By far the most dirty job when doing a playfield swap is cleaning the wiring harness.

Anyone who has ever tried to take a shortcut and skips this step, quickly finds out what a mess black fingerprints make on every part of the playfield and rubber.

The coil dust is carbon, iron and lead, so wear gloves.

If you blow some of the loose dust off with an air compressor; do it outdoors and downwind from your garden.

DO NOT blow that dust indoors and permanently contaminate your basement/garage.

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Be forewarned, people view their established cleaning routine with an almost religious fanaticism. Toes might get stepped on. Defense mechanisms will be on high alert and trenches will be dug in.

It will all be OK, I promise.

So we have a little prep to do before we do the actual cleaning.

We of course, have to remove the wiring harness from the playfield.

We want to remove bulbs and LEDs so the insides of the sockets can be cleaned.

Label everything with 3M Blue Painters Tape, it will remain stuck on throughout the cleaning process.

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We want to remove Coil Sleeves, Yokes, and other disposable items that would be more trouble to clean than replace. The more soil load you put in the washer, the less detergent is available to clean the other items.

A .40 cent coil sleeve is not worth your time to try to ream out (and you can never clean the metal flakes that are embedded into the nylon). You want to take the plungers out of all the coils, so they can be cleaned too.

Really, just throw it away.

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If somebody sprayed WD-40 on the coils or something like that, then do a pre-clean with Naphtha so the detergent does not waste all it's power on the oil.

Otherwise, this will be the last time you have to touch this mess.

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We want to put the entire harness on the top rack.

The bottom rack is too close to the heating element, and if a Molex connector should fall through the rack and rest upon it, it will melt.

Once the harness is arranged, make sure the scrubbing wand on the bottom of the rack is still free spinning. The washer won't clean well if the wand is obstructed.

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All the small brackets can go into the silverware basket on the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

This is a good pre-tumbling step, as you never want to contaminate your tumbling media with dirty materials.

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It was probably never this clean at the factory.

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The drops come out nice and clean (you know what a nightmare it is to clean them conventionally with a toothbrush).

If you want to really get crazy, you can take the drops out, wax them and then reassemble.

Clean, slippery drops never hang up, they drop like stones.

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Leaf switches come out looking like shiny copper from the sand blasting it gets from the detergent.

So there you have it.

In less than a hour you have a spotlessly clean harness that is a pleasure to work with.

No caustic chemicals.

No driveway rinsing.

No hair dryer drying.

No filling and soaking in the bathtub.

No expensive equipment.

No unsoldering coils or drop target mechs (how many hours would that add to your job?).

Once you have done a dishwasher cleaning, you will never go back to any other way.

Wrappers that are made of printed "masking tape" do totally fine.

Homemade wrappers on regular paper end up in the strainer at the bottom of the washer.

They were reproductions from ebay that came off in the wash.

I've had OEM laminated ones that stayed on just fine.

I just figure if I'm doing a playfield swap or restoration, I'm replacing the drop decals no matter what.

Thanks.

Can never be too careful ....

It's amazing that your wife can use your $300 chisels to open paint cans then shrug when you yell at her, but if you use the dishwasher you sleep in the doghouse.

Move it on on over

No, actually it wont.

(and you are not getting the pony Santa promised you, either)

You could buy a cool 22 liter ultrasonic cleaner for $299 on ebay.

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If they don't stick, Sharpie will survive the cleaning and can be removed with alcohol.

When the dog pukes in his bed, I always take it to the laundromat so I don't contaminate my home machine.

I've used the lead tester at work and it does not detect lead on a swipe from the walls of my dishwasher after washing a load of circuit boards. I assume circuit boards have 100x the lead of a wiring harness.

Dishwasher detergent has sheening chemicals that keep minerals from sticking to the sides of dishes and glassware - that's why you don't get spots all over your glasses.

Your favorite coffee mug from China probably has lead in the glaze that leaches out every time you pour hot liquid into it.

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It was more of a circuit board thing than a wiring harness thing, as all the solder on those old boards is lead.

We do lead testing at work, so it's always interesting to me.

I agree with you 100%.

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Everyone should think about this (if they haven't already):

Aluminum cookware is banned in many parts of Europe and SA.

Stainless Steel cookware can leach toxic chromium and nickel into your foods. Hell, even the inside of your dishwasher is low grade stainless.

Your expensive copper bottomed tea kettle leaches heavy metal into your tea.

If your Teflon pans were made before 2015, they leach PFOA into your food.

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If you feel any worry about using your dishwasher to clean circuit boards or wiring harnesses, get a $299 Ultrasonic and it's basically the same process.

If you don't think your dishwasher is rinsing properly, you can also test your own dishwasher for any residual lead dust with a $10 test kit:

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Use the correct amount of soap for the cycle you select. Too much soap won't dissolve, too cold of water won't dissolve.

You can put the harness back in without soap and run Pots&Pans. The hot water will dissolve your remaining soap.

You can't trust guys with a dishwasher.

They hook up the water line to the cold water pipe.

They put too much soap in so it can't dissolve.

They put the 24K gold trimmed fancy plates in it, so the sand can sandblast all the gold off.

They put all the spoons in one compartment, so they "spoon" together and don't get cleaned.

They use regular Dawn dish soap, so everything is covered in streaks and spots.

No joke.

You could run a garden hose from the laundry tub to a dishwasher for hot water.

$113 and you are good to go:

http://www.searsoutlet.com/14012-24-Built-In-Dishwasher-White/d/product_details.jsp%3Fmd%3Dct_md%26cid%3D224%26pn%3D1%26ps%3D25%26pid%3D90645&mode=buyUsedOnly&itemSelectionType=all

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.....and just think. If you have an electric stove you garbage picked for your powdercoating, you garage only needs a fridge and it will have a complete kitchen.

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I would not trust any microswitches in the dishwasher.

Even if they were sealed 20 years ago, they might not still be sealed today.

Fishpaper is fine in the dishwasher.

It's made of vulcanized rubber over a fiber base.

A little water wicking at the ends of the wire does not hurt anything.

Many times after washing, you are snipping off the wire ends to re-terminate the connector plugs anyway.

No one has ever snipped off the old contacts and said "OMG, these are still wet under the insulation!!!!"

It's not like pinball is a constantly wet environment (and the dish detergent is ph7).

People have been washing wiring harnesses in their old Gibson and Fender guitars since the 70s and we don't hear any stories about the wire ends corroding (and those old potentiometers were open frame - yikes!).

People have been washing pinball harnesses since at least the 90s (see rec.games.pinball), and again, we don't hear any horror stories in the last 30 years.

I've washed probably 100 harnesses and maybe 700+ circuit boards.

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If you want something that's not detergent & water, you can use Carbon Tetrachloride, but to me, that's "too much cleaner" for such a simple job.

You see how crappy the plating was on those old Williams sockets.

You can wipe the outside of the sockets with an old wax impregnated rag you used to wax a playfield with.

The inside of all sockets I clean with a Dremel stone:

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Usually the harness comes out dry and very hot just in the regular "pots & pans" cycle.

Make sure if your board has any relays, you remove them before you wash it.

Nobody has a gun to your head, clean your harnesses any way you like, lol.

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I've probably done another dozen harnesses since this article.

They went into some very high dollar restorations, for some very picky customers.

Time REALLY is money when restoring pins, and getting a spotless harness that looks better than new in 2 hours is money in the bank.

One of the first harness I believe I ever dishwashed was Fireball2 back in the late 90s after reading about the process on rec.games.pinball .

I replaced a coil and the rubbers few months ago for the current owner of that game.

Nothing was corroded, and believe it or not, it's still pretty clean after probably 20 years. That game is kept in an Ohio basement, one of the dampest places on earth.

My theory is, that by washing off all the sticky manufacturing oils & plasticizers from the surface of the wires, it helps keep soot and dust from adhering to it.

win/win

If the rodents ate the PVC insulation off, but left the copper intact; then just put the closest color shrink tubing sleeve around it.

You can release the contacts from the Molex plugs and slide the sleeve over the contact.

If it's on the playfield side, it might be quicker to unsolder a wire, then slide the sleeve over it.

On tiny nicks, you can use "Liquid Electrical Tape" they have at the hardware store
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Ebay or Fry's has huge grab bags of rainbow shrink tubing. Get the smaller diameters that will just barely fit over the connectors.

Liquid Electrical Tape only comes in Black, White, Red, Yellow and Blue. They used to sell Clear, but I have not seen it lately.

You can snip a few zip ties and let it really get in to the trouble spots.

I've cleaned a harness where someone had sprayed, what I assumed to be WD40, on all the mechs.

It was still dirty after a cycle, so I snipped the zip ties in the bad areas, and pre-soaked it with Dawn to break up the oil, then ran it again.

2nd time was the charm.

If we put a rusty head of a shovel in the dishwasher, it would not come out as shiny bare metal.

The fine sand in the detergent will clean off some oxidation, but if it's deep, you need to tumble with abrasives for 48 hours.

Unfortunately, an ultrasonic will not clean off oxidation either.

Again, probably just depends on how oxidized they were to begin with.

Also, the Harder your water is, the less effective the detergent.

And of course, you might have to experiment with detergent. The worst is Cascade With Dawn - it does not even work on food (the "dawn" part tricked me, knowing how good real Dawn is on oil). The stuff I'm using right now is Kirkland Premium, for whatever that's worth.

If the copper bottoms of your pans come out like shiny pennies, then that's a good soap for your switches.

The detergent has fine sand in it, so you want to remove the possibility of any grit getting in the relays.

Same with enclosed switches that are not waterproof. We don't want them filling with water that will never dry.

Make sure you hook it up to the HOT water on your laundry tub.

You can get "Rabbit Wire" by the foot at the hardware store if you need to keep danglers out of the wand.

Zip tie it in place.

(of course, nothing stops you from ziptie-ing any danglers to the existing rack, and skipping the Rabbit Wire.)

Prime Minister?

The Ultrasonic I have takes about a half hour to hit temp

I usually fill it with hot water, add the de greaser, then hit the heat button.

If you are in a hurry, fill it with hot water and use your wife's Sous-vide to heat the solution

Boiling water is dangerous.

It may have tripped the over-temp sensor inside the unit, shutting it off.

That white oxide forms when you have different metals in contact while washing.

Don't leave those Black Oxide screws installed in any zinc plated parts

Don't leave Stainless screws installed in anything aluminum

If you forget and get white oxide, just toss in the tumbler overnight

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Remember, don't put coil sleeves, flipper bushings , fiber yokes, or other garbage that you are going to throw away, in the dishwasher !

The dishwasher can't clean stuff that can't be blasted with water because it's out of reach.

Obviously, take your mechs apart, and put small parts in the silverware basket

You can.

I don't usually want the whole pin, unless it's something rare that I would want to play.

As long as there are no relays, or other open parts, you can wash them

Google "draining capacitor with resistor" if you want to drain any cap

The green is probably discolored from the high heat and flux used when those resistors were replaced - no big deal.

Any zinc plated part might have some white oxide that you don't notice until 30 years of grime is removed. That's normal.

But when you see bulb-like growths of it, that's normally when 2 dissimilar metals are touching when wet.

No, again dissimilar metals would probably do something bad

Besides, you want to scrub out 50 years of dust and crap

You could wash that relay in the DW

Or just clean the contacts and call it a day.....

Just not the little plastic cube ones that might fill with water & sand