This summer I bought a Bride of Pinbot that was in kinda bad shape. Dirty and non-working. Ive been using this excellent forum for help during the process of fixing the machine. I've also been reading NJGecko's thread about his Pinbot restoration and it got me inspired to start a restoration thread myself =)

So, here it is! This is my first ever restoration so it will take time and there will probably be many strange behaviours from me or odd solutions but I hope someone will find it interesting anyway.

The story so far goes like this:

I picked up the machine this summer about three months ago. It did not work at that time since the wire harnesses had been cut. It seemed like someone had attempted to move it but the back box was to wide so they had to remove it. This theory I came up with since I have been there myself moving pinball machines. Its alway annoying to have to unscrew the back box hinges and turn the top to get it out through a doorway. If this was the case with this machine I dont know but whoever made the decision to cut the harnesses did not know what they were doing. It was not the guy I bought it from since hes a pinhead who knows a lot better!

Besides the cut harnesses there were some ICs missing on the power driver board, a hack with a jumper wire on the underside of the CPU-Board and of course a lot of dirt and dust all over the machine. The playfield though was kinda nice. It had some paint come of where the ball drops on to it at different places as well as some yellowing outside the mylar protection. I guess from either sun light or cigarette smoke or both.

Anyway I got the machine home and decided that the first thing to do was to make it work before doing the cleaning and replacing of parts. So I started with soldering the wire harnesses back together. It was a tedious process but yet kinda straight forward since all the wires are marked very well. I had some trouble at a few points where wires had the same colour but figured it out with some help from the pinside forum.

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After the soldering was done I replaced all the fuses and tried to start the machine. It made a pop from the speakers and the sound bong. It also lit some general illumination and three of the lamps on the helmet was also lit. Nothing else worked. I tried to push the start button and the coin door switches but nothing happened.
I started investigating the transformer, that it was giving the correct voltage outputs, and it did. Also at the power in connectors at the power driver board. But the reading the leds and the test points on the board I found out that I had no +5VDC to the CPU board. After some major research and testing I finally found the problem, a bad trace/connection from one of the Bridge rectifiers to the capacitor C5. I made a jumper wire on the back of the board and now the game finally went into attract mode! It was not possible to start a game though because the start button did not work as well as the enter button inside the coin door.

More to come...

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Hi there!

Yeah the harness took some time and concentration to solder. Only problem were some wires of the same color. One would assume it would not matter where they went but i was being carful and looked in the manual schematics to find the original connections.

The backbox connectors and boards were in kinda good shape, yes but with a lot of black dust. Also one GI connector was burned but I think that it was a minor thing when thinking about how prone to burning these guys are!

More pics and progress will come, Ill try to recap what ive done so far because i started this thread 3 months late but I will include everything I can.

Speaking of burned connector:

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I am planning to get the decals available at different places. Called "next gen". I hope they will be easier to apply than what you describe. We will see when I get there!

Good to hear! I will write more as soon as I have the time every now and then =)

RandyV: red/vio goes with red/vio, blu/wht goes with blu/wht, blk/brn goes with blk/brn and on and on. All the time I hoped I would not find a wire left over in the end =) after an hour or so it was easy to mess up or forget the shrink tubing. Took me a good amount of hours but was worth it!

So the start button did not work, nor did the enter button in the coin door. The coin door switch (open/closed) did not work as well and not the plump bob tilt switch. At first I thought it was bad connections so I buzzed out the wires and switches in the door and then the coin door interface board all the way up to the connectors at the CPU board. All had continuity. I unplugged the connector J205 and tried to short it to ground as if the switches were closed but nothing. I thought that the CPU board was finally the problem, something on it that is. So a few more weeks of research led me to try to test the board outside of the machine.

I took an old computer power supply unit, tweaked it a bit and made an IDC connector for the power in J210, that would supply the board with both 5VDC and 12VDC. It worked and the board booted on the bench! Next thing was to get a logic probe. Bought one from Amazon.com for a reasonable price. I used it according to the various guides out there and found out that column 1 was missing its pulse on J207. That made sense since that's where the start button is located. J205, which is for the direct switches in the coin door also showed some strange behavior but I was not sure what cause it. I removed the jumper wire on the back of the board that someone had put there some time. It was done way back since the guy I bought it from had not done much work on the game. Nothing changed with the wire removed.

Now some head scratching... I tried to follow the pulses from the connectors back through the board and finally found that there were some broken traces on the board. Especially around the chip at U13. After a LOT of researching and some very helpful help from this forum I found that the schematics in the manual had errors. Sigh! But inspecting the board visually and measuring for continuity across it I found the bad traces. I replaced U13 and U14 and made quite many jumpers on the back of the board. Triple checked it all and put it back in the machine. Success!!

I was now able to start a game and to enter the test menus! The feeling was awesome!

Some pictures:

1. IC's missing on the power driver board, some where down the line of previous owners someone had been kind enough to prepare for replacements by putting in sockets

2. Brand new Octal inverters!

3. My own fix of the bad continuity between a bridge rectifier and the capacitor C5.

4. CPU Board hooked up to be run on the bench, well.. the dining table =)

5. Socket that I put in place for replacement of the chip U14 on the CPU Board.

6. Some of the jumper wires I made on the back of the CPU Board.

Stay tuned!

ic1.jpg ic2.jpg ic3.jpg cpu3.jpg cpu1.jpg cpu2.jpg

After the above fixes the game was playable!

My God! Shes a live! (been waiting for this classic comment! )

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When trying the game for the first time i discovered that the right flipper did not work and that fuse F102 (for the right flipper) had blown. I tested the transistor with the "quick and dirty transistor testing" described, think it was at pinwiki. It seemed good. I then tested the coil itself for resistance and it had zero resistance which it should not. So I digged up the flipper rebuild kits I bought earlier and replaced the coil and the capacitor. After that the right flipper worked!

I also found that the left sling shot had a broken piece of plastic on top of its "coil rod". Dont know the name for it but i glued it together just to see if it worked and it did. I will of course replace it later on but for now I left it glued just to make sure everything worked.

Another thing I found was that the outer ring of lights, big wheel, on the playfield were not working. I was afraid it was something with the lamp matrix but luckily i found a bad solder joint at one of the pins of the board when i checked for continuity. I resoldered it and the lamps then worked as intended!

So, now everything worked. Now for the fun part, or the "a lot of work" part, stripping the cabinett and the playfield.

Pic 1: Flipper rebuilding
Pic 2: Broken plastic at "slingshot rod"
Pic 3: Extra picture of the broken traces on the CPU board.

flipper1.jpg // Error: Image 137548 not found // broken_traces.jpg

Sorry, here is the sling part picture:

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Bop: yeah it will pay off! Even though it will take some time but that's half of the fun if not more =)

Spiffyrob: it's interesting to see for me too, looking back at what I've done so far. Motivates me to continue! I'll post some more recaps tomorrow and then I think I can start to add day by day from where I'm at now! Have stripped almost the whole top of the PF. Nice you like the thread!

Ok, here are some pictures of general wear and tear on the machine. Actually its mostly dirt but there are a few places where there is bare wood on the playfield for example. Overall I think its better than at a first look.

First some pictures of the cab. On the bottom sides there are some scratches and the usual fading of the red colours. My friend had a wild theory that the original colors did not include red but instead they had made the red dots/stars etc. with some permanent marker. This he thought because at the places where red should be there seemed to be some kind of overlapping of color but the color itself was faded. This overlapping is not present at other dots/stars. This was done, according to the theory, to save one color on the screening of the decals. However i think this is not the case, its just the original red was extra prone to fading in sun light.

One can talk for hours about the side art of bride of pinbot. I have seen machines in various combinations (some though only on pictures). For example the sides have purple base color as well as the back box sides. Another variation is that the base color is deep blue. Yet another version, that I have, is that the cab side is purple and the top box sides are blue. The back of the top is purple though as well as the top side of it.

One thing I noted is that the cab sides seem to be decals but the sides of the back box are completely made up by paint, even the blue base color. Maybe the sun light made the purple color fade to blue on this painted areas but not on the decal on the cab side. All the so called "Next gen" decals available for replacement are purple. I do not know how these processes of fading affect the original color but I assume the side art should be blue all over or purple all over. Anything else is because of fading, maybe.

I have also noted some very cool things about the colors. When Im working on the machine in daylight the cab looks blue. But during the evenings when I have the lights on in the workshop, fluorescent light "tubes", it looks purple. Also when taking pictures of it with my digital camera it always come out blue even thought, to the naked eye, it looks purple.
I even emailed John Youssi who designed the art on the cabinet and asked what the machine was actually meant to be looking like and how it looked when it was new. He answered me and said he would check it but i never heard from him again. So the mystery remains! =)

I have decided to not think about this anymore but just go for the next gen purple decals as replacements later on.

The below picture shows, to the left, what the camera sees when taking a picture and the other what it looks like to the naked eye. As you can see on the first pic the white balance of the camera is set to flourescent light, though with a slight green tint. The pic to the right has the white balance set to something else, i think it was like some mode for taking pictures on an overcast day. I made it just to show the difference that appears when taking pictures of the cab. I might try to do it outside because maybe its the lights in the workshop that are fooling the camera but otherwise its a strange and interesting effect.

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Now the wear and tear pics:

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And some playfield wear:

Note the area around the bumpers, a complete disaster!.. If it wasn't for the Mylar protection. More about that later. Mylar is good as long as you are lucky enough to have a playfield where it surrenders to you and comes of easily!

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Another thing i fixed was one of the light bulb holders inside the coin door. It did not work since it was too old and dirty. Besides one of my best friends from my childhood, McGyver, had been there doing some repairs. Looks like he's a little rusty in hes old age. The fix might have worked for a while but not anymore so I put in a new lamp holder. (Edit: the fix was probably to prevent shorting with the lockdown bar handle) Note the melted plastic around where the bulb is meant to stick in for lighting up the coin reject button (red circle). Thats a problem. I can not find a replacement part for that so I guess I'll have to find someone with a spare coin door from which I can grab the plastic piece. Thats for later though.

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Next thing I did, actually it was the first thing I did on the machine because i was curious about how it would work, was to remove the playfield Mylar. Why you may ask, well.. I wanted to test the technique but also I have plans of touching up the playfield and clear coat it later on.

So I had seen the following video on youtube where a guy removes the Mylar from a TZ.

(Thanks for a good video!)

I went to the hardware store and bought a can of compressed air used for cleaning electronic stuff. The trick is, as shown in the video, to hold the can upside down while spraying so that the liquid.. hm.. what is it called, "propellant" in the can comes out instead of the compressed air. When it comes in touch with normal room temperature it freezes. Im no chemist but I guess it has a high freezing temperature.

Anyway, I sprayed it on one edge of the mylar, let it freeze and took a credit card and tried to get the edge up a bit as described in the video. Then I continued carefully and started to pull the mylar off in small steps. If you do not hurry and let the stuff freeze well it will come off quite easily. Patience is needed here and don't force it because the paint under the mylar might come off with it! It's also a good idea to NOT get the spray on your fingers since you will get injured! Keep that in mind.

I have read that this technique might work or it might not. As far as I have read it depends on the playfield. Like the type of paint, how long they let the paint dry and harden before applying the mylar etc. etc. However it worked for me and there was no paint coming off. Maybe like some tiny tiny dot but nothing terrible. I did this same thing on the mylar around the jet bumpers since that area was really in need of getting it removed! If you feel like gambling a bit with your playfield at stake i recommed this technique but do it at your own risk!

After the Mylar is removed there will be a lot of glue residues on the surface. I used some label remover spray called "Label off", let it sit for a couple of minutes and then again used my credit card to carfully scrape the gunk away. Try it on some not so visible area of the playfield if you are not sure how it will react with the paint.

Pictures:

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@ SilverUnicorn, yeah I'm looking forward to play it properly. Only tried it for like 5 games to see if it worked. The Mylar glue residues were still there and did slow the ball down a lot. =)

Next I took out the coin door. It had some wear on it but the metal was not damaged. I wanted to make it look like new again so I sanded it down and spray painted it in a low gloss paint. I have not completed it yet but will put up more pics when I have. Also I have not decided if I shall keep it with just one color or add the "speckle" effect that it had originally. Im leaning towards the speckle thing but I must do some practicing first before I attempt it. By the way sanding the door was a real pain and I hope I will not have to do another door in a while.

Also some pictures from the backbox stripping and painting of the backbox hinges and the "rails" for the display panel. I settled for a low gloss black car rim paint that I think should be durable enough. I think it also match the original color very well. The last picture shows the difference between the original worn hinge and the freshly painted one.

Note the paper labels hanging in the backbox btw, Insert and Logic GI Power. I guess they should be attached to the harnesses to make them distinguishable. A nice relic from the past! (If it is original, but they seem to be).

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Leaving the cab for a while, dont wanna do too much on it before i get new decals in my hand. I know that if I start doing more on the cab I will end up taking off the original decals and paint and maybe wont get hold of new decals. That would be a disaster, so I better wait till I have everything. =)

I started to strip the playfield. The first parts I did with it still in the machine waiting for my friend to build me a rotisserie. Also to reduce the weight of the playfield. Then out it went and on to the rotisserie. I made a drawing of how I wanted it to work and together with some inspirational pics from the internet my friend built one. Its not perfect but does the job well and we will make a revised version later on with parts that fit better and some handles and maybe some attachable container to put tools and parts in while working.

Its the first time im doing something like this (PF stripping) so I take a lot of notes and pictures. I then put everything in numbered zip-lock bags for easier assembly.

I also could not wait to try flame polishing of the plastic parts. Seems like a nice method to make parts shiny. Did try it on the pinbot mini playfield. The result is not perfect but at least a lot better than it looked before cleaning and polishing.

Andy

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Hi there dieseldogpi!

I guess our playfields have the same discoloration... im not sure what to do with it to be honest but first I will try to clean it really good and see what happens. If its still yellow I will look into touching it up with new color. The downside is that once you start doing that it might look too good and you end up needing to do it all over the playfield. I dont want that but ill tackle it in some way when there =) Worst for me are the white and grey areas but the good thing about it is that those areas are not so cluttered with other colors so it might not be that hard to repaint them.

Andy

PF discoloration study. By the way, does someone know what text should be below the left sling shot? Looks like someone tried to erase some of it:

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Oh ok! Looks like a (C) there too so i guess it should be copyright (the C) and then 1990 or possibly 1991. Ill investigate further but at least ive got a clue! Thanks

CapnARRR: yeah it will be nice to see where the story ends =) Hopefully in a good place!

I have stripped the top side of the playfield now and started on the underside. At first it was intimidating to do the underside but since there are three wire harnesses that are possible to take off separately I gave it a shot. I keep track of everything (or try to do it...) by taking a lot of pictures. The pros only do this I think but I also take a lot of notes to help me later on when putting everything back together since im not a pro

1: The bride in her temporary apartment.

2: Playfield after stripping the top.

3: Underside while taking of the first harness, the purple one.

4. The current state, only the green harness left! It's for all the switches.

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Forgot to mention I saved the bumpers for later as can be seen in the pic. Ive never disassembled any of these guys so I will need to concentrate on them a bit and thats why I left them for now..

Choggard: i dont know if its available in the USA... I live in Sweden in Europe and it's sold by a company called biltema. However there must be some equivalent to the product in the us. Here is a data sheet: http://www.biltema.se/BiltemaDocuments/DetergentIngredientDataSheet/36590_FS.pdf

Cad-kid, yeah I will put some protection at the bumpers. Don't know if it will be Mylar or something else though. I would like something that is safer to remove in the future but Mylar might do it since the game will not be en route but played every now and then in my home. Guess it won't be worn that much. We'll see!

Been busy for a few days but I have now completed the stripping of the playfield. Only part that is left is the metal guide for where the balls are laying waiting to be fed to the plunger. The reason that I have left is is because I cant reach the screws when the PF is in the rotisserie but that will be an easy fix!

Attached are a couple of pictures of the clean PF as well as one from a test sanding I did on the underside. I will sand it down completely later and make it very smooth. Sorry for messing around in photoshop BTW =)

Next thing is cleaning the playfield. I have not really figured out what the best cleaner is but I will do some research in the forum. My thoughts right now is to go for the novus series but are they really needed? At least tried and true I guess.

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Allright! Thanks for the tip!
It seems one should be careful with it since its sanding of part of the coating layer... but since im planning to clear coat the pf it shouldnt be a problem. Does not seem to be available here in sweden but i think there must be something similar. Ill have a look and post back on the results!

Its also time for me to touch up the wear on the playfield. Im planning to use a hobby airbrush since i have one laying around. Not 100% on what color type to use though but i will investigate it further and see if I find something in the forums. I also guess that one should pick some color typ that goes with the coating so that it wont ruin the color when mixed with the clear.

The plan is that i first do a test on another piece of wood to get used to the airbrush, color mixing and so on. I will try to duplicate a small area of the artwork and see if I pass the test before i do something on the real PF

I have done some research and the work gets on. Tomorrow I will try the airbrush and see if it is the way to go as I think it is.
Been trying to clean the PF with various products, everything from turtle wax super wash to denaturated alcohol and a 1200 grit sanding paper which should be similar to the magic erasers. What worked best was the latter method but one must be very careful since too much will get through the coating and even colors. Works well for ball swirl marks etc and even some of the discoloration but I don't think I will use it so much more since it seem better to just clean with alcohol and then paint.

Also been trying some wood repair with plastic padding chemical wood filler. It looks good when sanded but I wonder if it will be hard and durable enough to withstand ball drops from the mini PF and the skill shot "holes".

Another interesting thing I would like to try is to scan the PF while it's stripped. Then mount the pictures to a complete image. Might come in handy some time or when making masks for the airbrushing.

More tomorrow and some pictures too!

Here are some pictures. First the cleaning with denaturated alcohol and 1200 grit sanding paper. As one can see some of the swirl marks and cracks go away. But I also went through the color at a couple of tiny spots. Should not matter since im gonna repaint the gray anyway. Did this more or less as a test.

Second picture, trying to repair some broken and worn wood. Not sure if the product will hold up or crack eventually. Also there are visible spots from the repair that are not really matching the original wood. Need to find out some way to deal with that. Maybe its better to leave the wood worn but fill it upp with clear coat later on? Anyway the surface gets really smooth after sanding.

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