So i'm at the stage of having partially stripped the playfield but a good few hours yet to go. You're not getting all the photos i took as lots of them are for my reference. I'm just uploading a few select ones.
Saturday 27 August 2011
Got some more work on the twilight zone done today and took a few more photos which you'll see below. The first load of parts has come out of the tumbler and looks really good. I put the ceramic powerball into the tumbler as it was looking really grey and nasty. It came out looking like brand new! Thats £40 saved on a new one! Below are a few pictures of the table. As you can see its filthy! Underneath the playfield looks ok though.
Tuesday 23 August 2011
introductions and problem 1!
Hi and welcome to my blog. I'm going to be writing about the restoration of my twilight Zone pinball table. The blog is as much about me keeping a record of the work i've done to my table as much as interesting others but seeing as you've found your way here welcome!
In this blog i'm going to be detailing step by step and (hopefully) in some technical detail how i go about repairing and restoring a 1993 Bally Twilight Zone pinball table.
The table itself has made the trip down from Hull. From the PAT testing sticker on the back it appears that it was originally sited in a Cornhill insurance building. From there i cant really attest to where its been until around 1999-2000. At this point it was in a house near Hull in the hands of a private individual. The pinball table came with the house he had bought and his children played it. Unfortunately he didn't know much about pinball and as such the machine has not seen any maintenance in the last 11 years (not so much as a wipe down of the playfield.). More pictures of the state of the machine will follow!
When i collected it it showed only 3 errors (a minor miracle given the lack of maintenance!)
1) Time and date not set.
2) clock is broken (surprise surprise!!)
3) Ball popper opto broken.
On getting home and starting to have a look it quickly became apparent what problem 3 was.
above is the popper coil. As you can see someones done a sterling job with some masking tape. But why? Well all will be revealed in the next picture.
What you see there is the top of the coil sleeve with none of the plunger (williams calls it an armature) showing. It seems what happened was the top plastic extension with the cup on snapped off and as such balls were able to fall from the under playfield trough into the cabinet. They had the idea of masking taping the hole to prevent this. Of course the popper also wouldnt work and quickly became jammed as the metal plunger battered into the steel ball and mushroomed itself. Hence its now stuck. checking on pinball heaven a new plunger is £5.86 so one will be on order soon! As a temporary fix to check the opto i ground the mushroomed end flat and jammed the plastic armature back on. Putting the popper back together and switching on led to the gumball popper working and the error disappearing.
One problem fixed!!
In this blog i'm going to be detailing step by step and (hopefully) in some technical detail how i go about repairing and restoring a 1993 Bally Twilight Zone pinball table.
The table itself has made the trip down from Hull. From the PAT testing sticker on the back it appears that it was originally sited in a Cornhill insurance building. From there i cant really attest to where its been until around 1999-2000. At this point it was in a house near Hull in the hands of a private individual. The pinball table came with the house he had bought and his children played it. Unfortunately he didn't know much about pinball and as such the machine has not seen any maintenance in the last 11 years (not so much as a wipe down of the playfield.). More pictures of the state of the machine will follow!
When i collected it it showed only 3 errors (a minor miracle given the lack of maintenance!)
1) Time and date not set.
2) clock is broken (surprise surprise!!)
3) Ball popper opto broken.
On getting home and starting to have a look it quickly became apparent what problem 3 was.
What you see there is the top of the coil sleeve with none of the plunger (williams calls it an armature) showing. It seems what happened was the top plastic extension with the cup on snapped off and as such balls were able to fall from the under playfield trough into the cabinet. They had the idea of masking taping the hole to prevent this. Of course the popper also wouldnt work and quickly became jammed as the metal plunger battered into the steel ball and mushroomed itself. Hence its now stuck. checking on pinball heaven a new plunger is £5.86 so one will be on order soon! As a temporary fix to check the opto i ground the mushroomed end flat and jammed the plastic armature back on. Putting the popper back together and switching on led to the gumball popper working and the error disappearing.
One problem fixed!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)