So back in the fall I ran across a Firepower that was badly in need of restoration. Based on the condition of the cab and playfield I would assume a good share of its life was spend in arcades before ending up in a suburban basement for a decade or two. I don’t think I would be going out on a limb if I were to assume that the previous owners were smokers, or that the basement could have used a dehumidifier.

When I got the pin back home to my basement I realized a couple of things:
1) Pins that smell smoky in a smoker’s house smell ten times worse in your house.
2) Pins that don’t boot up at someone else’s house won’t boot up at your house.
3) I’ve never played a game of Firepower in my life. And now I need to rebuild one before I get to play one. I’ve got a soft spot for Steve Ritchie games so something tells me I’m going to enjoy this one too.

I’ve been working off and on for the past two months on this restoration so I figured it was time to start a Pinside thread. Partly to document and share what I’m doing and partly to keep me on track to finish it! I’ve always enjoyed reading the pinball adventures of others and I’ve learned so much from all the great tech threads. Maybe someone will learn something from this one, or at least have a good chuckle along with me or maybe at my expense…

With the state of the cabinet and the head I had no reservations to pull the boards and put the cab and head under cover outside. A full restoration is in store so we will deal with all of the cab work later. The playfield was worn down to the wood in a dozen places and most of the inserts were cupped or sunken. A great candidate for a CPR replacement, which I didn’t have. And thus began my learning experience with Firepower. CPR playfields for Firepower are either a) virtually unobtainable or b) holy moly expensive if you happen to come across one. Hmmmm. Maybe I should start on the boards.

There are a couple of invaluable Vid guides on Pinside, one being the bullet proofing Williams System 3 – 7 thread. I basically ordered every socket, cap, diode, and transistor from GPE required to update the MPU, driver board and sound board. I also made a fuse block setup to fuse the bridge rectifiers. I like the way that this keeps the pin from burning my house down if the rectifiers short. Nice. I also split the GI into four individually fused lines at 5 amps each instead of the original 20 amp fuse. In order to make a little more room in the backbox I will be relocating the transformer from the backbox to the cabinet. One simple wiring harness and now the backbox has a lot more room and weighs about a quarter less as well. Works for me.

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One more addition on the fusing front is Barakandl’s special solenoid fuse block. My driver board has a hole burned completely though at Q12 from a previous short so the evidence is right there as to how critical this upgrade really is. And easy as pie to solder together and install. Beauty.

NVRAM replacement for the battery is a no brainer given the number of these boards that have been eaten by battery corrosion over the years.

My last planned activity with the boards is replacing all the IDC connectors with molex connectors. Apart from the tedious nature of crimping more than a hundred wires it’s a pretty simple task. I would rather put the time in now while everything is on my bench than chase a loose connector and troubleshoot when the game is up and running.

So that about takes care of the boards. All going well this Firepower should be good for another generation.

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Transformer with extended wiring harness.

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And rest of backbox wiring harnesses all cleaned up and re pinned with molex connectors.

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Staying with the backbox, I picked up a pinscore LED setup to replace the original displays. I've got one in my Sorcerer and love it so this one again was a no brainer.

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I pulled the wiring harness off the playfield and separated it into its three strands. The power strand was quite simple to clean up as it really doesn’t have much other than wiring to clean. I really like a clean wiring harness so I clip and replace each of the zip ties and clean the wires individually with a shop towel and simple green spray. No more black fingers and its amazing how much nicer everything smells.
The lamp wiring harness is a lot more work. I’ve fought lamp issues on other pins before so I took the opportunity to remove each of the lamp sockets from the harness, tumble the sockets in my vibrating tumbler, scuff the inside of the socket with my dremel, replace the diode, and resolder the leads. Wow, that took me way longer than I thought it would! It was pretty much free to do it this way, but next time I might just replace the entire socket with new...

The switch harness has a pile of leaf switches that are inevitably dirty or oxidized. I removed and disassembled each switch and cleaned them with Autosol to bring back that nice shiny look. Replace the dioides and capacitors with new and the resolder the leads. I have to say I relied pretty heavily on photos to make sure that I got the switches back together properly. I’m pretty certain I’ll be relying on a lot more photos when it comes time to put all the wiring harnesses back on!

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Stripping the playfield was quite uneventful. It pretty much looked identical to everyone else’s 35 year old pin. Black, black and more black on the underside. Worn flipper mechs hanging on by a thread. Wiring hacks here and there done by some operator a couple of decades ago to keep the pin working well enough to earn a few more quarters. A few broken plastics, crunchy dry rubbers, and grime filled posts pretty much summarize the situation. I won’t go into any more details now other than saying everything will be replaced, upgraded or modified as needed to play beautifully when I’m finished.

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All of the underside mechs were black and grimy. Every part got disassembled, dropped in either the vibratory tumbler or the ultrasonic cleaner, and sometimes both! New diodes and sleeves on the coils plus springs etc as needed and all the mechs are now bagged and ready for reassembly when the time comes.

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Ok, this is a pretty boring thread so far. Kind of like driving across the prairies. Surely something interesting has to happen soon doesn’t it? Time to give the wheel a hard yank … and hit the ditch.

The playfield. Yeah. That part.

So after looking for a CPR playfield for several months, and then seeing what they will actually cost if you can ever find one, I decided to take matters into my own hands. This would be a good time to state that I’m not a die hard collector who needs everything to be original. I love games that look great and play great. That’s my thing.
Looking at my playfield I pretty much ruled out trying to restore it. The gouges in the wood from decades of play were deep and prolific. Mylar had been put down over the center of the space station (is that what that is?) after it had started to wear through the paint. The same for the top area above the fire lanes. When I did the freeze spray on the mylar it lifted a lot of the loose paint along with it. Basically this playfield was worn beyond my ability or desire to restore.

Enter plan B. This artwork is actually not that complicated when you look at it and break it down into its components. Its mostly black and white with some straight red lines, a few colorful explosions, a fantastically cool spaceship and one truly crazy space station kind of thing. Oh yeah, and a crazy planet at the bottom with a strange atmosphere, apparently. Super cool, I can do this.

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Enter the point of no return, the orbital sander! A few minutes with 150 grit and she's down to bare wood. Heat up the inserts with a heat gun and pop them all out. Dremel the old glue out of the holes and voila, we have a fresh starting point. I took extreme care not to damage the hot dog inserts since these are impossible to find in the wild anymore. Mine have some small imperfections but overall they are in really good shape and I hope to keep them that way.

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A host of new inserts plus some five minute epoxy and the playfield reconstruction is underway. I elected to go with a few colored inserts and a few clear ones that give me more options to choose colored LEDs down the road.

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After installing all the inserts and sanding flush with 220 then 320 grit I applied a sealing coat of polyurethane to the playfield.

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I forgot to mention earlier that my plan for recreating the artwork on the playfield was to make a full size tracing of the original artwork and then recreate with an airbrush, relying heavily on frisket masks for the playfield details. A few pictures of the process...

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So along the way I managed to screw up my first attempt at creating the playfield. I ended up having a bad bond between the original airbrush paint i was using and the polyurethane layer, so the clearcoat peeled up the artwork. Chalk this up to rookie mistake. Instead of getting too frustrated I decided to try to incorporate something different into V2. I've been playing around with Lyonsden's Pinduino lighting mod on a couple of my other pins and decided to try something bold and incorporate some WS2812 led strips into the playfield under the red laser bolts headind up the playfield. If anyone gets nervous about hitting a playfield with a sander they should try using a router!

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Back up a hundred steps. Sand everything flush, coat with two part epoxy this time, block the entire playfield deadly flat, apply worlds stickiest airbrush primer (spend an hour cleaning airbrush afterwards), apply a plethora of frisket and frogs tape in various patterns and use createx autoair paint for playfield version 2. Hopefully lessons learned in V1 pay off this time!

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OK, apologies for some of that being out of order but i think you get the point. That pretty much brings things up to today's status. I'm hoping to move on to some of the cabinet work in the next few weeks plus the multitude of other tasks still outstanding. I've blasted through a lot of stuff pretty quickly here today so if anyone has any comments or questions on stuff i glossed over too fast, hit me up!

Absolutely! I'm hoping to create a "better than new" pin when I'm finished.

Indeed I think it was the same one. I picked it up somewhere in Okotoks if memory serves correctly.

Great question. So first off I placed sticker "dots" over the new plastic strips where the strip Leds will shine through. I then airbrushed the red laser blasts with opaque red paint. Then I peeled off the dots and re sprayed the laser blasts with transparent red paint. The circles are still visible through the transparent red but you can't see through to the leds underneath so it's a decent compromise I think.

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Thanks for the kind words!

I honestly have no idea what that giant sphere is that the space ship is firing at. Some kind of space station, or a planet or a Death Star copy? No idea. I'm going with space station . The craziest part of all of this is that I had the pleasure of hand painting that sucker twice. Yep, that's what happens when you have problems with clearcoat lifting your paint! Here was the compete V1 prior to a visit from the orbital sander. I made a few changes in V2, namely to the planet at the bottom and the explosion in the shield kickback on the left.

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Oh it's a labor of love all right! I use projects like this to learn new stuff. Up until that playfield I had never used an airbrush before. So, apparently anything is possible! And yes, playfield is out for first auto clear currently. That's not something I would every try to do myself. Way too toxic to fool around with as far as I'm concerned.

After the first clear I need to add the insert decals before the second round of clear coat. Hopefully no drama during that process. I'll be following Vids guide closely for that part

Speaking of learning new stuff, I've had a ball putting your Pinduinos in my AC/DC and Spider-Man. Very very cool lighting effects there. I will incorporate another Pinduino into Firepower to control the leds embedded in the playfield as well as some other leds I have in mind. More on that at a later date when I get around to it

I think there are a lot of Firepower owners who have done some serious touch up jobs to their playfields. I salute all of you guys for taking on that task! I looked at that route and figured it would probably be harder for me than starting from scratch. At least I didn't have to match any colors! And yes, I might have shed a tear or two, or even created some new words to add to the English language when the first paint job peeled up. But I really want to see this project through to completion so I bellied up and started over. Adding the leds into the playfield on V2 made it feel like I wasn't just doing the exact same thing over again too.

I tried to source a CPR but I was a little too late to the party to get one. I'm still shocked that there are so few repro playfields for the number of firepower pins made.

Ummm, there is no freaking way that I'm painting another Firepower playfield! Two is enough to last me for a long long time.

And yes, I am planning on doing something along those lines (actually very very much along those lines) for the cabinet. Here's the head mockup as it stands today. I've heard this attractive fellow referred to as "the melting man" somewhere but I have absolutely no idea why...

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Let me throw out a few more thoughts. Feedback welcome!

1) I'm planning on red powdercoat for everything chrome. Rails, legs, coins door, etc. I think it will be a nice match with the generally black red and yellow cabinet

2) I have all the parts sourced (I think!) for the drop target mod. Fortunately I cut the slots in the drop target area ahead of time. Finally, something I only had to do once!

3) controlled playfield GI circuit with RGB leds. This will run off a pinduino that interacts with the gameplay. Same idea as the leds under the playfield.

4) undercabinet led strips that tie into gameplay. Like flashing red and blue with the fire and power flashers. Stuff like that. I've got this setup on AC/DC and spider man and I love it. Lights up the whole basement!

5) I think it was MOF who was suggesting removing the upper gate to allow for orbit shots. I'm thinking of making that gate "liftable" and controlled by the arduino. Again, reacting to gameplay achievements somehow. This is still just an idea at this stage but I'm planning the for hardware etc to accomplish this. I would really welcome any ideas here on how this might best interact with the game. I'm really running blind here since I've never played the pin before.

Here is a sample of what I have in mind for the led strips in the playfield. This is a test setup with a spare arduino I had lying around (and for the record, don't try to power led strips through an arduino's 5v pin like this as it tends to emit blue clouds of smoke from the voltage regulator ). Throw together some quick code and here is one animations I was thinking of using. The leds at the bottom represent the space ship firing at the space station. The remainder of the leds would flow up the red laser blasts to the stand up targets and then to the explosion in the upper right. Feels a little bit retro, kind of like the rebel simulation of the Death Star exploding in the first Star Wars (anyone else remember that?). It is pretty straightforward to make these RGB strips do whatever you want so I'll add some other animations as well for sure. A really short video of my test setup.

So while I was disassembling the playfield earlier I noticed that the playfield rails were in excellent shape. Especially this one. Finger jointed pine wrapped in fake wood plastic. Not really in style anymore I think.

Off to the planer, table saw and drill press to make some nice maple ones. Let's prime and paint them a nice bright red.

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I started this week on the cabinet head. Sand down to bare wood, apply a skim coat of Bondo (thinned with about 10-20% lacquer thinner to make it spread nicely), prime heavily, sand more, fill more, prime again, and then paint black. Looking good so far I think.

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The cabinet itself is going to take a little work. Strangely enough, when I see something like this that needs repair I don't usually reach for the staple gun...

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I have to admit I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw this picture. No paint issues this time! Block to 600 grit, then I will apply the insert decals and send back for final clear coat. It's all coming together nicely now.

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Repro backglass arrived all safe and sound. Wow these look great. Can't wait to start putting this all back together.

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And since the backglass needs a place to live, I figure it's time to finish off the head. Here's a couple of pics. good enough for the side of the pin

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That's a great idea. I'm pretty sure there are some folks on Pinside who make excellent stencils.
The way I did it with frisket is way way way too labor intensive. Pretty neat end results though

I think I saw some of the custom stencils he did for a Flash restoration on Pinside somewhere. Looked fantastic. And for the record, this is certainly not my artwork! I totally got this from the poster on firepowerpinball.com (what a great resource for us Firepower owners).

Firepower Poster for editing.pdf

I've got the lower cabinet prepped and painted black. I really don't have anything concrete yet for the artwork and I need a break from painting for a bit (it's time consuming and occasionally frustrating when things don't go right). So I'm going to work on assembling some of the electrical for the next bit.

I'll try to come up with something that's interesting and manageable for the cabinet. The frisket work on the head just about drove me bonkers

Ideas welcome!!!

So I've been fiddling with the electrical side of things for the past few days. Here are a few pics of the controlled RGB LED's that are going to be the playfield GI circuit. I'll control these with the Pinduino, mostly defaulting white with a few color flashes or shifts when certain solenoids are triggered, like locks or pops. I'll post a demo video with some sample code when I get it tested out.

Next step is figuring out the playfield led strips and associated wiring.

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And I've managed to put the head back together with the updated boards, special solenoid fuse upgrade, a reworked fuse block system, one pinduino, and the new pinscore displays. Here is how I mounted the special solenoid fuse block, and the pinduino (which didn't have any mounting holes so I made a wooden mounting bracket of sorts)

I will post more information on how I adapt the pinduino to this system 6 game after I get it all set up and working.

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Backbox work mostly complete now. I like how there is more space (and less weight) by moving the transformer to the cabinet. Leaves a nice spot for my modified fuse panel.

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A quick update on a few things I've been working on over the past week. The playfield led strips are made and I'm just sorting out a couple of ghosts in my testing apparatus. Will post a sample video when I get it sorted out.

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And the red powder coated parts have been completed for a few days now. I have decided to keep assembling the pin and work on some artwork ideas for the side cabinet to complete a little bit later. It won't be difficult to mask off what I need to in order to complete the painting later. I'm quite liking the black and red combination so far. I decided to prime and paint the inside of the cabinet as well in order to get rid of the smoke smell. Looks nice and tidy now. Pretty much everything has been updated in the cabinet. New speaker (this isn't the correct one, it's 4 ohm instead of the required 8 ohm which is enroute), new ground braid, new line filter, and everything else disassembled and cleaned. The transformer sits nicely near the back now as well.

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At some previous point in this firepowers life a lower than average intelligence individual thought it would be a good idea to try to get into the coin box via the coin return slot using a crowbar. Needless to say this didn't do any favors to the coin mechs at all. So I ended up pulling the coin mechs and rigging a momentary switch on one of the credit switches. Should work, I think...

I also wired up a couple more GI lights for the transparent blue and red flipper buttons. Hopefully these light them up well enough. We'll see in time I guess.

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One benefit of pulling the coin mech is that I now have a solution for my "controlled upper gate". I'm going to use the coin door reject solenoid to activate the gate. I've mocked it up and I think it should work. This will be controlled by an arduino and an IRL540N transistor plus some code that I haven't given one single bit of thought to yet!

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Before calling it quits this weekend I couldn't resist putting a few things together. It's still way premature but ...

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It is quite tight. I measure 2 5/8" from the backbox side wall to the center line of the header pins.

So I've finally got the playfield back in house fully completed now. The clear coat is beautiful to say the least. I'm really happy the way everything has turned out. Pinball is really a winter hobby for me so I'm going to enjoy our short summer season up here before hitting the home stretch for this project.

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Thanks for all the compliments guys, it means a lot to me I've really enjoyed this resto project but I have to say I underestimated how long it would take by a factor of two or three!

Gosh, I really don't know. I am honestly an amateur with the airbrush. I picked it up on Amazon for about $50, and the only thing i really knew I needed was the screw stop on the back end to control the paint flow. I had previously used a Harbor Freight version without the stop and I made a real mess out of that! The second playfield I painted with Createx AutoAir thinned with 4012 reducer which worked very well. Highly recommended and looks fantastic when cleared.

I agree! I've left quite a few clear starburst inserts so I can play around with LED colors once everything is together again.

Well, quite honestly I learned how to do almost all of this from several of the how-to guides already on Pinside! When it comes to the playfield I didn't do anything too far off the beaten path. Heavy reliance on Vid's guide to playfield restoration and lots of reading other Pinsiders resto threads for ideas as well. A special shout out to Setzkor here on Pinside for providing his details on how to print and fix the decals properly.

Ok, I'm back at it again! Summer was great, but since it just snowed on the weekend I guess that means it's time to get back to some pinball

I started by installing the drop target mod that lots of pinsiders have completed. Took a bit of creativity sourcing the parts on eBay but it all came together in the end. A few of the topside components and rails installed then over to the backside for the mechs and wiring. There are a few things to work around now based on the changes I've made to the pin so it's a little slower than usual. Working around the playfield led strips and the drop targets means repositioning a few things. And the new controlled GI uses different wiring so I need to pull the old GI from the wiring harness and use the RGB wiring instead. Details, details, details...

Hopefully I'll have the basics completed in a week or two then start the commissioning process ...

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I'm giving these colored ones a try since the original yellowed ones really look out of place now. I also have similar led's for the pop caps so it should look pretty much the same as yours!

I haven't shared half of the mistakes I've made

Well, I've managed to get back at this over the past couple of weeks and have made some good forward progress. I can't seem to get the photos off my dying Iphone anymore so I'll write a bit on the computer then post a couple of pictures straight from my phone. Looks like I'm going to need some "what to try next" advice as well so I'll save that for the end.

Current status is that the playfield is fully populated and installed in the cabinet. The topside is all completed as well right down to the plastics and scorecards Looks like a beauty for sure. I've got the drop target modification fully completed now, which I'm pretty excited about. And I've got the Pinduino controlled GI lamps and playfield embedded LED's up and running with some pretty basic test coding.

I had a faulty 5V regulator on the power supply earlier which I replaced with a PSU5 5V switching regulator, so that's all good now. I slowly powered up each individual circuit fuse by fuse and found that the CPU didn't want to boot up but all other circuits came on fine (GI, solenoids, lamps). I haven't tested the flipper circuit yet, leaving that for last. So, take a little time to read up on system 6 board booting problems and eventually decide to pull the CPU and driver boards and recheck all my work. Turns out I missed soldering in a column of pins on one of the ROM sockets when I replaced these many months ago (I just tacked the corners and forgot to solder the rest in. Whoops, that cost me about a week of troubleshooting). So now we have a booting CPU which is a pleasant sign to say the least.

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So I'm currently going through the process of identifying what is working properly and what is not working properly. In the working properly category, the pin appears to boot up to attract mode with playfield lamps flashing away and the occasional synthesizer sound emanation from the sound board (not sure if this is normal or not). I can get into the test menu with the auto up/down and advance coin door buttons. I can't start a game, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest at this point. Some things worth noting from my initial run through the various tests (going from memory here):

1) I've installed Pinscore displays in the backbox. The first and last digits on the player 1,2,3, and 4 displays do not light up in any of the various tests including the display test. I self admittedly know nothing about what drives the display digits. Any advice on where to start with this problem would be appreciated.

2) During attract mode, the "right outlane special" lamp and the "1 can play" lamp on the backbox are locked on and do not flash (both of these are on lamp drive column 7). The remainder of the lamps on column 7 do not light. When I run the lamp test via the coin door all of these lamps flash as you would expect. Is this normal behaviour?

3) In the solenoid test, it appears that all of the solenoids fire except the top left pop bumper. I'll double check the solenoid wiring under the playfield before chasing this back to the driver board.

4) I ran the switch test and see that it is reporting a couple of stuck switches in the top rollover lanes. I'll double check the switch gaps there and give the rest a once over before spending much time chasing down anything else it could be.

5) I went through all the options on the menu and set number of credits in #18 to 0 to get into free play mode. Also adjusted a few of the others to what I think make sense for starters. Are there any suggestions for any of the settings from fellow Firepower owners?

And finally, I'm not certain that any of the errors I've identified so far would prevent a game from starting, unless a stuck switch would do it. So, that's possibly going to take some work as well.

Resolution is terrible and the synth sound comes on pretty loud, but it's a start!

Ha, great question! Unfortunately yes, three balls in the trough. I will double check that the trough switches register though.

Perfect, thanks for checking this out. Seems the lamps are all working correctly which is great.