The story goes like this.

I'm looking at pins on eBay and see that theirs a Heavy Metal Meltdown for sale, currently at £400 with a day or two to run.

It's not in great shape but looks all their with the major plus point being it's located in my town.

Anyway with half a hour left to go on the auction it's still £400... so I'm thinking I've got to put a bit in.. If it goes for £500 or £600 so what but at least I got a bid in so bid £410 expecting to get outbid.

5 mins left.... Still highest bidder..... 30 secs.... left still highest bidder.... You've just won!!!

Oh crap where am I going to fit this one!!!!

As you can see the back box is off and it's filthy. Playfield little worn but all in all looks salvageable.

I've always started projects like this and at the end though I wish I took some photos along the way and documented it a bit... So here goes.

The pictures attached were uploaded by the seller on eBay.

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Picked it up on this Sunday just gone (only about a mile from my house!). I was in two minds either to take it home or fix it up at work. Decided to take it home however it was going to have to go in one of the bedrooms upstairs!! With a bit of help from a neighbour I manged to get it round the bend in the stairs.

Look the glass/translight out of the back box and gave it a good clean... It's perfect. cant believe it! It looked terrible in the photos.

Now the hard work begins!!

Will keep posting pics and updates but it's going to be a labour of love.

My intention it to keep as must original stuff as possible. Without spending stupid money it's never going to be a show winner but hopefully in a few months I'll have a working pin!!!

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Work done so far this week.

Cleaned the siderails. All the heavy rust is gone but more work is still needed. They'll never be perfect but I'm happy with the pitted chrome look for the time being.

Removed metal parts from backbox end of cabinet. Removed all the dirt and rust and painted them metallic red. Hoping to give this pin a bit of a red theme. I'm going to clean up the legs so they're (as they say in the steel trade) bright and then give them a deep red anodised look. Also painted the parts of the cabinet where these metal parts belong as it was badly rust stained.

The picture shows what the red parts will look like on the cabinet but they have not been attached yet.

Spent a bit of time giving the lower 3rd of the playfield an initial clean as well.

Plans for next few days... We've got a bank holiday on Monday here in the UK So i'm going to get the legs sorted and reattached. Then might start some of the work that needs doing on the cabinet/backbox.

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Took loads of parts in to work today but no camera. However things are coming along quite well.

The legs were as you would expect from the rest of the machine, rusty, flaky paint etc. I cleaned off all the rust and paint, then game them a polish. After this I deliberately distressed then and gave them a red anodised finish.

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I'm really happy with how they turned out and I think they will look really great when bolted on.

Done loads of work on the boom box topper today. It's going to look fantastic (I think ) when it's done.

Expect some photo's in the next few days!!

Progress update...

Well the legs are on.

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The rotten back end of the cab has all being re-glued and whilst not as good as some of the restorations on here it is 10x better that the rotten mess it was!

The back box was many times worse than the main cab and was about to fall to pieces. This has now been all glued back together, all the rotten chip board knocked off and filled.

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Just waiting for a few bits of filler to set then after a light sanding the back box will be ready to go back on.

Any help with the colours for touching up the decals on the BB would be much appreciated!!

Also the topper is almost ready. I've spent so much time getting it to look really great I'm sure you'll all be impressed.

Hopefully this coming weekend I can get the backbox and topper all on and it will start to look a bit more like a pinball machine again!

Still loads of things to do though.... I'm miles away from where I need to be.

Heavy Metal Meltdown.... The adventure continues....

Got the back box on but got no locking bolts that are long enough. For some reason HMM needs stupidly long bolts (about 6" long!) No chance of getting these in the UK so I had no choice but to make some! Managed to get a 3/8" 16TPI die and cut the treads myself on some 10mm dia steel bar, then welded a M10 wing nut to the top. Rather impressed myself with how they came out.

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Anyway with the back box secure it was time to connect the whole thing back up.

Before...

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After...

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After checking, double checking and triple checking everything was as it should be and everything was correctly fused I switched it back on (probably for the first time in many years).

The odd solenoid popped and a few lights flickered then.... sizzle, BANG, followed by acrid smoke bellowing out from under the playfield.

A quick (but panicked) inspection revealed it was only the line filter which popped it's clogs taking out the fuse on the plug!

£10 for a new 6A line filter from eBay and a rest for a day or two until it turns up! Might even get some games of Pinball in if i'm lucky

Fitted the new line filter today and had another go at switching it back on.....

This time again a few lights flickered and solenoids popped, followed by BANG. Oh no not again.

C33 just disintegrated on the Sounds Deluxe board.

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Quick as I can I switched the machine off and removed the sound board for further inspection. It looks like the capacitor dried out or internally shorted.. Another job to do.

Now with the sound board removed I switched it back on again.

No bangs, pops or explosions this time!! No working Pinball machine either.

No led flash on the CPU board, no display, no lights (except the coin door lights), nothing really.

Got out the DMM and started to check the test points on the power board.

All of the testpoints showed around 10% of what the voltage should be??? Except TP4 which showed 0V.

E.g. TP3 should be 230V DC, actual 22V
TP2 should be 190V AC actual 15V
TP8/9 Should be 6.3V AC, actual 1.0V.

The transformer is set for 220V (I know the UK is closer to 240V but I've ran Strange Science set for 220V for years with no problems).

Anyone know what the problem might be??

After some help from the guys on here I've got the power supply problems all sorted out.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/bally-6803-power-supply-problems

The game still wouldn't boot! So pulled the chips off the CPU board and most of them were missing at least one leg!

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Bought some 27128 chips and a Eeprom writer and wrote the ROM chips for U2, U3. Just waiting on the 2 off 6821 PIA chips (should arrive tomorrow).

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Hopefully I should get the board working this weekend.

Still waiting for the the two PIA chips off the main board to come through the post so doing work on the back box and playfield instead.

Got the tranlite sorted out and about halfway through painting all the areas that were filled on the corners of the back box.

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Finally got the topper on. The speakers have been changed to a pair of 3-way car door speakers... The type that boy-racers fit in their overmodified sheds but here I think they look really good. Behind the circular hole (which was blocked off with some white fibreboard before) are a pretty bright 5W LED bulbs behind a red perspex filter these have been wire to the main lightbulb in the topper (behind the grill).

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Just waiting on some red T piping to arrived and then a bit of painting where I filled it up and the back box will be all done.

With the topper on this is one tall PB. It must be 8 ft tall Only a few inches off my ceiling!

Making some real progress on the playfield as well, looks a bit of a mess at the minute with bits missing all over the place will get some pics up as soon as I've got something worth showing.

About a month in to this now and are pretty pleased with how things are turning out. It was in a right mess when I got it!

Red T-moulding added to backbox.

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Still loads of work to do though...

After a bit of a summer hiatus, (for me) the winter pinball season is about to begin!

Starts off with Northern Lights in Manchester this weekend! Will be taking the faulty 6803 main board as well as the sounds deluxe board and fingers crossed will be able to get them repaired.

Then once the clocks go back (end of October in the uk) the Pinball season is in full swing for six months until the weather gets a bit better.

Have set my self the target to get HMM finished by Christmas. We'll have to see how it goes!

About finished (for the time being) with the playfield. Most parts were removed, the playfield cleaned and waxed, all the plastic parts cleaned, lost of post replaced, all rubbers replaced, metallic ramp parts cleaned and painted red!

With any look I'll get the boards back soon from repair and we can try to get HMM to boot up!

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This weeks work!

The auxiliary fuse board which fuses each individual flasher was missing!

Not a chance in hell of finding one of these on eBay so not option but to dust off the soldering iron and make one!

A piece of vero board, a whole bunch of fuse holders, some tinned wire and a strip of connectors and we've got a brand new board.

Just waiting on the main board and sounds deluxe to come back from repair and we might start to get somewhere with this pin...

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All being well I should get the repaired Sounds Deluxe and main CPU board back in a few days.

A big thanks to Jim at http://mypinballs.com/ for bringing them both back from the dead!

If all goes well expect some serious progress over the next few weeks!!

Hi there, I'll keep this post as brief as I can.

Well the HMM is in pretty much the same condition as it was when I was posting on here about it three years or so ago.

The main board and sound board had been repaired... First of all, I put the main board in back box and connected the power up... Switched on the power. Damn this still refuses to boot. TBH at this point I lost interest in the project, thing weren't going that great at work and along with a few other things, fixing up the HMM dropped down the pecking order.

In the end I quit my job, no other job to go to, not now knowing what I was going to do in life or for money. TBH it was a bit of a low point. Then through a number of coincidences I ended up setting up my own company with what little cash I still had, one thing led to another and the business became quite successful quite quickly, soon the money problems were gone but sadly I had little time to play pinball as the 60/70 hour weeks took their toll.

As the business become more established I found that I had a little more time for my pinball hobby. However I still for the life of my couldn't work out what was going on with the main board. However I knew that K's Arcade sold the Swemmer 6803 reproduction boards (https://ksarcade.net/new-used-pinball-boards-parts/swemmer-electronics-products/swemmer-6803mpu.html) but whenever I had some spare cash and logged on they were out of stock.

However, I've just logged on to find that they have them in stock! I've now got one of these on order and hopefully should take delivery soon.

To cut a long story short the HMM project is back in play, see pictures below.

Jobs to do....

1) Check over for any burnt-out coils.
2) Give it a good look over.
3) Install new MPU board and see what happens..!

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Major update

I collected the new MPU board from K's Arcade from the post office this morning. Installed it and with a bit of faffing Heavy Metal Meltdown is now working. After over 3 years!!!

The good points.

1) Really nice bright display.
2) Solenoids seem fine
3) A few bulbs out but hardly any but in time I'll LED anyway.
4) Sounds fantastic once I connected the aftermarket boy racer speakers I put in the boom box.
5) Plays quite nicely and fast even though the playfield has had some batter.
6) The homebrew fuse board I made from this game in October 2016 works a treat. God knows how long this board has been missing on this game but the flash bulbs certainly bring the playfield to life.

The bad points.

1) Back box light does not work. This will be the transistor type thing on the solid state relay board thing these games have... Should be a easy fix.
2) No GI. Nothing at all. 0V on the multimeter. Fuses seem ok, Could do with some suggestions on this please.

So still plenty to do in terms of fixing bits and bobs. And getting the cabinet looking a bit better. But I'd say were about 80% of the way there at this point.

Edit: I've found out what was stopping the GI from working.... I post more info tomorrow.

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Ok if 'fixed' the GI. Here's how....
The MPU should be able to turn of the GI, this I assumed must be by a relay. I found the output on the MPU board and traced the wire to a auxiliary board. Which was the PCB but without any components!!!

There should be a relay and a diode on here. But everything is missing. In order to get the GI all I did was bridge the connectors with some wire to make it like the relay was always in on mode. Eventually I'll either repopulate the PCB or build a new one if I have a hard time finding that exact relay (which seems likely).

Also been doing some touch up work on the cabinet. Not finished yet but I guess I'm 95%+ of the way there.

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Ok so fixed the auxiliary relay board and guess what it didn't cost very much.

A week or so ago I ditched the original 6803 MPU and put in a brand new Swemmer, which is brilliant by the way. Well the 6803 board has a relay to control control the power to the flippers. Coincidentally its the same part number as I need for the board. So to get the auxiliary board working I just unsoldered the relay of the MPU and soldered it in to the board and added a diode. Job done in 20 minutes.

Fitted the new board in to HMM and it works a treat. TBH the relay looks well lets say used but it does the job. I was contemplating building a new board from scratch which would have been possible so if anyone wants on one of these building let me know.

The GI now works properly with the playfield all dark at the beginning of the game with just the drummer lighting up and then as soon as launch the ball the whole playfield lights up along with the mad guitar. Awesome. The GI also flickers when you get a ball up the ramp or get Melt-Melt-Meltdown.

This project is motoring forward now at a terrific pace and is looking better by the day! Also it is a hell of a lot of fun... Such a crazy pinball theme.
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Hi there, I'm not sure if D&D uses this board, however it does use the aux fuse board (which I made earlier) and the dual solid state relay board, which I'll be repairing shortly. Certainly the aux fuse and aux relay board I'll be able to make and hopefully the dual solid state relay board if required too (but I'm nor sure about availability of parts) The Motorola 2322 triac I had to source from a place in Israel. Edit: Think I've found a source for an equivalent for these.

PM me if you need any help. Thanks

Today's work..

1) Fixed a few annoying things... Switches on the sling shots were too sensitive. 2) The ball kept getting stuck in the outline,due to a wrong sized rubber part. Both now fixed.
2) Made a note of where all the GI's are and made a shopping list. White for most of the playfield, 2 oranges for underneath the 2 rollovers which are GI's and 6 reds for under the red plastic lane parts at the top of the playfield.

Played a few games... This machine is really starting to come alive now.. Then I look at the sorry state of the playfield the main guy near the flippers who I call Eddie Van Halen could certainly do with a trip to a good plastic surgeon.

So I decided to have a hour or two working on the playfield. I've never done this before so not sure how things will turns out, also over the years I've seen this been done really badly. I guess I've also seen it done really well (and therefore not noticed it!)

The playfield is very well used so there was plenty of choice. I decided to start with the easy stuff. The black areas not sure is this is the right or wrong approach but I'll give it a go.

Under EVH's guitar there where some areas where the paint was missing so I had a go here first. Instead of using a brush I dobbed the paint in with a tooth pick. See photos below. Seemed to go alright. After that I did the black circles around the HEAVY inserts again seemed to go alright. I did a few more areas and then felt my concentration dropping so I decided to call it a night...

Would rather have fun doing this, take my time and knowing that I did the best job I could that rushing it and making a pigs ear of it all.

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