Light Panel
This was a pain. I removed all the score reels and the two plates that house the score reel.
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One small catch to doing with is the wiring for bulbs for the Beat Hi-Score and Shoot Again are routed through the lower plate.
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After I got the light panel out, I removed the 2 false zero digits. The game has 2 false 0 digits that look like complete score reels when the game is assembled. Since all the scoring for the game is in 10's, there is no reason to have a complete mech for the 1's digit in the score and high score. These are very fragile and thin and luckily both of mine were completely intact. When cleaning these and the actual score reels, I only used a slightly damp cloth. Any cleaners (Novus, Alcohol, Windex, etc.) will take the ink right off these. These reels are extremely hard to come by. Here is a before and after cleaning of the false reels.
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Next I moved onto the two plates that house the score reels. Same issue as all the rest of the metal in the game. The edges were extremely sharp and I lost a couple chunks from my fingers cleaning and polishing theses
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Lastly, I had to deal with the actual panel. I tried to carefully removed the old foam with a very sharp chisel. The foam needs to be removed so that it stops damaging the backglass. I'll be replacing the foam with the soft side of some velcro to eliminate backglass vibration. The foam removal didn't go well.
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The panel for the lights was made out of particle board and chipped badly when removing the foam. I thought about just making a whole new panel, but the seemed like overkill. So Bondo, sand, Bond, sand, Bondo, sand.....
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Then I coated it with a high build primer just to see how much further I need to go. Bondo, sand, Bond, sand, Bondo, sand.....
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Getting close. I forgot the take a picture of the final product. It's 90+ degrees in my shop and I was drenched in sweat and just wanted to go inside., but it turned out pretty well.
While I had the lights out the sockets were cleaned. 24 sockets took a while to clean and got screwed back in. Any weak solder joints were touched up. I had been saving these for a rainy day.
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Nice genuine NOS GE#55 bulbs. Not surprisingly, any non GE bulb was burned out. I only had 1 GE bulb burned out from the original bulbs. They don't make em like they used to.
While I was messing with the bulbs, I decided to take a stab at the Hi-Score Relay. A lot of the wires had been disconnected. After some trial and error with the wiring, I finally got it working. I might disconnect it though. If there is a high score to beat, the coil stays permanently energized while the game is on. I don't know if I want to run the risk of the coil staying on for long periods of time and burning up. But it was nice to finally see that part of the backglass lit up.
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