My shipment from Pinball Life was waiting for me at the office, er, two weeks ago. We went in on that Saturday and picked it up, then jetted up to Fry’s to get a soldering gun. They ended up having a fairly nice little kit for $25, and then we managed to buy about $100 in other items: work lamp with magnifier, part storage box, digital multimeter (with audible continuity tester — very important), etc.
We also found, not easily, a new LM339 chip and appropriate 14-pin socket. They were about 5x as expensive as they would be online, but then there’s no $5 shipping at Fry’s. Then it was back to the house with all of our new toys!
My first mini-project was to install the new coin door lock I’d gotten from Pinball Life, because we need to, you know, keep things locked up (?). Anyway, it’s much, much smoother than the one that came with it. Well worth $2.50.
Then we pulled one of the lamp boards and began to warm up the soldering iron. My first real electronics project, and my first time operating a soldering iron in many years, would be to replace a dead diode that was keeping one of the lamps on the lamp matrix from lighting. Hands shaking, I applied the tip of the soldering iron to the joint and had Jessica operate the solder-sucker. A few minutes later we had the dead diode free. I’d tried to be careful, but unfortunately I’d managed to rip out the part of the trace that surrounds the diode pin hole. Oops. After a little more soldering the new diode was in place (with a little extra glob to connect the lead to the remaining trace — not beautiful but it works) and verified that yes, the lamp works now. Hooray!
Then it was time for the Big Solder Job: replacing the LM339 on the drop target board. To make a long story short, I clipped the existing chip pins and desoldered them with increasing ease, dropped the 14-pin socket in, soldered it, installed the chip, and re-installed the board. It worked! The weasel was now functioning properly, each drop target functioning independently (the problem was that when the center target was hit, the game would behave as if all three had been hit). Here’s a photo of my handiwork:
The next day I noticed that the middle target wasn’t going down all the way. Unfortunately, it seems that by thoughtfully installing the IC socket I had raised the height of the chip, which was in turn blocking the path of part of the center drop target such that it stopped about 5mm short of its intended resting place. Hmm. Not great, but it would do for now. It worked.
I also replaced the flipper rubber rings. Huge difference. The ball was incredibly more energetic, the flippers sending it much higher on the playfield much easier. Cool!
Then it was time to get to cleaning. We pulled the center ramp and discovered a few things about its history of repairs (a little more involved than we had thought). I began by cleaning it with a damp paper towel, which gave pretty good results right off. Then I began experimenting with the Novus cleaners. There was a considerable amount of fogging on the lower portion of the ramp, which is unfortunate because there are 6 point value indicator lamps under it (one of which I had just fixed in the diode repair). So I began polishing it with Novus 2. After 3 or 4 applications I was seeing some good results. A “fogged” path where the ball entered the ramp was clearing up nicely. After (rather laboriously) cleaning the rest of the ramp and finally polishing it, I set it back into place and marveled at how much better it looked.
After a break, I came back and began to fool with the mill wax, applying it to the playfield. Again, the results were very good. Even though I was mostly waxing the protective mylar, the mill wax did a great job of brightening up the playfield’s vibrant colors and cleaning up all the black grime that had collected here and there. Then I cleaned and polished most of the plastic with the Novus 1 spray.
I still have a whole tub of replacement rubber rings to apply, but that’s going to have to wait until I get a little more ambitious.
