished and the shooters barrel spring replaced.  

Dolly Parton

It’s quite some time since I wrote something at the blog. It doesn’t mean that I haven’t done anything, just that haven’t had enough time for everything I want to do. Beside repairing and restoring pinballs I have also started horse riding and spend quite some time in the stables during the weeks. Yes stables, I ended up joining two riding schools and a private stable with Icelandic horses and I really enjoy the riding and the time spent with the horses.

I have made quite a lot of onsite repairs during the autumn and winter, about 15 pinballs and a few juke boxes and one of the last repair done in the workshop was a Bally Dolly Parton. This machine was more or less already restored. The playfield was cleaned and new rubbers mounted. It also had a new CPU board mounted but the previous repairer didn’t get the machine to run with the new CPU. When powering up the machine it displayed numbers at the player displays and a bright 0 at the credit display but nothing else happened. The cause of the problem was the cabinet switch matrix connector, J3. The CPU did actually boot properly but it wasn’t possible to add credits trough the coin switches and the start and service switch didn’t work. Repining the connector solved the problem and it was then possible to start a game.

 

The bright 0 at the credit display was due to a faulty resistor at the displays PCB, there are six 100K resistors at the display board and all six of them should be replaced with ½ w resistors, with a bit of distance from the board.

 

While working with the cabinet switch matrix I noticed that someone had disconnected the tilt pendulum and roll cage tilt, also the slam tilt switch at the playfield and coin door was disconnected, these was reconnected again.

I was asked to replace the three German coin mechs with a Swedish one while having the game at the workshop. The coin door also needed a bit of restauration so I took it out and disassembled it for cleaning and polish the bits and pieces.  

 

 

 And then after some minor wood work and just a little cleaning some playfield parts the game was ready to be picked up.