I've just begun another restoration. This time it's a Carnival Queen, the first magic screen game made in 1958. This is a candidate, everything's there and the cab and head are solid. But it's filthy. I started assessing what I'm up against here and noticed a few operator mods and cheats. One was the reflex unit. It was set so it couldn't step up or down, and the unit was positioned to break almost all of the circuits. Now here's an interesting photo of the gears taken out of the machine on the bench. Guess which one does what?

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Correct but I'm not sure fair is the right description! I thought this operator was a straight guy but the more I look at these games the more I think he was just another crook like most of them. Boy scouts didn't run these machines.

I'll check the number on the spare gear, it's still on the rear door.

So I can't be of any help unless I go looking at the other machines. The CQ's spare gear was another #3. It appears maybe the operator had a choice to make the step up and down in the same increments or screw the players. I'll bet they didn't have to think about it too long.

Terry1 - Bikini's a better machine than Carnival Queen from a player's standpoint. But the historical value of Carnival Queen makes it at least somewhat collectible and that's why I am attacking this one to bring it back. It's the third one I've owned and the first worth saving.

Back at work on the CQ. Here's a couple of photos of the winner unit. This unit is situated facing up on the back door, so it tends to get rather dirty. Well, that's an understatement. Here's the difference before and after cleaning. The back side of the unit was very clean; nothing falls in there because it faces down. I determined it needed nothing. Good to go!

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Continuing on this weekend...Control unit disassembled, cleaned, reclutched, motor repacked. What a mess.

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I always disassemble the mixers and clean and check everything. As a matter of fact, that may be on my agenda this weekend. Just looked at your site and never noticed that the mixer diagrams weren't done for the Queen. You don't think they're the same as the Sea Island? I can sure take a stab at it.

No rush but I'm putting this off at least for a short time. I thought I'd get to it now but I have two games going to the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown next weekend and they need some attention. I'll take care of this once it's disassembled.

Between work, family and life in general I proceed slowly on these projects. I've completed the disassembly, cleaning and re-installation of the magic screen. This thing is a bear, removing the motor, whacking roll pins, loosening and removing chain drives, lubing everything and the worst is getting it back together without three or four hands. A little gorilla tape helps hold things in place, and it doesn't hurt to say a few choice words as long as no one else is around. Install an NOS number board and looking good. I could probably use a replacement moving color screen but I'll worry about that later. Back in place and smooth as silk although I may need a very slight adjustment of the wiper to assure no problems later.

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I took the whole thing apart. First the top track to remove the screen, and that opens everything else up. I took everything apart and the pieces were sitting on the workbench mocking me. I had a terrible time getting the screen back in after maintenance since I've never taken apart a CQ screen unit. The wipers have to line up with the stationary board, the unit has to be aligned properly so the index is correct with the screen, and the screen has to line up with a secondary index switch so when the screen is at zero it makes. Putting it back together again I ended up loosening one screw at the bottom holding the whole thing down and sort of forced the screen in. This must have been a huge complaint from operators as Bally changed that design later to make it easier. I can't wait to get to the mixers in a while - much easier!

I think you could probably do that replacement and as a matter of fact I thought about it since I have parts. But I left it original just because. The lights can be accessed since the screen is short enough to leave plenty of room when shifted around the backside.

Fire! I completed all work on the back side of the white board, rebuilt all steppers and cleaned the score counters and the extra ball unit as well as the replay counter and the five bank switches. Next on to some more work on the back door and the magic screen feature unit. Wow, there'd been quite a fire in there at some point in its life. It looks like the step up coil had remained engaged for a little too long and poof, it burned, scarring the back door and melting some of the other parts in there. The operator did a decent patch job since the unit was working properly, but this has got to be fixed!

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On to the mixers. I'm in the process of taking them apart and cleaning, so baldtwit wanted a little help as long as the damn thing is accessible. Mixer #1 is documented for the CQ on the site, so I started by checking that diagram for accuracy. The diagrams are shown from the wiring side, I'm used to looking at things from the wiper side so I had a little problem wrapping my mind around this at first. I started by breaking as many circuits as I could. That was accomplished by sticking cardboard under all of the reflex wipers and disconnecting the reflex adjustment plug (Diag. I-23) and tripping the extra ball relay (Diag. F-26 to the mixer at C-31). Then I tested the lugs to check which ones made with each other. At this point, it was 13/14 and 6/9/11, just as drawn. So to check all of the other lugs was easy, but only if I had the mixer shown from the wiper side. I flipped the blueprint horizontally in Photoshop so I could see it from that side. Good I can read numbers backwards. Then it was easy for me to test all of the other wires 2-5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 and 16. They were all good as drawn. Since it was impossible to test the tied lugs without actually disconnecting wires, I had to visually inspect the wiring side to verify those, and all was good. It looks like lug 10 was available to the operator to loosen the machine a little by jumping to another lug, like that was going to happen...

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Mixer #2 is mapped. This one is way more simple than #1. There are seven lugs with wires attached on this mixer. All of its functions are located at H-26 of the schematic. As suggested, I started by x'ing out all of the unused rivets. It turns out that rows 3 and 4 (from the outside) are not used at all. Anyway, this took a couple of minutes but not that difficult. Now onto the wiring. Again, I would rather find a way to do this without visually inspecting if possible. I checked the continuity of the lugs without the wipers in place, and found that none of them made. Looking on the wiper side, lugs 2 and 3 are wired to feed rings. Lugs 4 through 8 did not make with anything else without wipers, so they were easy to trace and record using the tester. That's it for the wire map, now which are which? Since lug 2 and 3 go to the feeds, they had to be 56-11 or 57-11 respectively. Lugs 4 through 7 traced continuous to the magic screen feature disc and were easily identified. That meant lug 8 was 27-7. The only thing left to do was figure out which was which on lugs 2 and 3. I suspected that lug 2 was 57-11 because there were 7 ways to make with 27-7 from that path (untripped super relays), and only 6 ways with a super relay tripped. Testing to the red score booster trip confirmed this. So here's the rough draft and photos of the thing out of the machine.

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On to mixer #4. Finally! This one was tougher. There are 19 wires attached to the wiring disc and that requires the use of a lug bar to handle them all. The schematic locations for this one are at I-32 through I-34, I-29 and G-29, mostly in the same area. There's a mass of wires on this thing, and I get a bit nervous moving them around randomly if I don't have to. With my luck I'd pull something out and screw the whole thing up. So I decided to approach it by identifying the wires from the rivet side again and then flip the chart over so the wiring side gets posted. I started by cutting circuits that could give false reads again. For this one it meant isolating the A wiper sets on the green, red and yellow disks. After doing that, the only make I had on the lugs was "D" and "F". The schematic shows this at location G-29, and the continuity was caused through the select before 5th on the trip bank. Tripping that relay set opened the switch and the tester could be used for wire locations. After spending a few hours carefully going about that task, I had a blueprint with a few holes, i.e. rivets without a wire attribution. At this point, I turned to the wiring side and visually inspected to make sure I was correct, and confirmed that. This was tougher than it sounds as a few of the empty rivets were really hard to get to but a bit of patience paid off. The only thing left was to determine which wire was which, and that was pretty easy since they only trace to the three score discs except for one wire going to the extra ball trip #1 and one to the CU cam #7. So here is the final mixer #4 diagram as mapped.

There is an error in the Carnival Queen manual. On the red score unit lug 3 from the top left should read 10-8, and lug 4 should read 98-7. The documentation has them reversed.

After I completed the blueprint I checked my work against the posted documentation for mixer 4 on County Fair to see what, if anything, was different. There's a change in the handling of the D and F wires, they added another more complex circuit through mixer 2 to get to the same place and this is clear on the schematic. Otherwise, everything was the same except the rivet just above lug 15 in the third row labeled "15" on my diagram was labeled "16" on the County Fair on Phil's site. I looked at it again to confirm and the "15" is correct for the Carnival Queen.

As you can see in the photo of the mixer itself, wire 75-5 was disconnected from the lug. I'm not sure if this was done on purpose, but the end result was mixer #4 relay would not power and the game would have granted features and extra balls easier than normally expected. I know no one owned this game but an operator before me because I know its history, so that was sort of odd.

I haven't decided what to do, if anything, about mixer #3 yet. The documentation posted shows a shop engineering drawing, so I am inclined to believe it's correct and just move on.

Big kudos to Phil H, after going through this exercise I have way more appreciation for the effort he's put into helping all of us.

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Mixer 4 Draft.pdf

On to the mixers and everything else up there. Everything is detached from the back door now - easier to reach and deep clean. I am considering if I should go ahead and detach the stuff from the head as well so I can remove everything from the game and get the inside of the head cleaned really well. Then, if I do that, I may as well go ahead and get it painted while it's empty. Decisions...anyone ever tried to do this? I believe I may be certifiably crazy. Looking to do a really nice restoration on this one, though.

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That photo is the mixers out of the machine on the bench under glass, no problems. Believe it or not my wife wants to come to the York show too. She enjoyed the Denver show this year and some of the pinball shoots we did for the Tommy show last year with my granddaughter. Looking forward to it! We'll make it an east coast vacation.

Butch, here's a photo but oh boy, it's rough. Hope this helps.

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Getting new stickers ready for the various units.

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Steve, I do them in Photoshop myself. Anything you need send me the old crap and I'll clean it up. I need a few others I am missing. I need the reflex unit if I can get it, so I'll probably end up using the label from another machine. This is the first time I've gone to this extreme but I had to completely redo the back door and paint it to fix the fire problem. It's easy to fix the labels but the coil numbers are what I need.

Back door almost done, just need to add the stickers. Every single point is cleaned, every stepper disassembled and cleaned up, new springs and some new parts on the steppers, mixers completely torn down and put back together with NOS clutches. I painted it blue after fixing the burned out section because I don't like the drab grey they used. I'm still deciding if I should get the head out on the ground for a good cleaning and paint while it's empty. The only thing left to complete the initial work before cosmetics is the guts of the cab.

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Thanks Nick, slow and steady gets it done.

Ready to begin cleaning the interior cab and the guts. Looks like a rather large mess, eh?

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Finished with the interior cabinet. Initially my intent was to give it a good cleaning, but scrubbing and even sanding would not remove all of the cigarette ashes, liquid residue and whatever other dirt and crap had accumulated in there over the years, especially by the player controls. Every last piece was taken out and cleaned well, including all of the switches, and everything was painted . Thank goodness for digital photography, getting things back together again without it would be a lot harder. Here's a couple more photos of what it looked like before, and the after photos taken today. Lockdown is finished as well. I left the carriage bolts a little loose because they'll have to come out again once the painting begins at some point. I find it easier to leave the screws in their place when painting, and then removing them and cleaning the paint off rather than searching for obscured screw holes later. Next will be the inside of the head unit.

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Thanks guys. A snail's pace but that's about all I can do. Just a hobby...

Thought I'd throw this in now. The playfield on the right was taken out of the machine I'm restoring, I almost have it totally stripped. Very very dirty and why waste time if you don't have to? The one on the left came out of a parts machine with too many hacks and a destroyed cabinet. The colors are vibrant and the amount of cleaning will be minimal (comparatively). It does help to accumulate stuff over the years, you never know when you'll need it! Interestingly, the serial number of the playfield from the game is in the 1400's. The replacement, believe it or not, is only one number off from the rest of the machine.

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Cleaning the legs up. As far as I know, Carnival Queen was the only bingo that came with white metal legs from the factory.

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It's amazing how light this is when everything is removed.

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Computer artwork is completed for the stencils. I use a Canon Lide 220 scanner with the top removed to create scans and then stitch them together, clean up the colors and create the layers. From these samples, I can "stroke" the outsides with black lines and it is easy to cut the stencils out from there with an Exacto. I overlap colors where possible to avoid breaks in the intended scheme as much as possible. The colors represented here are not necessarily the actual colors being laid down, but close.
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Playfield in progress as well. I use Gel Gloss for the intial cleaning, then a Magic Eraser wetted with LA Awesome and finally Meguiar's Cleaner Wax to bring the shine. Parts are polished up and ready for reinstallation.

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The playfield is completed and ready to install once the rest of this beast is completed. The one from the parts game was in pretty good shape. Looking good, really no wear but, of course, the usual dirt. Didn't anyone ever clean these games? Anyway, everything is cleaned up and shined. The lamp shields are new, I think they came from Belgium. I've had them in inventory for a long time. At first glance the instruction cards on the apron looked good, but they've been swapped out with cards I Photoshopped many years ago. It was necessary, the third photo shows "Press Buttons After Shooting 5th Ball". That didn't happen on Carnival Queen, Bally was too worried about it with the screen movement. They capitulated after it hurt play on this game and reinstituted the feature on Sea Island, the next game up. I used the arch from the original game because someone had glued a Formica strip to prevent wear on the other one. Not happening. Those marks from hundreds of thousands if not more than a million balls running through that track are almost impossible to remove. I've found it's best to clean as well as possible and let it go, despite my pinball OCD.

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Always looking for parts. I bought an NOS Bounty glass (thanks Roger) six years before I located the game itself. I started a thread a few months ago advertising my quest for NOS parts, but not much came of it. Always buying if it's the right deal.

So things are progressing. I went to York to see the bingo row and hang out a bit, then some more family issues. Wow, this is taking me a long time. That's pretty normal. Anyway, painting has begun. Here's the cut out stencils for the cab sides. Head paint is just about completed.

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Hey BPC can you upload a pic of what you mean. I just checked all of the other games here and they all are configured the way I have set the CQ.

Gor it. Thanks for the input guys. I get so wrapped up in this stuff I miss dumb things like this! I actually looked at my other games and still didn't see it. As to the scanner...it's easier to lay flat if you can but the cab sides were done upright holding the scanner against the paint. It's very light and one person can operate the whole deal. @ bingopodcast cancel the photo request!!

BTW this scanner will work upside down so instead of laying the cab on the scanner you can do it the easy way, scanner flat facing down on cab.