First up, this game needs to be properly leveled, but all of the casters were seized something fierce. I took one leg off (swapped in one of my spares I keep for issues like this) and went to work on it.
24 hours in evaporust, no help. WD-40, no help. I even went and bought a product called PB Blaster, an intense penetrating oil, but still couldn't get it off.
With the help of a friend's extra muscle, it came off. So much effort for one damn caster!
I had stripped the playfield for a cleaning. The plastics were all quite dirty, but cleaned up well.
New rubbers everywhere, and that revealed how both flipper bats had a small hole smashed in to them, so ordered some replacements.
Time to change the flipper bats! What could go wrong?
Ugggggh how about shards of metal in the flipper shaft, making it nigh impossible to remove? After 2 days of on-and-off struggle, I finally got face to face with those goddamn little shards.
Go to replace the right flipper bat, then afterwards notice that the coil needs replacing. No worries, can get a new coil, but ummm wow one screw has had it's head cut off, and the other was weak and stripping with any torque. MORE FUN!
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| ugggh |
Then there was the kickout hole. This era of games, there is no bracket to slide the game forward on so I accidentally shorted the playfield kicker coil. Uggh.
Got a new one, put it in and it played great. Put the metal apron back on, started up and it fires right away. DAMMIT, there was no real clearance under the apron and it shorted the coil leads, blowing the transistor. So now the transistor gets replaced. Thanks to my friend who had a spare, and to my other friend who swapped them on the board while I wrangled my daughter.
Now with that coil, I'm bending the leads down, but yeah, I have to remember this is a 1979 game and a lot of common-sense things in later games, like proper clearance, support rods, etc, weren't yet implemented.
Another thing to tackle was that the left inlane guide rail had popped out. It was previously rebent, so the flipper was smacking it and it eventually popped out. I struggled to bend it in a way that would give clearance from the flipper, but also good gameplay.
Then I went and got some Gorilla Glue. Then I read that that stuff expands 3-4x, according to the label.
So then I returned it and bought some Gorilla Glue GEL, which doesn't expand, and that did the trick.
Next up? Order a bunch of extra light sockets. In this game you are chasing a lit target, so it is quite essential to gameplay to get all of these old and corroded sockets working 100%.
Check this thread on MAACA for more bulb discussion.
More fun:
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| looks like at some prior time, something fried on the CPU board! |