That sounds like a silly title, but let me explain.

I volunteer in a small pinball workshop set up to provide a weekly relaxing afternoon outing for a group of ex psychiatric patients. Relaxing being the key word here - if we need time for coffee, coffee it is. In between we repair pinballs (and test - we test them often!) without any time pressure. My part in this operation is to provide technical guidance, interface with the Real World Outside and search for parts or in this case: information.

We have recently received a 1970's Bally Flip Flop in non-working condition. It appears to have at some time provided shelter to some kind of unidentified rodent - no excrements. It is relatively clean without smell. As the owner commented, 'the book is inside'.
Well, it may have been but it was not identifiable. EVERYTHING made from paper was gnawed up beyond recognition.... and part of the wiring is heavily damaged as well.

So now you may better understand the title: the original paper strips stapled into the cabinet are completely gone. The staples are still there.

To help identify some of the wiring, it would help to be able to identify the relays. We do have a schematic diagram, but at times colours have faded and parts of wires are simply gone. Before we reconnect some gnawed up wiring it would be nice to make absolutely sure which wire end belongs to which other one and relay identification would certainly help.

So my question...

Would a member with a Flip Flop that still has recognisable paper identification strips be willing to provide a readable picture of the paper strips? There is no such information in the booklet I have. Not wanting to sound demanding, I would be nearly as eternally grateful with a simple textual enumeration front-to-back for the relais on both the left and the right row of the cabinet as well. Any other tip that may help is very welcome of course.

One of our group members has adopted this game to try and get it back to working condition but as I'm sure you can imagine, it is quite a challenge. I would really love to see him succeed. I expect this will be fixable as in the end it is just wiring that has to be restored. We know how to solder
Any of the usual pinball maintenance is to be expected after that - something we feel we can tackle. Remember we've got time. Plenty of it. Finishing a pinball is appreciated, but having fun doing it is our target.

Any input would be much appreciated.

There's a thought - I hadn't thought of approaching registered owners directly.

If no-one volunteers I'll contact some of my fellow countrymen. Thanks for he pointer.

AlexF : exactly! The are stapled in but only the staples remain... As long as they are readable, I'll be very happy.

Apex : thanks for the offer. Very appreciated. Seems that AlexF beat you to it. If he runs into problems, I'll take you up on it.

Feeling gooood...

That is awesome!!! Thank you so much, this is going to be of great help.

Sorry for the delay in responding, I have been out of da house a couple of days.

Just to give you an impression...

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Thanks for asking. Project is going sloooow, because the guy working on it had some health issues. He's back now though and is working on restoring the isolation of the relay board wiring. I just made a plain paper copy of the schematic yesterday so we can keep notes of wiring issues - we haven't worked out all of the unknowns yet....

This one is going to take a lot of work and because we have only a couple of hours a week I don't think it is going to be connected up for a test play for at least a couple of months.

Hope your one restores much more easily!

Looking good!

Progress here has slowed down even more because the member of the team who had dedicated himself to this game had to quit.

We keep it warm and dry and work on it when we can.

Some progress.... (by the way: our project is nowhere near as good playfield/cabinet wise as yours! @mpellicano) We manage to focus a bit more on our Flip Flop, now other pins await parts or are pushed into continued testing mode.

We thought we managed to restore all of the affected wiring: isolating stripped wires and replacing missing pieces. We didn't get all of 'm, of course. But, last week cabinet, playfield and back-box were joined and switching it on did not blow any fuses. Big smiles all around.

The first wire-fix we missed was a piece of wiring that kept us from being able to start the game! Pretty essential. That was quickly located and added (there should have been three wires connected to a relay-switch. So much had been gnawed off that we restored connection between two wire ends but hadn't noticed they sould be on the switch. The one wire left on the contact didn't really do anything, so when we finally looked at it we had a good laugh). That restored, today we noticed that we can start the game and score some points by touching the targets on the playfield, but when the ball drains neither the ball counter increases nor does the player disc progresses. Narrowed it down to three contacts on three different relays, but then coffee happened and we had to stop

Also, at least on digit does not reset to zero on startup (although the score motor keeps running), but when stepped to zero by hand the cyclus stops as it should. There are probably some more of these, but we haven't run in to them yet.

It looks like all the playfield switches seem to work. One out of four Flippers is not stuck. Most of the light-bulbs glow up. There is dirt in places you cannot get to without dismantling some of the playfield. There are creative playfield additions (to replace missing parts) but they are easily renewed once we start ordering parts for it. But we'll try to get everything working first.

Main thing is: the guys enjoy it. Progress is a bonus. Thanks for listening.

Allright, some progress made. Thanks for showing interest!!!

We have got all the flippers working: three of 'm had rusted stuck - very weird. Had to cut out the shooter (rusted solid and mushroom top). Cleaned up some contacts where we had to and replaced some bulbs. One counter failed to reset because of a simple broken wire.

Touching all the targets and rollovers and what-have-you, it looks like we have it pretty much working. As we haven't cleaned the playfield yet, nor put new rubbers in, we haven actually *played* it yet because of all the dirt which would do extra damage. Apart from lots of shrink-tubing, we've only had to invest lots of time up intil now.

Looks like we can now do the interim meeting with the owner, explaining that we think we can get it pretty much running for the price of rubbers, a new shooter and some plastics.

Because you asked for pictures, here are some I took especially today. Beware, it is not always a pretty sight. And remember - we're in it for the fun and not for restoring for value.

Had to restore cabling, used a lot of shrink-tubing.

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Should have learned how to redo the harness, but hey - tiewraps are easy.

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Playfield is oaky-ish, but very very dirty. Minor damage to the flip-targets.

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This is the one I'd rather not show...

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This however is pure joy. It says roughly: the glass plate is $30. If you break it, you'll pay. The innkeeper.

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Looking at the front door (sans shooter now) and the left side (serial).

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Today we replaced the worn-out rusted shooter and now the game seems to be fully up and running.

From experience we know that all kinds of gremlins lurk in unused pinball machines, so the coming weeks (at least) we need to do a lot of testing. For outsiders it is indistinguishable from playing pinball

Now we've got it playing: this is actually a great game. Especially the way the mushrooms reset the flip-flops means you keep having targets even after you once flipflopped all four over! We love it. Will be very hard to return this to the owner...