Wanted to share a nice, original Whirlwind that was in Canada for some of its life. We found more evidence of it from the square head screws. It is a solid machine with the usual wear but fully working and complete.

This one will get an original playfield touched up and cleared by Neo. It looks great and makes the swap much easier. We installed all new pop bumper plastic parts, plastics, ramps, and some minor switches and odds and ends as needed. We're looking to make it nice, but it will be used and enjoyed. All parts are tumbled, ultrasonic'd and checked. Coils get new wrappers and flippers fully rebuilt.

Here's some of the initial tear down pics:

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Creative support for left ramp with carefully placed square head eh!

Some more pics of the tear down and things we found:

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Here's the underside. Dirty, but pretty normal and complete. Nothing really shocking other than some minor issues with wrong switches used to make game play, GI relay board was "modified", and some wear. Typical stuff and the game was fully working.

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We found some interesting marking on the playfield on all sides in red marker. Also we noted the red tape on the back of the painted blue end section. Wondering if this was one of the test clear coats that were being done at the time. It's not a DP, but interesting notes. More info here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/curious-playfield-markings-on-whirlwind-prototype-clearcoat#post-4540714
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Repopulating begins.

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More top side assembly:

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Bottom side progress:

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Top side mostly together:

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Something to note for others: The cellar popper is listed in the manual as 26-1500 and maybe was on some early, sample or prototypes. BAA/PPS includes what manual state so you get the 26-1500 wrapper. Both his and my machine use the 26-1400 so I installed the 1500 but note the actual coil. Potatoes/potatoes but worth noting.

Playfield swap is mostly done but will try and update progress over the time instead of jumping into the finish line.

For those replacing their ramps, there’s quite a bit of riveted parts that need transferred over using rivets or other methods. I’ve been doing both seeking on what it is and if easier for future repairs. You’ll need an assortment of rivets and back up washers on the ramps. New ramps are quite a bit thicker than the originals.

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Some more notes. The rubber behind the single drop target was a bit thick and preventing the drop target to move down. I went to a smaller size from the 1 1/4" to 1". I also had to size down the one next to the ramp lift as the mech was rubbing the rubber. So 1 1/2" to 1 1/4" there. YMMV.

Top side pics of being completed.

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The underside is all completed. Replaced all the pop bumper lighting diode tubing with new as well as new tubing for the ball shoot switch.

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Playfield is installed back in the game ready to test. We had several things to take care of but nothing major. Will note them further in the thread. Note the early production game with the Williams logo sticker over the Cubs hat. Board has been removed so mbaumle can fix a transistor and put a new battery holder on during these pictures.

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Few pics of the swapped playfield in the machine.

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Always check your targets. I didn't even think to check but this one had a yellow swapped in at some point for the SE target. We opted to go with what matched the flyer and insert with orange.

Good picture of the ramp thickness and new clear plastics, the Orange SE target and playfield ready to go in the machine.

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A few things we found on start up. Both the spinner and inner loop switches worked but they seemed to hang up. The inner loop switch was actually touching the whole in the playfield when a ball would travel down through it and hang up likely. The wire wasn't centered in the hole so even on an original playfield, you still have to test/adjust. We made new holes and it worked perfectly once centered.

For the spinner, it would work, but sometime would hang up slightly which again could be a ball stop or at minimum stop the flow of the game and would stop the ball. We found the exact same issue: Wire wasn't centered. Another adjustment for new holes to center the pin made the spinner work perfectly.

A few other trough switches and outer loop switches needed fine tuning. Even testing out of the machine, you can see you still need to put some time in switch tests to make sure everything works perfectly.

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Another issue we found was we had nothing from the Sound Overlay Board when testing solenoids. Pretty easy fix; the ribbon cable wasn't attached so we were able to quickly resolve that. We did have one solenoid non-working: the lower right pop bumper. We swapped it out with a spare 23-800 I had because found it tested to infinity. After swapping it out, it was evident why we had a short: winding was broken to tab but wasn't seen until desoldering. Triple check your coils. We were trying to keep this affordable, so some of the coils did have some tabs pulling through a few.

Lighting: we had a few GI sockets that were causing us some issues and a few inserts. The millions plus was found to have a bad socket and a few GI sockets were flaky. The biggest issue we had was the IDC connector for the single drop target insert lights. Header pins were re-flowed twice but still same issue. Found the IDC to be the problem: A molex will replace it.

So plan to have several bayonet holders for various types on hand and a good supply of connectors. Reflowing should be mandatory, but you still will find problems after being removed/handled/re-installed.

Insert board lights affected and one of the bad coils that were replaced with a new one:

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Game is completed and running.

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