Hello Pinsiders!

I've been lurking around here for a couple of months now, (mostly reading the fantastic guides on playfield restoration and Williams system 3-6 bulletproofing by @vid1900) as my wife Kaydee and I recently expanded our arcade collection to include pinball, adding 4 pins to our 35 video game collection in the span of a couple of weeks shortly before Christmas. Flash Gordon, Firepower, Genesis, and Blackout!

The Blackout was a project. A project that sane people would walk away from. Someone was using it as a coffee table (a slanted coffee table at that) after removing the legs and unceremoniously ripping the neck off. So, a slanted coffee table with a big rectangular hole at one end. Questionable decorating choice in my mind, but people will do what people will do.

So we traded some monitor repair work (a couple of WG 6100s and a G05) to pick up this tortured, but mostly complete Blackout, and we got to work.

Our goals were:
* Learn enough to convince ourselves we could maintain a collection of pinball machines
* Take this abused collection of pinball-shaped parts and have a fully playable machine that looks at least half way decent

We certainly made some mistakes along the way, and while we won't be posing any challenges to high end restorers anytime soon, we did learn a great deal about keeping these machines running, and we do have a playable Blackout on our arcade floor where previously we did not.

The lamp board was missing, no backglass, no displays, there was some minor acid damage on the MPU, and caps all looked like they were from the Eisenhower administration. The voltage regulator on the power supply board had a big X drawn on it, and I have a personal policy that I replace components with big Xs drawn on them.

So we recapped the sound and power supply boards, cleaned up the MPU, and installed various upgrades including NVRAM to eliminate the battery requirement, a fuse board to protect special solenoids, and a bridge board to replace & protect the bridge rectifiers. We were able to source a replacement lamp board, PinScore display replacements, and repo backglass.

That was the easy part.

The playfield was bad. Double plus ungood kind of bad. 100% of the inserts were either raised, cupped, warped, or otherwise cursed. Some genius at one point used screws that were too long to attach some of the underside components, pushing up the playfield surface in a couple of areas. The art was a bit of a wreck, with wear and gouges all over.

So we hopped on over to Pinside and started learning about all sorts of things like Frisket, Air Brushing, Waterslide Decals and clear coating.

We replaced all playfield inserts. Cleaned the playfield as best we could. Clear coated. Airbrushed the playfield where possible, hand painted where the detail was too fine for our frisket cutting skills, and printed water slide decals for inserts and for the white text that was all a gross shade of yellow. We learned that Kaydee is a better artist than she'd ever give herself credit for -- the large areas of artwork she recreated came out great!

We also had to rebuild the interior of the cabinet. Everything had been ripped off and thrown in there. Also there was a sock, a single lone sock, which I declined to touch with my hands or take photos of for fear of damaging my phone. Socks do not belong in pinball machines and as this one was of unknown origin and history, it was removed and unceremoniously disposed of, never to be thought about again. The harness was intact, except for the coin door portion which we had to recreate. Using photos and how our Firepower is laid out, we reinstalled the various internal components such as the speaker, line filter, fuse, volume pot, tilt devices, credit knocker and grounding braid. Even put in a new prop rod for easy servicing.

The credit button had been replaced with a standard leaf switch... so we got an original button and restored that as well.

After the final coat of clear had cured on the playfield, we rebuilt the flippers, put in new drop targets, replaced all plastics, applied decals to the targets and spinners, and got to work troubleshooting other items like various lamp sockets and leaf switches.

We are almost to 100% functionality now -- our only issue is one of the drop target banks scores the entire bank when hit. The drop target guides (molded plastic with screw holes) are all misshapen and gross, and we think that's affecting the overall performance of the drop targets, so we are working on 3D modelling that part, hopefully we can print up some replacements.

We also have a bit more work to do on the cabinet paint, there aren't any stencils for Blackout that I'm aware of, so we've been doing touchup. We did the black already, need to do some color matching for the yellow and red. Not as nice as some of the sanded/refinished cabinets I've seen here, but looks many times better than it previously did with just the minor ding repair and black touchup that we've done so far.

This consumed about two months of "all of our free time", but we couldn't be happier with the results.

Big thanks to vid1900 for his awesome guides, Chris Spaseff, and Kris Bliznick (Firebird Pinball) for all of their advice and help with parts sourcing along the way, and to Scott Goldsmith for loaning us his HPLV setup Also thanks to Nate for trading this to us for the monitor repair work (we like fixing the vectors!).

We didn't really document the step by step with the zeal of a prize-winning photo journalist, but we do have some photos that I'll share as additional posts in this thread, along with some notes and things we learned (that many of you already know

For now, some photos of the (nearly) finished results --

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Some of what we were starting with and during the process. Already removed the inserts on the playfield, there were universally awful.

We covered up much of the star field repainting black in various areas -- we created it by hand where needed. The before shots don't show how yellowed the white text was, we ended up replacing all of that. We kept the faded color for the stars, even color matching it to recreate them, rather than attempting to recreate all of them.

One big lesson learned -- we didn't use the right clear. Also if we do this again we'll probably outsource that step. We got the safety protocols right, but ended up using a product that was a bit too hot and lead to some minor imperfections. The surface plays well, looks good in arcade conditions, but if you get close you'll see that we did fall short of many of the perfectly smooth mirror finishes you see all over the restore threads here.

There were also some things we did pretty well. The recreation of the detail like the center explosion, asteroid fragments, etc. came out way better than we had hoped for. We had some problems in applying waterslides that we were able to overcome (black on insert decals, even with laser printer at the highest toner use settings let too much light through on the black, but we were able to double them up. The reverse printed decals we created for white text were a disaster, but we were able to reverse print them on the clear and use un-printed white underneath to get a good result, much better than if we had attempted to hand paint to correct missing white text).

We had to build a new neck, as that was just gone... used our Firepower as a guide, that came out pretty well.

We also used the fonts we downloaded for the playfield to print up some new instruction cards -- we like to take some creative license on the stuff we rebuild in ways that could be easily reversed in the future.

All in all, we feel pretty good about taking what probably should have been a parts machine and ending up with a decent players-quality game. We probably spent more in time and money than it would have taken to buy a working machine, but we learned a great deal that will be helpful in maintaining our collection, so all goals achieved!

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Thanks mof , we just didn't take that many "along the way" pictures. Its something we need to get better at doing more of for sure.

I do regret not taking a photo of the inside of the main cabinet before removing the mystery sock

We made the insert decals ourselves using water slide decals on our laser printer. They had to be doubled up as even at max toner settings they were not dark enough.

Inserts were sourced from Marco and Pinball Life as I recall. Orange seemed right for those condition yellow arrows based on what was in our blackout when we started.

PM sent!