Regina, SK
Hey all,
Well, after some thinking, I've decided to put my Twilight Zone up for sale. I've got a lot of machines on the go, plain and simple.
Here's what I can say about the machine. Is it a show piece? No. But it's pretty presentable; original cabinet decals, some chips out of the cabinet, not faded (the pictures can speak to that). I wouldn't categorize this in the "beat to crap, needs new decals right now" range, anyhow.
Here's what I've done to the machine, and why the price is a bit higher than usual for what isn't exactly a collector machine:
- Full teardown of playfield: I took this down to a bare piece of wood. The playfield was polished in three stages using a random orbital car polisher. This is true for the mini playfield as well. The underside was sanded to remove trails and so on; I can't 100 percent recall if I did this for the mini playfield, but believe I did. I don't want to sound like a tool who can't remember what he did or didn't do, but I did a LOT to this machine, and some stuff gets lost in the shuffle.
- Harnesses were cleaned.
- Almost all metal parts were tumbled; I don't believe I did the parts in the clock, there may be the odd E-clip that escaped the process, and I might have skipped the brass screws such that I didn't wear the plating off them and mistakenly blow a long screw through the playfield.
- All plastics were cleaned.
- Some, if not all, ramps were regrained; I know I spent a few NFL Sundays with sandpaper in hand, that's for sure.
- New rubber rings
- I can't recall if I replaced all the bulbs, but I don't know why I wouldn't have.
- I have the original clock board (non-working), but there's an Ingo v. 1.8 board in there right now. That's new as of about a month ago.
- The backbox has 545 flashers in it; just got those last Friday.
- Cliffy protectors installed save for the long one on the side of the mini playfield, which was giving me some grief when I went to install it, but will be included in the sale. I'm guessing I'm just missing something obvious.
- I spent about 15 or 20 hours doing airbrush work; someone had blown a screw through the top of the playfield and into the rocket ship area. I filled this and touched it up. I can try to take pictures of it, but unless I pointed it out to you, you'd be pretty hard pressed to tell what I did.
I'm not trying to blow my own horn, but I wanted a game that played well, and it really does. It looks pretty good, too. I knew this wasn't going to win best of show, but I wanted it to play as best it could. If it was on that playfield, it's been looked over. I can't recall anything on the top and bottom that I didn't clean; I'll put it that way.
The cabinet was cleaned out. I believe I sanded the bottom where I could reach in there, but did not take out the transformer and all those goodies. Could it be cleaner? Yes, probably. Is it pretty presentable inside? Yes.
The issues I know of:
1) I socketed the UNL2803A chip that controls the switch matrix, as this chip is known to go. I put the socket in backwards, so the little notch in the chip doesn't actually line up with the notch in the socket. Simple mistake, but I wasn't going to risk damaging the board by doing unnecessary soldering on it to repair this mistake.
2) Some plastics are cracked/broken. Slingshots, rocket ship, some of the larger ones. Anything horrible? Not enough to make me want to buy a new set, but you may feel differently.
3) The ball occasionally stops on the left-most magnet of the spiral. I have put a piece of mylar over the magnet, and believe it's getting hung up on this. The mylar could easily be removed.
4) Mini playfield has some planking; I'll try to get better pictures of it all lit up.
5) Two or three of the blinkers in the backbox do not work; I believe they need new sockets. I didn't know this until I actually receive the 545 blinker bulbs last week; correspondingly, I have not replaced those sockets.
6) FIXED - There is one four-pin connector that was giving me a lot of trouble. It connects the mini playfield up to the rest of the wiring; I wasn't getting the right-hand switches on the mini playfield to fire. The pins and housing for that is on order as we speak; hopefully, it will be here tomorrow and I can get that fixed (July 4th may slow down shipping). That's why there are no pictures of the game fired up. I will not sell until this issue is fixed, as I'm not comfortable saying I did the clean up on this game and not having it work as well as possible. I'll get that going as soon as I have the parts, and take corresponding pictures.
7) PARTS ON ORDER - Some #2 screws are missing; I will gladly get some and give them to you, but though I'd put that right up front. These are the ones holding microswitches in place. This hasn't affected gameplay, but hey, I'm trying to be forthcoming.
A couple of the brackets holding the mini playfield switch covers broke upon reinstallation. I intended to get the kit from Great Lakes Modular and replace them, but never did.
9) There are a couple of wires coming off the mini playfield that are wrapped in electrical tape. I think the Cliffy protector will cover this (don't write that in stone). Now it's been disclosed. There may be other such wires; if I come across things as I do another once-over, I'll post up here.
10) REPLACEMENT PARTS ON ORDER- The boards on the trough are being flaky at the moment.
11) Clock face (clear plastic) is missing - the parts costs $3.50 from Pinball Life; just haven't placed an order recently, but I guess I can knock that off the price
Long story short, I have quite a bit of money and a tremendous amount of time into this machine. I don't want to turn this into a sob story or anything to that effect, but if I got $5,000, I'd be coming out a bit behind on this machine. That's taking into account the machine and parts alone, and none of the time put in. I think it's a good solid machine, and if nothing else, it's not going to need to be shopped out for a while.
I'm looking to either sell outright or trade. DMDs, Sys11s, pretty much anything would interest me, but I'd actually like to trade down a bit. Let me know what you have. Any questions, feel free to fire me a personal message or ask here. If you want to chat on the phone, let me know and I can give you a call. Thanks for looking.
Luke
Bradenton, FL
