Picked this up at auction last summer for a grand total of $40. She's a dirty girl.

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Glass is toast.

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Displays are questionable.

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Boards look good.

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Cab is good, though the bottom is delaminated.

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Steve Young to the rescue:

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Random parts in the box:

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Missing some stuff:

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Stripped the playfield, almost all the way.

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Going to work through this playfield at the same time as my Blue Max project. Saves time and materials costs to clear coat 2 at once. Wish me luck. My first System 1.

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Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions, everyone!

I'll spare you some of the gory details, but I finished what playfield part removal I'm going to do for this one this weekend.

As I started:
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About the end:
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Eat it, star rollovers (save the inserts, you'll need them later):
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Saves me a chore, mylar was toast:
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After:
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Next, flipped it over and cleaned the shiznat out of the inserts. Qtips and spit, if you're wondering. I also checked them all. They were all still seated in place very securely.
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Next is where we kind of follow my misunderstandings and complete half-assing of the stuff vid1900 lays out in his "ultimate guide to playfield restoration" thread. This is my 4th such attempt. The others turned out beautifully. It should be noted that if you go much farther than this and don't apply new clear coat, you're going to ruin your machine.

First, to make sure that the inserts stay put after we clear coat, I put a bead of epoxy around the lip of the insert and wood interface. Take care not to get any on the lens as you'll be able to see it when it's lit up, especially on clear ones.
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Before flipping it over, I like to put painter's tape over the bottom of all the playfield penetrations to keep stuff, polish, clear, etc. from dripping down and getting all over everything.
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Finally, here's where we start with a bare playfield:
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Hit it with naphtha to clean all the surface dirt, wax, etc. off before starting more aggressive negotiations. Round 1, 2, and 3.
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Then started the fun part. I've done this a number of times and this game fought me the entire way. It had been rode hard. The ball swirls are all the way down into the paint. Poor thing. It was brutal. Can you tell which half I did before deciding I was tired and giving up for the day??
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Be careful when finding out that the ball swirls actually go all the way through the clear coat into the paint. Wipe, good. Wipe, oooh, pretty. Wipe, great! Wipe, oh, shit, bare wood. At least it's, like, not in the center of the playfield where people will notice it. I think I'm going to have to take a dremel to the bonus ladder inserts. They're just not coming clean and the uneven discoloration is driving me nuts.
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We'll finish the other half next time.

Old clear coat all over my hands. Badge of honor!!
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I'll check them again. They all seemed to be pretty well seated, but better safe than sorry. I didn't get too aggressive trying to push them out.

Haha. It's on the list. Last weekend it was in the 20s outside and there's no heat in the garage. I was being lazy. The weekend before that, I participated in the Houston Marathon Weekend events. It was just exhausting as I forgot to train for it.

Hopefully I'll get out there this weekend and make some more progress. I have a plan to fix all the missing paint, but I've never tried to get that in depth with repairing paint before. We'll see how bad I can mess it up.

I hope so! I'm having a bit of a tough time making a decision. I've heard a rumor that new playfields may or may not, maybe be in production. I could do that or I could spend 30 hours fixing this and it'd still look like crap.

Managed to do a little work this weekend. Still not 100% sure where I'm going with this, but she's still a dirty girl.

Cleans up nice, kinda:
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After cleaning the whole playfield:
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It's hard to get a picture of what I'm talking about. The ball swirls are all the way through the paint. All over the playfield. Short of re-painting the whole thing, I'm not really sure how to make it look decent:

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This is what I call, "Good Enough for the Girls We're Datin'."

Should have laid down a layer of clear first, but the in-laws were in town and I needed more than an hour in the garage.

First, took a couple scans incase I messed it up and to re-make stencils for the lettering later.

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Fun with "frisket". This stuff works good for cabinet stencils, and came up without taking any paint with it.

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After cleaning it about a hundred times, laying down the frisket, and cutting everything out.

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Put down the white. Now, the white went on and dried about 10 shades "bright ass whiter" than it looked like it would out of the bottle. Baby girl needs a tan, but, you know, see the first sentence of this post.

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Frisket removed. I wish I'd done some of the yellow at the top before I removed it, but oh well. It's only a little more $$ to put another layer of frisket down and fix the yellow towards the top.

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Then I went around and repainted in a whole bunch of black. Not bad.

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Side by side.

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Next time we'll finish the rest of it and prepare to start clearing.

Also, forgot to add. Before doing the touch up stuff, I used a Dremel to clean all the old crap off the tops of the inserts. Not recommended. Pop them out and use sand paper. They don't look great.

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I've actually been dreading this. It didn't cause any problems last time I used it to paint a cabinet, but that's a different kind of paint. We'll see what happens.

Had a nice 4 hour mess trying to get this to work. I've seen others have some good results, but I need practice. Hopefully this will work out for me! Took so long, I ran out of time to actually paint.

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Fun on Easter Weekend.

Used the stencils to put the numbers back in. Moral of this story is to clear before you use these stencils. They pull chunks of paint off. Ugh.

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I touched up a few more areas. I suck at matching colors and the f-ing paints keep drying significantly different shades than they go on. So what the hell. Most of the bad parts will be covered by plastics, aprons, and skirts. But this is never going to look perfect. I'll probably just mess it up more if I keep going.

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Now the fun part.

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First coat and leveling inserts.

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The next day. Inserts need another round of leveling. Sanding to level stuff out.

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Coat number 2. Use pennies to level out your playfield before coating and insert leveling. It'll save headaches.

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After coat number 2.

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More to come!

Not a lot of time to work this weekend, some sick kiddos! But got a few things.

Mainly, I masked off the circles and sprayed them black. Still figuring out the stencil thing. They're hard to place because you can't see through them!

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Keylines look reasonably good. However, the freaking stencils left some adhesive behind. Not sure if it is because it interacted with the clear or I left them on too long, but it's really upsetting. I used some alcohol and a rag to get most of it off, but it smeared and removed some of the black paint. Sucks.

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After 3rd coat.

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Ready for 4th coat.

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After 4th coat.

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Final sanding ladder.

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After 320.

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After 600.

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After 1000.

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After 1500.

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After 2000.

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After 3000.

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We'll do the final buff and wax after the 6 week cure time has elapsed. I can also start testing/rebuilding boards and getting the cabinet back in shape.

Hopefully I’ll get something figured up this weekend. I’ve been waiting for it to cure. I need to order parts and have been moving the stuff in my shop.

I need to find my computer power supply so I can test the existing MPU.

I've been kind of a lazy F the past little bit. I was working to get the clear coating done on this and Blue Max so that I could move all the stuff in my garage. My wife bought an office for her law practice last year that happened to be big enough to house a pinball hobby, not saying it was planned, but kinda happened that way. Thank someone for making it cheaper to buy a property than to rent an office. Go figure.

Anyway, I've spent the last while moving all my garage stuff over there and getting it set up. Not as easy as it sounds. Ugh. In the process, I've been upgrading a bunch of stuff and building new stuff. And trying to fix it so that I don't just have a bunch of shit laying around everywhere because I don't have any proper storage. And I'd like my tools to not get gross and nasty and dusty in between solutions. Enter blowing a bunch of money and crap.

I used a bunch of lumber I had laying around from disassembled previous projects to build most of this. So, it wasn't too much cost for wood.

I built an extra set of "paint carts" so I could do two machines at a time. One for a cab and one for a backbox. Pretty handy so as to not get paint all over your pinball cart.

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Next, a lot of people use the black bins with yellow lids from Home Depot to store stuff. Those are like $12. I found a bunch of these on marketplace for $5 each. Not bad. Commercial grade, cheap, used, heavy duty. I got 20 for $100. The wife wanted 5, and I got 15. Can always get more if need be. But these will be for like saws, clear coating supplies, etc. I only use them a few times per year, so they get dusty, gummy, and gross in between uses. With these, each can have their place and not be in a giant pile right in the f=ing way.

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I started building a rack for them, but only got as far as cutting most of the pieces out. It was almost 100F outside and the garage is sweaty. More to come.

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Next, I'm sure you've seen them, but I want a small parts organizer. Right now, they're just in piles or cups or random boxes. You can get these from Harbor Freight for cheap. Like much cheaper than anywhere else if you use a coupon and wait until they're on sale. Problem is, there's a limit of 4 and I need 20. So, have to get creative.

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You can see the endgame with these cases in this video from some random guy on the interwebs. I'll eventually build one of the racks like this.

Also on the list: I need to build a cart to combine my shop-vac and dust collection bucket so it's more user friendly. Something like:

Finally, I had the brilliant idea to make my clear coat boxes have wheels on them. Up to now, I've just been picking them up and moving between saw horses. Wheels. What a novel idea. You can see them to the far left of this picture. (Be sure to tell me how nice the reflections look in the currently curing clear coat.)

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So, some progress, or lack thereof, this weekend. Mostly garage organization.

Completed the bin organizer rack. Worked pretty well. I used some spacer blocks to keep me from having to measure everything. First, clamped the risers together.
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Added the cross members:
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Made sure one fit before assembling everything:
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Made sure it fit after assembling:
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Drug it into the final area and organized everything into their bins. Took giant piles of sh!t scattered everywhere and made it all in neat bins in the rack. Pretty awesome.
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Bought this buffer/polisher stand from Harbor Freight. Need to find a 13mm wrench to assemble. Forgot to bring metric stuff. Also need to bolt the buffer to the stand...through holes that don't line up. Before I was just putting the wheel on a bunch of bricks or a table or something. This will be a lot safer.

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Cut the stuff for the small parts organizer carts and the vacuum carts. And the clear coat stand legs, but I didn't take pictures. Will build all of it next weekend, hopefully.
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Everyone loves my non pinball updates, so here we go.

Assembled the vacuum cart. Need a couple longer hoses, but needed them anyway. The main hose was too short for my Maslow. I have a lot of issues with short hoses.

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Worked on assembling the storage tote cart. They're pretty awesome. Hopefully with the 30% off Father's Day coupon, I can fill out the big bin cart.

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Assembled Clear Coat Cart 2.0. Wheels make everything easier in pinball.

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Hung some pegboard after organizing a bit. Works better than a giant pile of hand tools on the work bench.

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The giant mess is getting there. Almost ready to start enjoying it. Well, if it wasn't 98 degrees all the time here in the summer.

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Finally did a little work on this. I used Clay's guides to test the existing MPU. Well, stumbled through it. It seems to be working all the way, but there's one address line that's suspect. I'll see about rebuilding all the boards and hopefully it's going to work.

MPU as found:
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Set the switches as Clay suggested. Well, backwards. Took me a while to figure out what was "on" and what was "off".
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Computer power supply for +5V and -12V. Not fun unless it's a hacked up mess.
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Making an "alive" light. Note to self, LEDs are polarized and won't work if installed backwards. Even if you triple check you're putting it in the right way, you're going to fuck up and put it in backwards. Ask me how I know.
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Installed. Note the nice, professional solder job:
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Let's see if we can blow something up:
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3 hours later and one reversed LED. Another note to self, don't forget to install the slam tilt disable jumper. Duh. Now, she lives:
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I ran through all his tests. Only thing that looks suspect is one of the address lines. It's not pulsing or pulsing very fast, hard to say. But everything else works like a champ, so I guess we'll roll with it.
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Post testing mess:
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Redneck engineering seal of approval:
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I'm not sure which line it is, but see the pic. It's a screenshot from the video I made of testing it. TC1 connector, pin 10. If the line you're looking at is the same one, please let me know. I'm still trying to decide if my board is working or if this is a broken spider chip.

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I spent a lot of this weekend making lists of stuff I need to get for Blue Max, Countdown, X-Files, and Doctor Who (LEDs and Rubbers for the last two). I usually make lists before I get started. Like testing coils, digging out the rubber quantities I need, etc. But with Countdown, I was ready to clear coat Blue Max, so I just stripped it down and took off with the playfield. Stupid, because it took 3x as long to scrounge through the pile of stuff to find everything that I need.

Anyway, started in the bottom of the cab on the transformer board. Needs a new power cord, all but two of the fuses were just gone, and the two remaining ones were really off...like 5A in a 1A and such. Scary stuff. But the rectifiers were good, so that's a plus.

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Next, I dug out the power supply. When I went to pick this up, the entire assembly was dangling by the top cable. First thing I did was pull it out of the machine. I hope they didn't plug it in like that.

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So, naturally, things were amiss. I don't think it broke traces, but ouch.

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It must have been swinging around for a while, because the caps were beat up from banging on the mounting bracket.

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Getting the thing off the back ripped up both of the traces. I'll probably have to jumper the back traces to the front to make sure it's good.

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Next, the driver board. Only found 3 transistors that were bad, I'm pointing to them. They ran some lights. One was shorted and two were open. One pin on one chip (I think it was the 3rd from the left, pin 10? Not sure) tested out of spec, so I might replace it (didn't correspond to one of the transistors at all).

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Finally, fun with displays. First, bench tested all chips. Both on one display were testing completely open. I wasn't brave enough to pop it in my Close Encounters and see if it works though.

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Recharged everything using the computer power supply.

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Now, off to spend my retirement money on loads of stuff at PBR, Comet, Titan, Mouser, and PinballLife.

Weekly procrastination update. I put in orders at eBay (x2), PBR, Titan, Comet, Mouser, PinballLife, and Marco for this and Blue Max over the past couple weeks. Nobody had everything. The ebay and PBR orders haven't arrived. PBR is the one I really need to get started, so I got sidetracked again and built a version of Skypilot's rotisserie. His was made for WPC stuff mostly, this was made for Bally/Stern games and should accept widebodies.

Castors from Harbor Freight (with 30% off coupon). Boat seat mounts off of Amazon. This will hold it at whatever angle you want vs using a stick or something to clamp it in one place.

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Chicken scratches, if you're interested. Don't cut your fingers off.

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Build progress. Clamped the parts together to make the holes for the seat swivels reasonably similar.

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Used pocket holes and way too much glue to assemble.

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I wasn't confident that a wood screw would hold the weight of a playfield long term, so I used angle brackets and a bolt through the cross member instead. I need to get some more #8 screws to replace the #6 that I had in stock. Also need some #8 nylon lock nuts.

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And done. Note to self, you'll never achieve my completely next level carpentry skills...so don't try. And don't stick your fingers in the swivel whilst rotating.

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Tried to do a little bit on Countdown yesterday...but something fishy is going on here. Wish I'd noticed before spending 35 mins getting the damn old levelers out. But the rails have some like wood veneer sticker on them. I was going to repaint, but I'm scared to see what's going on under the sticker. Cleaned up pretty good though.

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Fun times this weekend. Polished the playfield. Didn't wax yet, because I will need to clean it again when I get to repopulating it and didn't just want to redo it.

Consumables in question:

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Some progress shots. Kind of the polish progression. I didn't have good lighting to get really good glamor shots.

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Took a dremel and cleaned all the crap out of the holes. Shit be gone!!

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Used a brad tipped bit to make sure that the screws didn't lift the clear when I put them back in. Blue Max playfield, but you get the point.

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Pretty shiny.

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Thanks PBR for new drop targets:

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Before/After. These had like 1/4" of dust and gross on top of them. Pretty nasty, actually. The coil on the yellow drops was fine, but incorrect. I ordered the right one, apparently, so I installed it here. I'll save the one that was in there for a future project.

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I then cleaned up most of the playfield hardware I removed for touch ups/clear coating. Most was just dirty as this didn't have any playfield glass on it when I purchased the machine. Cleaned up pretty nicely though. Naptha will clean with no ill effects, but a little spit will take the paint right off. Weird. Be careful.

The rebound bumper is, like, riveted on there. If anyone knows how to replace it, I'd love to do so with the Titan one I got for the machine.

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If you look above, I probably noted that one of the flippers and the kick out hole were missing coils and a bunch of parts. Think I figured out why. Gonna have to double check the boards and make sure this doesn't happen again.

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I'll give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion. As it's usually over 100F in my garage in the TX summer, that shouldn't be a problem.