I was bitten by the Black Knight bug when I was a teenager. I can't remember how many quarters I've dumped into that machine at the corner pizza shop. I couldn't play it enough!

So a few years ago a friend of mine that has some pins told me he saw a Black Knight LE at a weekend moving sale. He said it didn't look all that great and he didn't have the time to do anything with it. So I figured "what the heck, I'll check it out". So I go over there and took a look at it. It was pretty dirty inside the cabinet and the playfield had some wear(the upper playfield looked a lot better). The cabinet has a few scuffs of different color paint(must have bumped some walls during its life), but the art work looked pretty good. The back glass has a little bit of the normal flaking(I've already sealed it up to prevent any further flaking). So I asked if it worked and the guy said that it did but it was missing 1 ball. He turned it on and it went right into attract mode. I didn't get the chance to see the inside of the head because he said he lost the keys. He said he was moving out of state and couldn't take it with him. So I made him an offer of $300 and he said he can't sell it for that but gave me his #. I called him the next day to see if it was still there and it was and I asked him if he would still take my offer. He reluctantly said yes so my friend and I dismantled it and loaded it up in my truck and brought it home. The first thing I did was drill out the lock on the head to check everything out. The boards looked in really good shape. No battery corrosion(which I feared), but it had the usual burnt GI connector. No big deal, I can fix that. I re-hooked everything up. My friend just bought new balls for one of his machines and gave me one of his old ones since one of them was missing in mine. I fired up the game and started playing. There were a couple of issues while playing. The bottom lock hole would work occasionally and one of the lane switches would not register. Also, when I locked two balls in the upper trough, it would go right into multiball. I lifted the playfield and saw that a diode on the bottom lock came loose and was just barely touching so I soldered it back on. The one nonworking leaf switch on the out lane was dirty so I cleaned up the contacts with a pencil eraser(the eraser worked pretty well). A micro switch in the upper lock was broken and a jumper wire was installed to bypass the broken switch. That explains why it went into multiball with only two balls locked up top and why 1 of the balls were missing. I replaced the micro switch and every single thing is working in the game as it should. There is a speech problem which I haven't figured out yet. When the game is over and it says "will you fight the black knight again", the word "the" is garbled in speech. I had the machine in my garage at the time and it would only garble the speech when it was damp outside but worked fine when it was dry. Any thoughts?

I have since removed the playfield to clean it up and did some touch up on the paint. I am no artist and can't paint worth a lick and by no means does it look as good as some of the others I have seen on here, but I am happy with the results. I'll get to play my childhood favorite pin whenever I want when it is done and it didn't cost me much. It will take some time to get it going again(time that I don't have at the moment). But somehow someway my Black Knight will live to fight another day. I do plan on bullet proofing this machine with the help of Vid's great guide before I put it all back together.

Sorry for the long drawn out story. I just thought I'd like to share it with this great community.

-Talon