Hello all, and fellow EM enthusiasts. Look what I have in the back of my car.
I'm happy to say that I've finally rejoined the fold and bought myself a pin after about 27 years of not owning any.
So yeah, it's been a while. (I had 5 pins way back in the early 90's). I finally feel like a legit member of Pinside now.

I miss working on EM's and I saw this one come up locally so I went and had a look at it and it was in pretty good shape so I ended up buying it. The seller was great to deal with and I might have a new local pin friend hopefully.
The playfield is great and so is the back glass. The cabinet is pretty good too for its age. Even though it's chipboard. Terrible stuff.
132,990 plays on the meter.

The motor runs non-stop so there must be a stuck switch I'll have to track down, but everything seems to work okay.
Flippers, bumpers, targets, slings etc. Lights all work and the score reels turn over easily.
The schematic and service manual and parts list were all included with the pin. Very nice.
I'm looking forward to getting it inside and starting work on it.

~ Mal ~

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Thank you Murph. Sure feels good to have a pin in my house again. I'll post some more photos in a sec.

I was wondering how I was going to get it in the house as it's too heavy for me on my own, then my brother rocked up out of the blue, so he helped me get it out of the car and we put the legs back on. Then I gave it a good blow out with my air compressor and again it was fairly clean.
Then we carried it in to the house and bolted the head back on and I plugged in 3 jones plugs after cleaning them.

Then he left so I started cleaning up the playfield. It was quite clean really.
Then I found that all the vertical switch stacks in the back box were quite loose so I tightened all those up.
Cleaned stuff here and there and plugged in another small jones plug that I found laying in the bottom of the cabinet
buuuut the motor still keeps on spinning, so some more work is needed yet. Probably clean lots of contacts next.

~ Mal ~
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Thanks guys, yes the playfield and back glass are in great condition. I was surprised wshen I first saw it in person.
I don't really have any space for more pins Wayne so if it breeds I'm in trouble!
Thanks for the tip Murph. There are no coin mechs in it so no leaf switches on the coin door, so I'll go through all the switches on the underneath of the playfield and see if any are stuck. Haven't had a chance to do anything on it today as I've been busy but later on I'll get into it.

~ Mal ~

Hi metallik. It has some sort of plastic coat on top of it, so thanks to Recel it has lasted for ages and looks great.
It's not perfect by any means. Here's a pic I just took of the worst worn area where it gets plenty of ball traffic.
You can also see tiny air pockets here and there underneath the plastic protector.

~ Mal ~

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Last night I was adjusting the leaf switches of the score reels as they're not right on mostly player one, and a wire I barely touched fell off, so a cold solder joint there, and a few other wires looked pretty dodgy, so I went looking for my soldering iron, and sure enough, can't seem to find it anywhere. Couldn't find my wire strippers either. Typical.
So off to buy some new ones instead. Now I can get to work fixing things.

~ Mal ~

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Well, you get what you pay for.....after soldering away for about an hour the iron got so hot the plastic housing got gooey and it all fell to bits. Unbelievable. Taking it back for another model tomorrow.
A screw fell out of it as I had it hanging on the front of the cab so I became aware of the problem when the screw hit the bottom of the cab. Of course it had to roll under the total play meter so it took me a while to find it.

On the bright side...if you can call it that, I found several wires with cold solder joints and one wire for the 3 or 5 balls jones plug had broken off. Fixed all of those problems then looked at the score motor to find 3 sets of yellow wires broken away from somewhere. That's when the soldering iron fell to bits, so the repairs will have to wait until tomorrow.
I pored over the schematics for a while but I haven't found where those wires go yet.
This seems to be turning into an EM tech thread now. Hmm

~ Mal ~

Really? okay, thanks. I'll check it out later.

Using a dremel and a bench grinder I made this 'leaf switch adjuster' today out of an old screwdriver.
Turned out fairly well I thought. I gave it a quick test drive just now and it seems to work well.
It should make life much easier for adjusting all those switch stacks.
Picked up a heavy duty soldering iron to add to my tools as well.

~ Mal ~

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My latest update is that I've started scanning my schematic, huge job. Done about a third of it so far.
Then re-drawing it in Photoshop so I can read it as the original is a bit hard to read.
Here's a small sample of what I've done on it so far.

~ Mal ~

Lady Luck schematic sample.png

Hi Peter, thanks for that. It's the first Recel I've owned. Hadn't actually seen one before. I've done a fair bit of soldering on it so far and you're right, I found lots of cold solder joints.
Funny, my eyes aren't so good so using tweezers to tug on the wires is how I've been checking them. I only found one very tucked away cold solder joint in the cabinet relay bank, but plenty on the 16 score reels.

It's missing its bell, but Arcane has kindly just sent me an ebay link to a 5" bell for it which I'll have to buy.

German hey? I've redrawn the schematic but some of it is in German and I need it translated to English, so if you're interested could I get you to translate it to pinball speak for me?

Cheers, Mal

That looks great Peter. Sorry I haven't been on Pinside for a while as I've been busy with work, but I'll send you a pm soon about the schematic translation, or just upload it here. Cheers