I found a new project to work on to keep me busy for a month or two. This is my first ebay pinball purchase as well as my first Gottlieb. The price was reasonable, and it included free shipping, so I bit. I've played this on virtual pinball a number of times, but have never seen one out in the wild before. From the listing pictures it looked to be in pretty decent shape.

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On Thursday my new project was delivered care of Kevin Coughlin aka @captnretro. Now that it is where it belongs (Florida), I'm hoping to add some shine back to this super 80's machine. I know this art package has a lot of haters out there, but I think it's so retro that it's fun.

This machine got stored somewhere wet in its lifetime. There is a fair amount of rust and oxidation on parts, and some swelling of the MDF parts of the cabinet that I will need to come up with some strategies to repair. There is also the usual wear and tear that needs to be addressed.

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Already ordered a new one in purple from ramp-o-matic. The clear one on there is in pretty decent shape, and cleaned up nice in the ultrasonic cleaner.

First job I tackled is an easy one. The fluorescent bulb in the back box was dead. I decided to update this to use an LED tube. I had read in previous posts that the ballast can cause some electrical noise that can be problematic.

To install, you simply cut out the old ballast and wire up the 120V AC to the existing sockets. When connecting, power goes to one socket, and neutral goes to the other. On each of them, you need to create a jumper between the 2 sets of contacts.

All told this is maybe a 10 minute job.

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This is what I am talking about when I say make a jumper. You can see I have a wire tying the two terminals together.
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Next order of business is tracking down a light issue. The right in lane release ball light (L28) stays on all the time, and in attract mode, you can see it slightly blinking.
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So starting off I gave the socket a cursory check and didn't see any issue with that. I followed the wire back to the driver board and checked the edge connector and gave it a quick burnish with a fiberglass eraser. Everything looked good, but the issue persisted. I grabbed the schematics and looked up what is driving L28.
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Looking at it, I had a hunch the transistor wasn't working fully. It sort of blinks in attract mode, which which would seem like it's getting the signal to turn on and off, but the voltage isn't going low enough for the bulb to turn off. Testing out Q29 I was seeing .6 from the emitter to ground, so it would seem like it is bad. I ordered some replacements (CEN-U45 rather than MPS-U45) off Digi-Key (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/central-semiconductor-corp/CEN-U45-PBFREE/4806928)
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Pinrepair.com has a great little blurb on testing the MPS-U45

MPS-U45 Transistor Test:
The MPS-U45 transistors test the same in circuit and out of circuit. Best to do this test with the driver board removed.

Using a DMM (Digital Multi-Meter), put the meter on the "Diode" setting.
On the COMPONENT side of the board, put the RED lead of the DMM on the middle trace (the base) of the transistor.
Put the black DMM lead on the left transistor lead. This should show about 1.3 (emitter - ground).
Put the black DMM lead on the right transistor lead. This should show about .7 (collector).
Anything within .1 of these values is good.
If getting zero or no reading for a test, that transistor is bad.
If a reading of .4 to .6 is seen, good chance that transistor is probably bad too.
If in doubt, compare the readings of the transistor in question to the other surrounding transistors of the same type. They should all read about the same value.

I wasn't kidding. This is the most Florida machine out there.

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Started tearing down the top side of the playfield to see what I'm dealing with. Lots of surface rust for sure. The chromed sheet metal ball guides are going to be a particular challenge. The plating is flaking off around where the rust has settled in.

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I lucked out that the surface rust on the wire form came off easily. I shot some clear spray enamel on it to help further inhibit any new rust.

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The pop bumper mylar had lifted off on its own, saving me the trouble. I still need to remove the mylar from in front of the sling, and from the upper playfield where the wire form drops the ball.

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Thanks! How is your Ali coming along?

Hope the old girl can live up to your memories when it's done.

Pulling apart the pop bumper mechs so I can remove the the bumper bodies from the playfield. The coils were thoroughly filthy.

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I really like how Gottlieb used a spring rather than a solid linkage on their ball gates to connect to the leaf switch. It makes them a lot easier to work on.

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Last thing to remove are all the wire ball guides. I had to take a lot of pictures so I have some hope of remembering where they all go when I'm done. This also gives an idea of the general state of the playfield including:
1) Some minor planking
2) Lots of ball swirls
3) A patch in the yellow where the wood grain darkened to the point that it shows through. Possibly moisture damage.
4) Minor gouges from the sheet metal ball guides
5) Some more rust on the wire ball guides

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Finished depopulating the playfield. Lots of grime to clean off, then it'll need some work with some rubbing alcohol and a magic eraser to try and remove some ball swirl and even out the tones especially around the pop bumpers and in the upper playfield where the roll overs are.

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Here is the result after some cleaning, rubbing alcohol and a magic eraser. Not perfect but a definite improvement

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I spent a little time with photoshop to try to recreate the sticker of where a shooter gauge would normally be. The test print doesn't look too bad. Once I'm good with it, I'll print it onto a glossy sticker.

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Did anyone notice that the guy looks like the six flags dancing grandpa is wearing a wig?
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Also why is he dancing at the top of a palm tree and giving an alligator a thumbs up? Cocaine made people do some crazy stuff in the 80's. It's obviously the Florida man thing to do.

That's the plan. I wasn't sure how it was going to clean up so I was looking at new playfields for it. I think this is in decent enough shape to get away with just spraying clear rather than doing a full playfield swap.

It was, but I’m going to redo it to clean it up. The ring terminals used were too small and it looks like it could get a loose ground at any minute, which is what the mod is trying to avoid in the first place.

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I’m sorting parts that have come out of the tumbler. I use crushed walnut shell from pet smart along with a little flitz to help shine it up.

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Unfortunately some of the plating is gone. The guards on either side of the ramp have it flaking off. Some of the ball gates were also pitted and have some blemishes. I’ll have to try to work to hide them in less obvious places where possible.

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Now that everything is sorted, it’s time to reassemble and bag all the different mechs. This helps speed things up when repopulating the playfield later. The tumbler has them all looking pretty good. It’s amazing how much better they operate when clean.

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New pop bumper bodies, skirts and caps. Spuds is looking much better now.
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I like to reassemble these ahead of time. I swear when it comes time to put them back on the playfield, I assemble them at least once with out the ring on and have to go back and start over. This should help.

Does anyone happen to know if you can buy these little clips anywhere? I had a couple of broken ones.

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That’s awesome! I’ll have to call Steve on Tuesday.

Too bad he doesn’t make full replacement for the ball guides

Put the drop target mechs through the ultrasonic cleaner to brighten them up. Replaced the drop targets themselves with new ones and new decals from PBR. Also cleaned the contacts of the switches in some vinegar while I had it all apart.

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Was able to buff this to a shine, but I hesitate to try to sand it smooth to get a mirror like finish. The plating is too thin on this stuff.

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That’s a fun table too. I would have grabbed that if I could have found it.

Playfield is out of the cabinet now. Removed the remaining Mylar from in front of the sling and from where the ball drops on the upper playfield. Used the freeze method and the Mylar came off with no paint loss. Then I used 90% isopropyl alcohol and flour in a slurry to scrub off the remaining adhesive with my finger tip. It all came up really nice and I was done in 15 minutes total time.

First time leveling raised inserts. I followed the advice on here of using a deep C clamp and a hair dryer. It worked really easily, I was surprised. Now I just need to give them a little epoxy and they’re good.

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Printed the sticker and shot some clear to lock it in.

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Cleaned all the spider poop off the translite. I soaked it in a tub of warm water with some Palmolive dish soap, then gently scrubbed the backing to get off some of the yellowing with a magic eraser.

It's faded but in otherwise pretty good shape save for a crack in the middle. I need to find a good way to repair the crack, or just scan it to have it reprinted after some photoshop work. I'm not a fan of any of the alternate translites out there for this machine.

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Filled in key lines with a paint pen and gave it the first light coats of 2 part automotive clear.

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Transistors came in from DigiKey, so I swapped out the one that tested bad (Q29), and one where a bad repair was done, and the soldering pad was gone from the back of the board. I was able to leave it a little high and solder cleanly to the pads on top of the board to ensure a good connection.

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More coats of 2 part clear

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Getting there. I need to work on some photoshop solution to a problem I had filling depressions around the pops. When I dripped clear, I came back and hour later and found that it cracked and lifted the paint and made a real mess.

I have it back to being flat, but due to general wear in the area and the pattern (there is some light stippling with white dots), I wasn’t able to get a good paint match.

I’m planning on making some water slide decals to cover those problem areas and will lock them in with a couple more coats of clear.

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Another day, another coat of clear. Also shot some clear on my old meteor playfield. I’m going to use that as a wall hanging at some point.

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Spent a little time messing around in GIMP to make some zebra print transparent water slide decal patters for around the pops to hide the paint issue. I think the zebra print fits in well with the 80's theming, and honestly will be mostly covered up from view by those big old Gottlieb pop bumper bodies and all the surrounding plastics.

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Sanded and decals applied. I tossed the old pop bumper bodies and skirts on to check to see if I like it before I clear over it.

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And you guessed it, another coat of clear.

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Last coat of clear is on. Tomorrow I will sand it down and let it sit to harden up for polishing.

I had a good old central Florida love bug land in the clear while spraying. I got it mostly out of the clear, but there is a leg that will forever be under the side rail.

I’m also happy with how the area around the pops turned out.

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I pick and choose advice from the Spray2k thread (https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-spraymax-2k-auto-clear-in-a-can-club). Being in Florida where it's always hot and humid my dry times and re-coat times are very different from some of the folks who post a lot on there from dessert climates with low humidity or from far northern climates with much lower temperatures. You'll find a lot of deeply held opinions on process there, but you can take some best practices and not be afraid break with others to go with what works for you.

The heat (always in the 80's and 90's) here doesn't allow for the Spray2k to flow as nicely as it would in the 70's and you get some orange peel texture in your coats. I end up putting on an extra coat or two and do more final sanding than most to get a good finish. That's okay though because I refuse to waste my time block sanding by hand, and use a random orbital sander with wet/dry paper to wet sand between coats and for the final sanding stages from 600-10000 grit before buffing.

The good part about Florida is that the heat helps reduce cure times quite a bit. My last playfield passed the hardness test (finger nail, ball drop, etc. I wish I had access to my old school engineering lab to use a Rockwell indenter and get a real hardness test number) in 6 weeks, where I see others waiting a full 10 weeks.

That's what I was going for! I'm glad someone else likes it. I thought it fit in with the theme.

I guess I'm lucky that there aren't too many Spring Break purists or they would be lining up outside with their torches and pitch forks to take me to task for changing the art in any way.

Flattening my plastics. I gave them a wash in warm water and dish soap to remove dirt and crud from them. To flatten them I use 2 old sheets of playfield glass and let it sit in the bed of my truck for a day. I learned my lesson and use a sheet of wax paper on the back. The coating on the back of the plastic can stick to the glass and will rip off the art if you aren’t careful.
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Sanded down the final coat of clear. You can see the shine really start to develop as you move to finer and finer grits.

Now it is ready to sit and harden up.

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I’m excited to try evaporust for the first time. I tossed the legs, lock down bar and receiver into a wallpaper tray and am letting it sit over night

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The sun did the trick and my plastics are perfectly flat again. When you do this, you need to be sure to bring the glass and plastics inside into the shade to cool down before removing the top glass. Otherwise they can curl a bit as they cool. You can also see that it got hot enough to melt the wax in the wax paper. That could have been the backing to the plastics. Always best to be careful with unobtainable plastics.
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The hype turns out to be true. Evaporust is amazing stuff.

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Trying an experiment. I treated the swelled MDF edges with wood hardener and clamped them.

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Trying to flatten out the coin door that has taken a few knees over the years and give it a new coat of paint. Tried to take a picture to show how dented in it was.

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Removing the side rails was a real PITA. A few of the spiral nails had rusted and the MDF around them swelled making it really tough to remove. The good news is that the texture on the side rails makes it easy to just bend back and dents and wrinkles without it being noticeable.

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Good news. This worked like a champ. These edges are no longer swollen and sand beautifully.

The bottom particle board needed to be stabilized. While it is solid, rubbing your hand over the surface causes it to flake off.

To stabilize this, I’m using a wood working trick of mixing 1 : 1 water and glue (Tite Bond II or Elmer’s work well). Brush this over the whole surface letting it get soaked into the particle board. When it dries, the surface will have some roughness that can be sanded if it needed, but will no longer flake and will be stabilized..

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Maybe once this is all together I’ll talk to Marshall at LSOG and see if he wants to bring it into the shop for league play one Thursday night and give others a chance at this one.

Had a minor accident. I was trying to move the cabinet on the saw horses, and the front one collapsed. The front corners hit the garage floor pretty hard. I used wood hardener on the banged up corners and clamped them down. They are back to being a normal shape. They will get a flood coat of resin once I strip the cabinet down to strengthen them up..

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Scanning in the artwork on the cabinet. These cabinets were probably screen printed back in 1987. I’m going to have some decals created for these. It will also help to protect this cabinet in the future from any water.

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All scanned and stiched together. Now I need to learn Inkscape so I can convert the art to a vector drawing.Side (resized).jpgFront (resized).jpgupper (resized).jpg

It all depends on what I'm painting. For small stuff or spraying a little clear, I don't really bother and just work in the garage over a drop cloth. If I'm spraying color, or something I worry about getting dust in the coat, I either use my spray tent, or hang poly sheets to make a large enclosure.

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NVRAM arrived today so that went on

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Adding some wires to the score multiplier to maybe drive a topper. Not sure what I want to do just yet. Maybe just some lights, or maybe use an Arduino to drive an LED matrix with some animations. We’ll see…

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New game Rom with single ball and free play. Thanks to Dave Astill

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Bought some 20ga 304 Stainless steel #4 finish yesterday to build new ball guides with.

I’m making some tracings of the old stuff to try and get the shapes down since I’m going to have to flatten the old ones to transfer all the holes and notches to the new steel stock.

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Straightening out old guides with a slip roller might be my new favorite trick. It’s amazing how they come out perfectly flat.

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I used the newly flattened guides to transfer the lengths to my new stock and cut them on the sheet. These little 3 in 1 machines work great for this kind of stuff. When using the sheet, save some effort and use something to extend the lever arm (you can see I used a bar clamp).

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Just got in my new old stock translite from Steve at Mayfair amusements. I know people hate these, but I think it adds to the 80s nostalgia. I think this is probably a better looking machine now than it was back when it was new. You can see how yellow and faded the old one was.

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Finished making all the new ball guides. They turned out pretty nice and I’m happy with them. I don’t think them not being mirror finish is going to bother me (pretty sure all new Sterns are brushed finish), but if it does, I can always polish them up on the buffer.

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I thought about replacing the side rails with smooth remakes, but after some mean green and a scrub they clean up really nicely. Mean green really removed the crud that was In the crevices.

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I wish it were my idea. vid1900 has a fantastic post on making new guides https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/making-new-ball-guides-from-scratch-vids-guide

Coin door cleaned up, flattened out, and reassembled.

I sent my scanned cabinet art out to be converted into vector graphics for printing. Once I get the go ahead that it is good, I can start stripping down and repairing the cabinet.

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Cleaning inserts and changing bulbs for LEDs. I like to use cotton swabs and a little spray bottle of isopropyl alcohol.

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Yeah, that linkage was holding on my a thread…

There was only a tiny sliver of a roll pin left, and just shaking it made it fall out. It’s a good thing I’m rebuilding all 4 flippers.

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Got some new parts in. A number of the coils seem like they got toasty and the sleeves were almost welded in place. I usually like to reuse coils when possible, but these seem like they were about end of life.

So new coils for the pop bumpers, the sling shot, and both ball eject assemblies.

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Rebuild for all 4 flippers. New coils on 3 of them (the upper A-17875 was newer and in good condition). New plungers, coil stops, return springs, upper and lower bushings, and end of stroke switches all the way around. Should be flipping like a champ when it all goes back together.

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Fixing the chunked up corners. Resin epoxy is one of my favorites for this job. Easier and stronger than regular old bondo.

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Some more repairs

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After sanding them down

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My apron (or card holder as Gottlieb calls it) has some condition issues. It looks like someone spilled solvent on it then tried to repaint it either by hand or with a paint pen (and then spilled solvent on it again).
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On top of that it is starting to rust.
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Luckily, Steve Young still has some 80B card holders. I wasn’t able to get the same purple and yellow that came with the machine. I was however able to get a red and yellow one (maybe off a Surf N’ Safari). The new one has 4 holes at the top. I was able to use some pop rivets with washers on the back to fill them nicely.
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Still working on sanding and prepping the cabinet. In the mean time the playfield is hard enough to start populating. The new guides definitely look nice. I’m glad I put in the effort to make new ones. I also really like the new purple ramp from Ramp-O-Matic. I’ve got some Purple flashers under it so I’m excited to see what it looks like in action.

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Finished populating the playfield. All the rusty stuff is gone.

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Added a trough light strip.

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Slapped the new apron on. Gave it a quick coat of wax. Looks the part even if the colors are different.

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First coat of primer is on. This is my first time working with an MDF cabinet. There is a bit of a learning curve trying to get it smooth.

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I think I’ve kicked the rust bug on this pin. A couple before and after shots. You can see where the plating was flaking off the guides, and also shows how much more shine the playfield has.

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Finally getting back to painting. I’ve been side tracked with other painting and pinball projects, namely picking up a lightly routed GOTG at a sweet price and getting it back in working shape, making some new Halloween decorations, and finishing up my arduino driven Meteor playfield wall art.
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Sprayed the first coat of black on Spring Break. Pulled out the old HVLP sprayer that I haven’t used in forever. Went on a little too thick, but that is OK for a first coat. I can level it out with some 400 grit wet sand paper once it dries and it’ll be good for the next coat. 29B88514-2527-453E-9421-007B7E8B5EBE (resized).jpeg

I also got word this week that Jeff PinballPimp Miller finished cleaning up the art work and is ready to make stencils.E2D3C070-8A45-4034-9CBD-893C081F98EC (resized).jpeg

Btw this is my playfield wall art project that was one of my other distractions. It’ll be cool when it’s done.

Wet sanded and applied 2nd coat.

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Since this is a full respray, I decided to add a little extra color. I think it goes well with the plastics.

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Wet sanded and last coat of black is on. Now it just needs the 2 colors and it’s ready to put back together.

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Just waiting on either stencils or making decals and then it’s ready to put back together. Shouldn’t be much longer.

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