So I've been working on this Eight Ball Deluxe for a while. I thought I'd share the story.

I got this game from my friend Ken in 2016, but the story goes back further than that. My friend Ken bought two Eight Ball Deluxes from another collector for $200 each, maybe back in the '90s. That's a story to itself, but not mine to share here. Between the two games, there was one good playfield and one good cabinet. Ken's plan was to make one good game.

In 2012, I was helping Ken get a load from his warehouse to take to California Extreme. I saw the nice EBD cabinet, and said I was looking for one. Ken said he had two, and showed me the bad cabinet. He offered to sell me one game for the same $200 he paid, but I got the worst of everything. I said yes, but not today.

I didn't actually pick up the game until 2016, so like I said, this has been going on for a while.
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I didn't get the game in 2012 because I had gone to the warehouse in a truck with Ken, and we were taking a truckload to the show. Then I got sidetracked with kids, another new development in 2012. But I was also putting off getting the games because I knew I wanted to get a new playfield. I don't enjoy doing touch-ups, and they were available. I thought I'd be able to find a CPR repro.

I think it was 2013 when Gene Cunningham was selling EBD playfields at California Extreme. I didn't buy one; I had my heart set on CPR. I think they were $600. I wish I'd gotten one. I didn't have any luck with a CPR playfield.

I probably should have tried harder.

In 2014, Gene's IPB assets went to California as part of the bankruptcy. Planetary Pinball posted just one playfield, and it was clearly a second. It had a couple obvious flaws (stray ink near the 25,000 logo at the top, and one of the inserts had a slight misprint), but nothing I couldn't get someone competent to touch up. This the only playfield they had, it was $1000. I bought it anyway.

I sent email to HSA Pinball, when they were still doing work. Brian had worked with Gene and had remembered this *specific* playfield. He knew the flaws, and he knew the colors were outright wrong, something I hadn't noticed. I sent him the playfield and a check.

Then something surprising happened. IPB had no clear on the playfield whatsoever, so when HSA went to clean the playfield, the ink smeared all over. They did some very good touch-up, plus clearing and dimpling.

HSA has before and after pictures posted here: http://www.hsapinball.com/HSA_PINBALL/hsa081015ebds1.html

Now that I had a playfield, I could buy the game.

Six months later, CPR announced another run of playfields. I got one of those, too.

Here's the playfield I got from Planetary, before the touch-ups by HSA.

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Well, I got that cabinet, but not that playfield.

In 2016 I finally got the games out of the warehouse and took them home in a U-haul. I took the picture at the top of the thread after I unloaded the good cabinet, but before I unloaded that bad cabinet. I set both up in my garage, and a couple weeks later, swapped the parts around.

The good game got five working displays, the good playfield, a complete set of plastics, the better backglass, and the only computer.

For my game, I got no computer. I got four displays, of which a couple were not working, and a couple were Stern. The display brackets on the Stern displays were bent with pliers so the deeper displays would fit. I got three bumper caps, incomplete plastics, and no computer. The backglass would have to be replaced.

And the cabinet for my game was in a fire and had been pretty well smoked.

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With all the speed that had moved this project forward to date, I spent the rest of 2016 doing absolutely nothing with this game. In fact I spent most of 2017 just walking past it in the garage. Oh, sure, I bought parts and piled them all over the house. But I didn't install anything other than a cash box from Marco.

I wanted to do the cabinet first, and I wasn't sure how to get started on the cabinet. I just got stuck because there was so much to do.

I heard through the grapevine that an acquaintance was helping to repaint cabinets. He did one for the Pacific Pinball Museum, and it looks great. Certainly anything is an improvement over my cabinet. I weaseled in a request to get him to help, and he said sure. I stripped my cabinet of almost all of the metal, the boards, the playfield, and the coin door. I dropped my cabinet off at his shop. He had a few cabinets off to the side that he was repainting for other people. This was a really kind offer, and he just wanted cost of materials and some experience in doing this. It was awesome. We talked about his actual business, which is awesome and has nothing to do with pinball, and his upcoming fatherhood.

That was something of a worry, as I know my kids have derailed my time for my hobbies. But no matter, even if he made no progress, I was no worse off.

Well, after two years, he had made no progress. It turns out kids take time. So I got the cabinet back, two years later to the day, in December 2019.

Having failed at outsourcing a cabinet repaint, I promptly outsourced the cabinet repaint to a different friend who had even less experience.

For the last couple years, I've had the game's guts sitting in my garage. Most of the parts are in boxes, but not the playfield or the insert. I want to have the cabinet put together so I have somewhere to put the completed playfield, so I decided to tackle the insert board first.

This cabinet was near a fire, and got smoked pretty well. It was cleaned up with a coat of paint. This kind of worked on the front, but on the back, it was smoky and dirty. The lamp sockets had not been painted; they had been covered with tape when the board was sprayed. However, every lamp socket had a protective coating of rust.

I hate the Bally wedge sockets. If they're going to be this rusty, they're not going to work.

I removed all the lamp sockets, sanded the board clean, filled some of the bigger divots, and painted it white. It came out fine. If I had this to do over again, I might have found a fill that held up to staples better.

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Everything has rust on it. The hinge that holds the insert board was pretty awful. I took a wire wheel to it and gave it a couple coats of primer. It won't look original, but it won't get rust all over my hand every time I touch it, either.

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Long time, no update. Anything interesting happening this year?

Sorry if some of this gets duplicated; I can't remember what's covered in the thread and what isn't.

My friend Mike actually did what I hadn't done, and started working on the cabinet. And it wasn't pretty. I think some of the insides of the head -- the INSIDES of the head -- had been painted. Obviously the whole outside was painted, too.

Mike stripped the cabinet and ripped all the metal bits out. Somewhere along this, the lockdown started and did slow things down. We finally dug up the color codes for paint this summer, and things got painted towards the end of summer.

The stencils I had didn't work two well with the paint that Mike bought; the yellow he picked out was too transparent (it lacked a white base). No matter. The nice thing about working on a disaster game is, everything is an upgrade.

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Once Mike finished with the lower cabinet, I started putting stuff in it. I started with whatever was on top of the storage bins. The buttons were dirty. But when I looked at them, I saw the familiar classic Stern corrosion. I had never noticed the Stern part number.

These have been reproduced from PBR, but the patina nicely matches the ivory color of the cabinet. I'm not going for perfection, anyway, so I cleaned these up and put them back on the cabinet.

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Fuses were correct, but fuse holders look a little crispy. These may get replaced, but I'll wait until I can test them first.

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I forgot about this. My game had a fan installed, sucking air through a grill in the lower cabinet, and wired into the mains plug. I'm not keeping that. When I clipped the fan out, I tagged it. It had been electrical taped before, no solder. Now it's spliced, soldered, and heat-shrunk.

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I can manage a fair amount of board work.

The transformer board looks clean, other than maybe the fuse holders. We'll see how it does when it finally gets power. For the SDB and lamp driver, I will probably be able to manage it. For the lamp driver and aux lamp driver, well, I bought replacements thinking I was going LED. I haven't decided what I'm doing with those yet.

For the computer, I have an Alltek. When I shuffled parts between the two games a few years ago, one game had no computer, so that became the best available MPU by default.

The S&T is sitting in a box in the cabinet right now. I haven't plugged it in, but I have a couple friends who will be happy to help regardless.

Here's the inside of the head of my EBD before it was torn completely apart. Here are highlights:

* Head has been painted yellow, not cream/ivory
* The screw holes in the mounting rails are stripped
* Lock plate has been replaced with a crummy one
* Tech sheets are missing
* Everything got painted to hide the smoke damage

I especially love the last one. All the sheet metal in the head has been hit with spraypaint to cover up the smoke damage.

Mike tore all this out and put in new sheet metal. I'll get pictures of that over the next few days, as I figure out how to put the boards back in and add new mounting holes. I need to get up the patience to figure out what to do with the mounting rails, as they have a fair amount of surface rust. Fortunately, I have the old sheet metal to use to transfer the holes and at least get them "close".

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I started sorting out my boards, and figuring out the details of mounting them. Because the sheet metal in the head is all new, there are no holes. I have the old sheet metal, so I'm going to transfer the holes over, but I wanted to make sure nothing got bent.

If your Flash Gordon is missing its S&T, I found it.

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I've been trying to wonder how long this game has been sitting. The previous owner had it in a storage space in 2016, but he'd bought it previously. The SDB has a "good" tag from 1997. Let's hope it's still accurate.

(It's not that accurate, there's a little plastic shield falling off the filter cap.)

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I sorted through my mounting rails. I have spares, probably out of a pinball show junk pile or something, since I knew I had some that were pretty rusty. I found I don't need to use the really rusty ones, and I knocked the rust off the conductive surfaces on the ones I am using.

[edit] I re-tapped all the holes as #8. They were all stripped, but they're more or less holding OK. I think I can get by with this, unless I see new ones at a show someday.

This is all sitting on the old (painted!) shield, which I'm using to make sure I use the right rails in the right locations. You may be able to see the paint drips towards the bottom and some overspray in EBD-ish yellow. That's not reflection, it's actually yellow there.

Once I transfer the holes, I'll screw these down.

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Boards on rails in the right locations. Minimal finesse seems to be required here. I'm going to screw down the old sheet metal, transfer-punch the holes, and mount the rails. (Mike didn't think the sheet metal was straight enough to trust it but it seems OK to me.)

The computer and lamp driver here are from my shelf. The game I got was lacking both boards. I'm trying to decide if I'm using a new lamp driver for possible LEDs, or fixing this one and going original. The computer will be an Alltek, but I used this -17 to check the holes, since it's full-size.

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No -- very late. Too late.

Fathom is a personal favorite.

So here are the boards in the head, with the original sheet metal removed. The new shields are aluminum, because that was what Mike found was easier. It doesn't matter, but it does mean the magnetic parts bowl has one fewer place to stick.

I put the head lock in last night. I didn't clean up the bar; the rust can stay for now. I'm not getting it plated, and I think it may last longer this way. If I ever find a nicer one, I'll replace it.

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I put the head on the body to get it out of the way. I threw my worst playfield glass in it so I wouldn't drop the head in the body. The wiring downstairs is mostly reinstalled.

Right now, I'm kind of motivated by getting some parts back together so I can get some crap cleaned out of the garage. I have a new pinball machine arriving at some date in the future (transportation got complicated for reasons that aren't funny yet) and I'm trying to get the parts out of the storage bins and into the cabinet.

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Which shooter rod is original to EBD? This is the one that came with my game. It has a flat, textured finish to the end of the rod. I thought it was a little rough, and I have a "new" one from Marco, but it's not clear to me that the Marco one is the original part. This one is a little longer, and it cleaned up so nicely, I may use this.

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I've seen that, but I'm not sure which rod was original. I think_ by 1981 Bally had cooled it with the pointy rods, but I can't prove it (and the parts catalog is no help).

BLY-A100-7 looks close to what I have, but I can't see the end of the handle.

I'm working towards getting the game turned on and most of the parts from scattered over the garage and back into the cabinet.

The cabinet repaint lacked the ground braid across the bottom, so I added it. I have stuff that's a little bigger than original, but will work fine. My stapler aim needs work. (And I've already clipped the loose end off this.)

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Lockdown bar receiver before. I think this got rusty because that happens, but the paint had something to do with the previous cabinet repaint.

I took this apart and took a wire wheel to it to get most of the rust off.

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I got this reinstalled. This included cleaning off the pivot bolt and washer, which had paint from the messy repaint.

I'm a little worried about this stuff rusting, but it's better than it was.

(Obviously parts organization has not been a priority.)

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Trying to clean out the boxes of the loose parts, the lockdown bar was next. I spent about half an hour cleaning off the old beer seal and putting fresh stuff on. Probably shouldn't have bothered, the old stuff was actually OK. But I did manage to clean some gunk off the outside, and it looks pretty good.

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It's time to sort the head harness, I guess. Now, I've never powered this game on, and a big reason is that the head harness is almost scary. There are a couple stray wires in and out of the driver board. I de-soldered quite a few wires to get the insert apart, so I need to go back and work out which ones are which.

But I've got a smoke damage problem here. All of the wiring is discolored. Last year, I took a steam cleaner to this wiring, and while it is now cleaner, the colors are still not apparent.

I found some wires soldered to pins, and a few loose wires with electrical tape, that need to be cleaned up. I suspect I will have to install the insert board next so I can hang the rest of the harness.

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Spent all that time sorting board mounting rails, I found one more, and then lost two I wanted for the aux lamp driver. Fortunately I have spares, and the originals will turn up in the chaos of my garage.

Many months ago, when I was allowed to freely leave my house and visit my friends, I wired this. Chris Kuntz is a friend of mine, and let me use his compressor and stapler. I put all new sockets and new wire in. (Chris would know better than to start this project in the first place.) Tonight, I decided to actually install this, in the interest of getting it off the floor of the garage.

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It looks OK installed. (The paint is too thick, but the backglass will cover that anyway.)

I had to install the hinge into the cabinet, and then install the insert onto the hinge.

I discovered that I wired a few wires too close to cable clamp screw holes. I wish I hadn't done this. I had to relocate one or two cable clamps.

I am a little worried that the lamps are going to be too close to the backglass, for both heat reasons and simple clearance. I'll deal with that as it happens, I guess.

I'm still trying to "correctly" route the cables, then I'll solder in the controlled lamps and fix some hack jobs in the wiring harness. But before I get to that, I probably need to make some space in the garage, which is quite crowded.

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Like any good collector, I complained about space, then bought some more games. So I haven't made much progress recently. But a couple friends offered to help and, for the first time in probably 20 years, the game served a ball to the shooter lane.

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening reconnecting (possibly correctly) all the disconnected wiring in the head, re-pinning connectors. My friends swapped a couple of the always-bad headers on the SDB and found a couple mistakes I made in plugging everything back together.

The S&T board has a problem. It talks, but appears to have a logic problem. And since it turns out I have exactly zero working displays, we couldn't set the settings correctly to get the right sounds.

But the good news is, I have working boards, the wiring is mostly correct, and the playfield mostly works. All we have to do is swap the playfield, troubleshoot the S&T, rebuild everything, and figure out where I put the screws to reattach the coin door. And get some displays.

Of course, I took no pictures.

Oh, the nice shooter rod I got from Marco appears to be too short. I'll be substituting the ugly one, possibly permanently, and perhaps making sure I have the shorter-style barrel spring.

The ugly shooter rod cleaned up nice with some sandpaper, but it is also too short. I guess the modern Williams rods are long enough, so there's a way of making something work.

The S&T board needed some help. It got re-capped, and my friend Mike noticed the D2A converter apparently had a leg out of the socket. He fixed it and it sounds great. It was picking the wrong sounds for a while; either changing connectors or re-seating connectors has hidden the problem.

Wouldn't start a game. Of course, all the connectors are cooked and trashed. I changed one of the connectors on the computer and it will start a game. A few switches are out, likely due to bad connectors. Those are next.

I got these PinScore displays. I don't know how to put these together correctly. I'm not sure it's me. I think the brackets are slightly off, and either the hole in the board needs to be moved or the bracket needs to be different.

But if the connector is fully seated, the bottom board is flexed, and the display works. If the bottom board is not flexed, the connector is not all the way inserted, and the display misbehaves (missing digits, wrong digits, etc.).

In the picture here, the bottom hole is "right"; the top hole in the board is too low, and either the board or the bracket needs to be adjusted. Or, I'm doing it wrong, but I don't see how.

I have some Pinitech Duo displays, but I never got them put together. (I started, was in a hurry, made a mistake, and haven't gotten back to it.)
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I still need to re-skin the coin door, but it did get installed in the cabinet (for the first time in about 3.5 years). Makes me pretty happy to see.

And, thanks to the mysterious Pinball Santa, I got 9/16" leg bolts, just like the factory. Thank you Pinball Santa.

Game got put together and rubbered tonight. It's not nearly done -- there are a ton of little things and a few huge ones. Today I rebuilt a few connectors and found I need to do a few more. Flippers got some much needed new parts. Most of the lamps are now working; the exception is the 20k light on the Corner Pocket,. The inline drop targets were a little bit seized from neglect, but they're working OK now that they have had some lube. The bottom arch is still wrong, one of the coin door bolts is missing and needs to be shortened and installed, the playfield still is terrible. But it now plays, and that's the first time these parts have really done that in probably 20 years.

The next step is to start swapping the playfield. This includes fixing a bunch of poor wiring decisions and some other fixes. Once that's done we'll have to go back over all the little stuff, like some missing hardware.

(Picture taken at Pinball Pirate in Benicia, CA. Chris is a friend of mine and has been hosting my game, likely because he's sick of hearing me talk about this project.)

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The shooter rod I installed was what I thought was a correct rod, but it was slightly too short. I swapped it for the nicest (used) pointy rod that I found in my stock. It appears this bottom arch really wants a 7 7/8" rod. I don't like the pointy rods and I don't know what's "correct" for EBD. Come to think of it, when I switch to the new bottom arch, I may have to swap this again -- the bottom arch is off an Eight Ball for some reason.

The coin door harness is probably going to get replaced with one I got from Third Coast Pinball ages ago. One of the coin switches is disconnected. But that will probably happen last.

I swapped the Alltek computer for a barakandl one and turned the Home ROM on. Interesting extra feature for DELUXE, plus the player 2/4 bonus bug is fixed.