Well hot off the completion of Sorcerer, I have started my next project: A restoration of a Fish Tales Machine.

I first encountered Fish Tales int he basement of the Student Union at Oregon State University in 1992. It was flanked by an Adam's Family, and spent quite a lot of time there instead of studying. I love the fast pace of the game. If you don't hit that boat ramp, or the long cast, then you are in trouble. Bricked shots are not very often forgiven.

I also love the goofy call outs, and it has one of my favorite call outs of all times.. "Hey look Bob, water skiers!" The first time I saw the video mode, I nearly fell over with laughter.

So on to our restoration subject. This machine belonged to a friend of mine (@acitti) and was a regular part of his collection for years until I acquired it as part of a trade for my Fun House. The machine is not in that bad of shape. The playfield has the usual issues with lifted inserts (the fish bodies), and the cabinet has the typical fade that so many of these machines suffer from. However on the plus side, there are no termites to deal with, and more importantly NO CORROSION.

So here is the plan for this machine.
1. Strip, prime, and repaint the cabinet and head (single stage gloss black)
2. Apply new decals
3. replace the playfield with a CPR gold playfield
4. Upgrade the speakers
5. Install a Color DMD
6. Have the rails, lockbar, coindoor, and other miscellaneous cabinet hardware power coated blue (not green).

In the end, it is going to be a bit of a show machine for acitti when it is done, so for the first time I am kinda doing this machine as a commission.
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So this last weekend, I performed the annual ritual of setting up the paint booth. I made a few changes from last year, and I am hoping this year it seals up better, and I can get all my painting done before the weather turns cold on me. So here it is before I made the openings for the filter and fan, and I haven't sealed up the ends yet.

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I actually think one of your past projects is the inspiration for this one.

My mistake... Ive corrected it in the first post.

Well the cabinet is cleaned out, and the sanding has begun.

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Now one thing I an still trying to decide is what I’m going to do with the back of the machine. It is in pretty good shape, but not perfect. I’ve got some feelers out to try to find a silhouette cutter file to use to make a stencil from. In the meantime I’m not going to sand the back.8F4B50C7-ED0B-40BD-9F7D-15BAB0398ED6 (resized).jpeg

Hmm.. I may take you up on that offer.

So I have made progress on the cabinet. All the decals are now off, and I am starting to fill the dents with bondo. The last WPC I restored was a Funhouse, and that had very thin decals that sanded off very easily. The decals on this Fishtales were much thicker, and I had a hard time getting the glue off after I got through the vinyl. I did use the heat method to remove some of the decals, but that left me with a messy adhesive I had to deal with. Ultimately, I went with my sanding method. I just took longer than normal.

Overall this cabinet is is pretty good shape compared to others I have dealt with.

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Progress!! The good news is my paint booth worked better than expected. The bad news is my primer tried to setup in my gun. Luckily I was able to finish before all the paint set up.
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So now let the sanding begin!

So I realized I have neglected this thread for far too long. I have wrapped up paint on the cabinet, and have started to put decals on it. The head turned out great, but I feel like I am constantly chasing bubbles on the cabinet. I didn't buy the decals, but they did have a PPS gold sticker on them. However the quality seems to be lacking compared to other decals I have used in the past.

Also if I had to start this one again, I wouldn’t paint the bottom of the cabinet. I tried it in gloss, and it looked bad. So I sanded it all out, and redid it with a semigloss enamel. It looks much better now.

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After a slight delay, the cabinet is finally done!

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While I am waiting on parts to be powder coated, I’ve decided to turn my attention to the playfield. The replacement playfield is a CPR reproduction.2F4B1956-7FE0-48A3-BC98-18CE0AE4651A (resized).jpeg

The first thing I like to do is get all the hammering done with the playfield flat on the work bench before I mount the playfield on the rotisserie. So I start with the blind nuts, and then install the guide rails.Installing blind nuts.

I use an old pinball as an installation guide. I use a rubber mallet to hammer them in until they hit the ball at the widest point. This game only has a handful of guide rails, so it went pretty quickly.
This guide needs to go down some

The other thing I have found very handy is when you strip down the old playfield, take lots of pictures, and also take the time to mark the backside of the playfield. I have found I use the marked up playfield more than the photos when rebuilding the underside.

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Well %#^*.... I imagine I am not the first guy to put a screw through the playfield in this spot. oh well at least it is not visible when the playfield is complete, but I am still going to patch it up. Time to go buy some filler.

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Well after a great night of pinball courtesy of acitti , was going to go out to the shop this morning and get started on populating the cabinet... By my youngest child had different ideas, like she decided to puke in my lap at 1 this morning. Needless to say it was a rough night, and I don't think I will get much shop time today.

In the mean time, last week I was able to finish cleaning up all the under playfield mech's and I have just about all of the on to the new playfield.

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Some more progress... the head is almost ready to install. I also test fit the new speaker in the cabinet and finished off the ground braid in the cabinet.

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After all the kids opened their presents, I was able to sneak out to the shop for a few hours. I managed to get the machine back on its feet, and install more of the cabinet wiring.4A0DED63-4258-431F-9B72-9A3AE4DB9EEB (resized).jpeg
I like using these spacers under the legs, it goes a long way to preserving the cabinet decals. You do have to trim the decals out from under them when you install them.

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The powder coating on the legs turned out pretty nice.

76E6535B-D836-40F8-8C7B-327067436F23 (resized).jpeg. The cabinet wiring is about 80% done. I’ll finish it up after I put the head on.
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I turned my attention back to the playfield this weekend. I got the mini-playfield populated, and the wiring harnesses on the main playfield are almost complete.

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So today I remounted the topper on the head. There is a reflective strip on the head that I removed before painting. Obviously the strip didn't survive the removal process, so I decided to replace it with a strip of reflective vinyle. I think the results look pretty good, as the strip tend to reflect more blue.
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I'm still waiting on the powder coated rails, but after I finished the topper, I decided today to go ahead and mount the head anyway and do a power up test. I am glad to report it booted up with no issues.

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That is the look we are aiming for.

More progress this weekend...
I have completed the wiring on the playfield, and it has been successfully tested. The next step will be to get the playfield off the rotisserie, and back into the cabinet.

This is the first time I have used titan rubbers on a playfield, and I must say I like the color.

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I moved on to installing the ‘bling’ on the machine today. In this case it means adding a color dmd, a lighted speaker panel, button leds, and some light strips in the trough and along the back of the playfield.

So I started with the color dmd on the lighted speaker panel. The speaker panel kit Adam provided to me is pretty nice, and included the speaker lights.

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I’m burning through the zip ties trying to keep the wiring nice and neat. So far it’s looking pretty good.

So last week the rest of the powder coated parts came in. I spent today getting them all put on and they look pretty nice. I really like the coin door with the clear coin slots.
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Do you mean the flap over the coin return, and the frame around it? They were powder coated. The plastics on the backside were all left stock.
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I didn’t think so either before this project, but the came out fine.

Lots of progress this weekend! We got it flipping again. I forgot how fast fish tales plays, especially with a new playfield.

It was not all good news this weekend however. I discovered that the 12 volt circuit cannot support all the accessories I added. It worked fine in attract mode, but as soon as I started a game, it blew the 2amp break I setup to power the accessories. Come to find out the lighted back panel draws 1.5 amps by itself. So I’m going to have to setup a separate power supply to run the back panel, the lighted flipper buttons, and the trough and back strip light. The color Dmd will stay on the driver board 12v circuit as it the ground reference to work correctly.

I also had an issues with my new sound setup. I’ve been using the WPC speaker upgrade guide publish by Tony Dziedzic to wire up new speakers for the machine. I’ve done it on 2 other machines and this is the first time I’ve had an issue. The problem is the amp would start to cut out after about 10 minutes of play. I think I isolated the problem however. I used a 120 hz crossover on this installation, and I don’t think it isolates the base well enough, and you have to turn the volume up to around 16 to get the base to feel right. On my other builds I used a 100 hz crossover, and I had no amplifier issues. So I have a new crossover on order. Hopefully this will take care of the issue.

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Ok, I have just about gotten this one buttoned up...

First, I did install the new power supply for the accessories. I used a small 5 amp power supply wired into the switch side of the AC feed circuit. The accessories are protected by a 3 amp slow blow fuse.
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I also replaced the 120hz crossover with a 100hz crossover. That made a lot of difference with the bass in the machine. I only had to turn the volume up to 12 to get it thumping nicely, and the onboard audio amp handles it nicely without cutting out.

I also did one very important test with all the new accessories. I put the head down to make sure I had enough slack in the wiring harness so that nothing snagged or pulled out. If you are adding anything to a WPC game, it may seem trivial, but you don't want to move the game for the first time and pull out all your hard work.
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So now all the accessories work, and it looks pretty nice all lit up.
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Ok, this one is getting delivered to Bakersfield today, so I am closing the books on this restoration. I've played the game enough now I think I have all the bugs worked out.

The next restoration will start soon...
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