Restoration - Page 4


The "Bottom Board"

The last major section of the machine to be addressed is the "bottom board". I don't know what it's really called, but it is a board that has some critical parts mounted to it : the power transformer, the score motor, a relay bank, connectors, and a couple of other parts. These assemblies had to be cleaned and reassembled as well. I didn't actually fully disassemble all of these, since I didn't want to risk messing up the score motor and relay bank unless it became clear it really needed it. They looked fairly clean already.

cabinet-bottom_board_before3

Here's the bottom board as it sat on my workbench. The wood board itself is in rough shape. It's extremely dirty, and it had warped and bowed considerably over time. I decided to replace this wood, as well...


cabinet-drilled_bottom_board

...so here's the new wood, with mounting holes all carefully drilled, ready for parts!


cabinet-bottom_board_installed

Everything that I cleaned had been cleaned by now (it only took part of one day). This shot shows the new wood in the bottom of the cabinet, with the cleaned components. A new (longer) power cord was added also. Notice too the nicely finished wood rails on the sides, and all of the front-end hardware has been reinstalled..

It time to bring it in the house!


The Final Set-Up

In order to fit it in the gameroom, some careful calculations had to be made. I discovered that my options were not really all that many. I had to move the High Speed where the Joust had been. This also meant having to raise the mounted TV set about 7 inches. The Big League was to go where the Stars machine had been, and the other four machines would be repositioned along the east wall. So all the posters had to come down, too. The only things not moved are the desk and the Darts machine.

finished_product

And here it is ! Finished, in place, and fully functional!

Actually, I brought the machine in the house on Saturday the 25th, but it needed quite a bit of 'tweaking' to get it to run properly. I finally got the last bugs worked out on Monday, January 27 [revised: Jan 31]. Since moving it in, I have also re-manufactured a back door (cuts the noise tremendously), and worked on fine-tuning the coin door. There are still some minor things to do, but that will likely never really end...


Back to Big League
Back to Pinballs