A few years ago I picked up two broken Eight Ball Champs. I figured, between the two games, I'd have enough parts to get one working. And then the games sat in my garage for years. I picked these games up because Eight Ball Champ was the game that got me into pinball. It wasn't my first pinball, but the one that got me addicted.
I started to clean my garage out and sell off some of my broken video games, I also put the pair of Eight Ball Champs up for sale (even though some pinsiders assumed I couldn't count and thought it was only one game!) I had one person ask several questions about the games, and I checked the games out, for the first time in years. And I realized that I had always wanted to repair a pinball game, but if I didn't do it when I had two mostly complete games, then I'd never do it!

So I checked over both games, and picked the one with the best looking box and playfield. One game was missing the audio and cpu boards, and backglass, but otherwise it looked like I had most of the parts for both games.
I had a few days off before a three week vacation. So I dove in and started stripping the game. First I videoed the game. You definitely want to take plenty of pictures, take more than you think. Then take a few more. I figured I'd use video. I'm not sure if that was better, as fortunately I had a back up game to use.

I took the board out of the pinball box, and put it on my workbench. Then I proceeded to flip the game over a half dozen times as I stripped the playfield. And I felt that there had to be a better way.
I was able to strip the game before heading out of town. While on vacation I figured there had to be a better way to handle the playfield. I knew going forward I'm going to have to flip it over a lot. And that was when I discovered the pinball rotisserie, from @pinballmike217 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.pinball/MUCCofqKYL0 as well as @vid1900 Quick and Dirty Guide: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/vids-quick-and-dirty-rotisserie-guide
I spent quite a bit of that vacation reading about how to build the rotisserie, as well as how to clean and repair a playfield.
First thing I did when I got back was build that rotisserie. It took my longer to acquire the parts, than do build it.

The rotisserie is nice, and pretty much required. But I think I need to figure out a better way to hold the playfield down. I had to remove the apron, the plastics, and two solenoids from the bottom, in order to clamp the playfield onto the brackets.

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Cleaning the machine
Once I stripped the playfield. I started cleaning.
First step was to shine up the metal. I decided to go the tumbler route. I picked up an ultra vibe 18 tumbler. This thing is nice, just toss in the metal parts and turn it on for a few days. I put some novus 3 in the mix as well, but I'm not convinced it was necessary. All the small metal pieces went into the tumbler. The downsides are fishing the pieces out when its done. In addition some of the almond pieces will get stuck in some of the small areas (like the ends of the bolts) that you'll have to dig out. But otherwise it is very easy to use.

The playfield was dirty. @vid1900, and many others, recommend using naptha to clean the playfield. Naptha is good to use as it isn't harsh, and isn't water based. Typically when you clean a playfield, it really isn't that dirty. But this playfield had been in the open, without a playfield glass for several years. Dirt was caked on. Naptha wasn't able to touch it. I broke out with the Simple Green. Damp the cloth, and then clean the playfield. The playfield cleaned up pretty well, enough that I chose not to anything else to the playfield.

The plastics I cleaned with Simple Green. I thought they came out ok.

After cleaning the playfield as well as I could, I waxed it with some p21s.

I was able to toss everything into the tumbler, except for two of the ball guides, and one long ball stopper (not sure what else to call it) I tried to shine them up with my dremel. They came out ok, but I wasn't happy with it. I felt I could do better. I ended up getting a Powertec BF600 heavy duty bench buffer that did a much better job of buffing the guides.

Now the east part is done, the playfield and most of the parts are all clean, it is time to start fixing everything,

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