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2004-9-29 Wednesday - HSII: The Getaway
Tracked down and fixed a cracked solder joint on the beacon motor driver board that was causing intermittent failure. The board looks like it's been cooked (possibly when the original motor failed), so it probably needs to have its capacitor and resistors replaced.2004-9-28 Tuesday - HSII: The Getaway
The new beacon motor (#14-7971) arrived this afternoon from John, who purchased it in the USA on my behalf from pbresource.com, and who was kind enough to organise sending it over to me.These motors have been reproduced due to demand and are identical to the originals, produced by the same company (which was taken over and now goes by a new name). Because the motor runs in parallel to the lamp, for the sake of simplicity both are crimped on the same set of pins in a single connector. That's great, but it means the motor doesn't come with a connector, which means finding a replacement or at least a set of new male crimp terminals. Although it looks like a standard Molex male crimp terminal (possibly a 0.062?), I couldn't source any locally, so instead I made do with manually pulling apart the insulator and conductor crimp tabs and recrimping the existing terminals - a painstaking task. Once all of that was done, the motor was mounted in its place under the beacon. The old mounting machine screws were mangled, so I found replacements and cut them to the right length. If they're too long they protrude through the mounting plate and into the beacon assembly, hitting the beacon reflector as it spins. Because it's intricate work it took a while to do, but after waiting months for the motor+gearbox to become available I was willing to put in the extra time to get it right. And here it is, rather subtly back how it should be:  It was very satisfying to see it start up in redline mania. 2004-9-23 Thursday - HSII: The Getaway
I've been working on stripping the cabinet of the Getaway on and off as I get a few spare minutes, so here's the progress so far.This is the point where I was wondering if I really wanted to do this ;)  The coin door interface board and shifter were disconnected, then the coin door and shifter were unbolted and removed from the cabinet. I started from the top left working slowly towards the bottom right, tearing small pieces of the decal away until it was completely removed. So far I've used no scraping tools.  I realised when I started on the side that the coarser wood grain was going to cause chunks of wood to strip away with the decal. It was also going to take several lifetimes on an area that large, so I went and bought an el-cheapo 1600 Watt heat gun...  Which made things a lot easier. The 300 degree C setting seems to work best (500 is too harsh). I found the best results were obtained by getting the decal to slightly change surface appearance without creating any large bubbles (otherwise you're melting the decal and it becomes harder to get off - the decal will shred as you pull on it, usually melting on to your fingers, and the glue will stay on the wood).  And a while later I had the front and the side completely stripped. It's good to take frequent breaks because it's hot work and a lot of fumes are produced. I've left the playfield glass side rails on for now because once they're off they can't be put back on without new adhesives being applied. Similarly I've left the legs on so far for the sake of convenience - I'll do the sections under the legs when I get to sanding the cabinet.  You can see some of the stripped decal piled on the plastic storage box in the bottom left of the pic. There's still the other side to do and then the backbox side decals. I'm trying to do as much as possible without having to remove a lot of hardware from the cabinet. Once I'm ready to start sanding, the cabinet will have to be moved out into the garage, at which point I'll take the legs and rails off and disconnect and remove the backbox, which is a sensible time to take the playfield out and strip it down as well. No turning back now! 2004-9-5 Sunday - HSII: The Getaway
Tonight I replaced the Getaway and TZ's lock down bar foam rubber seals. The old ones were falling apart and making the games a little louder (because of the vibration of the playfield glass).A fair amount of effort was required to get all of the old glue off (using turps and metho) but I gave the lock down bars an overall clean at the same time. They're now much cleaner and dampen the glass really well. The replacement foam rubber (which has an adhesive backing) was found at Bunnings and is only a couple of dollars a metre. It's wider than the original, but that's better because it ends flush with the playfield edge of the lock down bar, which reduces the amount of dust that can slide under the bar and into the front lock channel. 2004-9-3 Friday - Twilight Zone
Tonight I took a few minutes to fix some annoying problems that have existed for a while.The first was the frustrating TZ lock "bounce back" that causes the ball to go SDTM. It's solved easily by bending the top deflecting panel of the lock lane upwards. This causes the ball to bounce down when it hits it, rather than bouncing back and out of the lock lane. The second was the rocket kicker's switch wire, which was bent upwards at such a steep angle that it would often stop the ball from falling into the rocket kicker properly, requiring a bump to get it to trigger. This was another relatively easy fix that involved bending the trigger wire under the playfield so that the wire required less travel before triggering the microswitch, then bending the wire above the playfield so that it was almost flush with the playfield surface. Now the ball isn't obstructed from rolling into the rocket kicker by the switch wire. And thirdly, the clock is still playing up a bit. It will randomly stop functioning because the contacts that join the two clock (hour and minute) boards aren't a tight fit. Wriggling the boards gets it going again for a while, but I really just have to find 15 minutes to pull the clock out, open it up and clean and adjust the contacts. View previous months of the pinball restoration journal... | |
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