Plunger lane guide adjustment is dicey; if you have time, please check my "help me" thread:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/flash-plunger-lane-guide-help-please#post-6017194

Stephan28 and I have each experienced complete sound cutoff in the last 2 weeks. His game has rebuilt Williams boards and mine has all new pinballpcb.com boards. His game stays silent until the game is powered off and left to "rest", mine drops background sound (and sometimes all sound) until some big scoring event occurs which has a sound associated with it, and then all the sound comes back on. (@stephan28, correct me if I described your symptoms wrong)

Any thoughts? Has your Flash ever done this?

My flash has no sound at all for a while now. We make our own sounds during comp, but i'd like to get it fixed up as i need the space, any ideas what to look for?

Thanks, i'll check. I have a mate who's an operator and a tech who's looked at it a bit, so assuming he's done the obvious, but i'll check.

I asked Lloyd Olson (of "Ask Lloyd" fame on the Pinside front page), and he said: "Boards sound good. I'd suspect aging connectors next. Might be time to replace them."

I had a short near the coin door that would cause ALL sorts of weird... particularly related to audio etc. maybe something to check.

Thanks - I'll snoop around there as well.

Update - Connector J3 (sound board to MPU) was loose. My game seems better, but I would never claim any late-70s solid state game is "fixed".

True Confessions, episode 3: my solenoids shut off last night and I tested the fuse (visually and with multimeter), followed by checking the solenoid input and output power on my beautiful pinballpcb power supply's built-in voltmeter. Output power was only 2.0 volts instead of 28-38. I wrote piballpcb's Jeff, who asked me to test the fuse again.

Turns out I had confused connector J3 and fuse F2, and tested the wrong fuse. Once the visually-OK but bad fuse at F2 was replaced, power came back up! I love having that built-in voltmeter (and a kind, patient vendor)!

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Thanks - hopefully not too many of my mistakes will require a vendor to talk me through what I did wrong. Anyway, no - I don't know what caused the fuse to blow. I have played a few games with a new fuse installed, and so far things work.

Have you made any progress on your sound problem?

I have another game (Star Explorer - a 3/4 scale home game from 1977) which has a persistent problem too. It's a nuisance, as it waits a minute or more before giving you a new ball. With lots of helpful advice from experts, and many(!) new components installed on the boards, it refuses to be fixed. It makes me more sympathetic to your sound problem and that of others with suicidal games.

Finished new Gorgar playfield swap last month so been working on my “new to me” flash. Cabinet and backbox all done. Now on to playfield, sure wish CPR or Mirco would do flash.

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I read a while ago CPR commenting on why they haven’t considered a Flash playfield. It was because the low value of the game would not warrant the outlay for the playfield. Maybe not the case nowadays.

considering the number of sales (3rd most in pinball history with just under 20,000 sold) it seems like the number of used machines out there would make for a large potential market, certainly bigger than some of the games that sold only a few thousand.

There's a NOS playfield for sale on eBay:

ebay.com link: Williams Flash Pinball Machine Game Playfield NOS RARE

That playfield should come up looking fantastic after restoration - the cracking looks like it's mostly going to be in the old lacquer which would get sanded off. Interesting how cupped those arrow inserts are for a NOS - goes to show how it's not really lamp heat but moreover the weak structure of the inserts that causes severe cupping.

I bought a NOS set of Flash playfield plastics from that seller - very happy with them. Great seller.

The condition of that nos playfield is terrible. Inserts, cracking and the planking is terrible. That’s why its been on eBay at least a month or more. Nobody wants to touch it.

It looks like it might be the same playfield that sold a couple of months earlier for $200: ebay.com link: Original Williams Flash Pinball Playfield

I almost pulled the trigger on the original listing but even $200 seemed a bit high.

Interesting...

What I did was spend a couple months cleaning and then hand-restoring the playfield art. Three coats of wax followed by mylar left things looking nice and playing well.

It's not fresh ice rink smooth, but the ball moves correctly and it's fun to play and to look at.

In the process of restoring the art, I noticed the bonus insert circle features black and white fingerprints from one hand painted around the outside of the circle. Are they Constantino Mitchell's?

How much restoring did you need to do? I have a playfield with moderate wear around the bonus inserts and one (that I purchased for restoration practice) that has a lot more wear. If you reworked areas around the bonus inserts, how did you go about doing it? Completely free hand or did you use frisket, air brushing or other techniques?

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Practice is a great idea. My playfield looked similar to your bad one:Playfield_Before (resized).JPG
I did it freehand with a couple reference photos alongside. I used liquid acrylic paint mixed with Golden Artists Colors GAC-200, the secret ingredient. It's a clear medium which hardens to a much harder finish than acrylic normally does. It also allows acrylic to adhere to glass, so I used it on defects on my backglass. IMG_1211 (resized).JPG

The most important thing is matching the colors. Most artist/craft acrylics dry darker than they look wet. On the up side, they also can be removed with isopropyl alcohol, even after they dry. If you put a bit of color on and it looks wrong after it dries....

When I got the playfield looking right, I waxed it 3 times and then laid mylar over it wherever I had done paint repairs. So far - about 9 months in - it's holding up.IMG_1816 (resized).JPG

I really wish I had this skill set. Nice work clodpole

Thanks, @clytor; the skill set I lacked was cpu repair. I tried, but couldn't revive battery damaged MPU and Driver boards. Happily, pinballpcb boards saved the day!

Too bad you don't live nearby. I lack the art skils and could use help sometimes with that. However I have excellent board skills and have revived/rebuilt a ton of these boardsets.

Yeah, that'd be a good exchange and we'd both end up with nicer games.

Thanks for motivating to give the practice board a try! Alas, I'm in the same boat as robotworkshop - pretty decent when it comes to the mechanical and electronics end of things, not so much with the art end of things

Be patient with paint mixing, and if you can, print reference photos as close to life-size as you can. You can actually trace the shapes onto the playfield and fill in the lines like paint-by-number!

I am going to see if my daughter can help with some of my touch up projects since she seems to have a good eye for it. I've been saving some clear celluloid sheets and though it may help if she painted on that since it would be easy to set on the playfield to compare. Also can use it to test sample colors and how light shines through for BG touchups.

Yeah, clear tests help. I have a sheet of plex with a bunch of odd color samples on it.

If I have a reference photo, how does one go about tracing the shape onto the playfield? Do you do it freehand?

I did mine freehand. You can use graphite transfer paper (like carbon copy but easier to erase) to trace. Or, you can use regular tracing paper to trace your photo and then blue-tape it to your playfield on only one edge of the paper and flip it down and up while you draw in the shape on the playfield underneath.

I put a bunch of layers of off-white paint into the shallow dips where the wood shows, trying to get the playfield smoother. Then I just drew and painted in the various other colors like black and green. Then I coated the finished spots with clear acrylic mixed with that GAC-200 hardener.

Then wax, then mylar....

Cool feature: all reversible with isopropyl alcohol in case you dislike how it came out. The "ice rink" clear coat people don't like reversible; they want things permanent, but that makes for more pressure to get it right in one try.

Gotta love when the cat jumps on the game as you're close to breaking a personal record. Still love the game and, usually, the cat. I knew pins were crazy in price when Flash started going for over a grand in some places.

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joining flash club ,
don't have it working yet but its playfield and cabinet are looking good.

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That's a nice Flash. Most of them the middle of the playfield is blown out. Is this the one with the overheated transformer ?

yes , i am going to get someone that can help with repairing the transformer or find a another one in better shape and also get new bridge rectifiers with fuses for added safety.

Perchance have you seen a Flash whose outhole kicker occasionally fires twice? Reliably, but not regularly - like maybe once out of 4 or 5 balls. So far I adjusted the outhole switch, but that did no good.

Lots of system 6 games do this, it's a combination of timing on the kick and when the switch times out in the software. You can usually get it down to a minimum by adjustment of the switch - which you've already tried but keep trying, the gap needs to be pretty wide.

Sometimes it's the wireform actuator, they wear and contribute to the issue, they get stuck on the trough.

Thanks, @slochar, I've found what you said to be true on our EM - sometimes the optimal switch adjustment is in a tiny range.

Update later in the day: I tested the outhole switch diode in case it was defective (it was OK) and replaced it anyway.

Then I manually tested the wireform and switch combo. The fish paper between the top switch leaf and the wireform hangs up on the wireform once in a while and keeps the upper leaf very close to the lower leaf. I think it allows for the lower leaf to vibrate and touch.

I'm going to trim the fish paper a bit and see if that eliminates the hangup, as well as adjust the damper leaf a hair to reduce the posibility of vibration.

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Well, I did all that, and the outhole kicker still fires twice sometimes.

It’s in the board. I had a gorgar that did it and I messed and messed with it for years. Finally just accepted it. Something happened and I switched boards. Problem cured. The other board also solved a magnet problem but I don’t remember what exactly it was.

I'm gonna' check the connector just to have a look at it, but I'm inclined to think my game went to school with your Gorgar and learned the same trick. I guess the double-kick doesn't hurt anything anyway.

Hi all!

This is a dual first post and a post joining the Flash Owners Club.

I got my Flash on Friday. It’s my first pin. I had to drive to Nashville (I’m from Knoxville) to pick it up and was scared as hell because I knew I’d have to break it down when i got there.

Several YouTube videos later, I walked in like a champ and took off the head, removed the legs and got it into a cargo van and brought it home.

I got it home and just reversed everything I’d done and got it playing 100%. Ecstatic.

Flash is a fun game! It’s a lot more challenging than I expected.. and the outlanes can be brutal sometimes. I’m also one of the weirdos that actually likes the playfield art.. (Much better than the back glass).

So everything was working great the night I got it home. My wife and I played about 10 games and were having fun.

Until....

The left flipper began to get stuck, and finally just stayed up. Then the ball return stopped working.

Welcome to pinball, right?

Long story short, with the help of the seller and YouTube, I took the left flipper assembly apart sanded down the mushroomed coil stop and shaft, cleaned it up and added Teflon dry lube. It’s great now.

The ball return problem ended up being me breaking a diode on the ball return switch when I was raising the playfield. A little solder and it’s good as new .

Anyway, glad to be here. This is a great forum and hope to learn a lot more about pinball.

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