Well it's been a long time. A LONG time. Shortly after starting this thread, a home became available nearby that was too good too pass up... so we moved... and turned the old place into a rental property... which was a many-months ordeal! Along with life happenings of various flavors.

But, Big Hurt's Pieces all made the move. I am pleased to say I don't think I lost anything important.

I'm even more pleased to say that as of Sunday I've finally begun the process of putting the machine back together, by starting to reattach the harness to the playfield.

I'm not thrilled with with the pf condition, but I don't think any better ones are out there, and there's no way of making this one any better short of getting a true mylar polishing kit, which I may yet do. At this point though, I just need to get this thing back together and less in the way.

So I hope to be updating as I go, once again, soon.

I'll probably need the help... digging through the parts bins I recall just how stupidly complex this game is. Zeus, man! They threw everything at this game, and it all weighs a ton... and with nearly a year having gone by, do I remember how all of it went back together? HAHAHAHAofcoursenotohgodnowiknowwhythisgamehasthisname

I'm horrible at taking pics once I dive in to plow through work as one thing leads to another. But... BUT! I am happily astonished, that after connecting all harnesses and plugs then flipping the pf on my rotisserie to mock the mechs & stuff by hooking up their own connectors...

...it seems that everything works! Or wants to anyway. All the solenoids work. Most of the lamps (aside from a few sockets that I knew would be extremely suspect) work. And all of the switches (save one standup) including the optos work too!

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It didn't come 100% trouble-free. Had to hack in a temporary MPU battery since the original was directly soldered on and long dead. Also had some weirdness in the driver board harness to figure out since it wouldn't even allow the test control board in the coin area to function.

And before I could fully evaluate even after fixing those, well... remember how bad this game was when I found it? There was stuff I didn't even look at just because I knew the whole thing should have been burned, so I'd eventually get to certain parts when relevant. So now that I was finally ready to test the solenoids, every single mech that uses a fiber pawl on a link was rusted solidly in place where the press-pin oxided and swelled into the fiber. IIRC there were 9 such mechs, each taking 30 minutes to disassemble and clean well enough to get to move and function freely. All were straightforward and cleaned up enough to not be an issue in the future, but just tedious in the mean.

Also had to reflow solder on the opto boards to secure the resistors, and some other piddly randomness throughout the game too.

But yeah, the reward for this is everything seems to want to work, so there's some promise. Can't keep a good man down, Big Hurt himself would be proud But it still sucks about this pf though. It's super toasty brown everywhere. Maybe the Sox will introduce some kind of sepia-tone throwbacks one day and I can link it to that, ha ha. But the pf has curtailed my investment of time in terms of polishing out all the metal bits to new. At this point, the patina to tie eveything togther as its story just makes sense, so as long as there's not flaking rust and powdered zinc sugar on stuff, that's good enough.

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Anyway now that I know the game is functionally worth the investment, my next steps are to touch up the bare pf spots (under inlane ramp return drops), apply mylar to the areas that lack it, wax up the whole works, then start fastening the mechs topside and let that process puzzle itself out.

I also need to order a bunch of fasteners since 80% of the originals are nasty oxidized and rusty. And replace several T-nuts where the machine screws broke off because Gottlieb apparently had barrels of lock-tite lying around.

Have an order built of misc parts coming to about $100 for new flipper parts, rubber kit, replacement switch, drop target coil that fried because I'd no way of knowing a pre-existing defect... etc. The side rails are atrocious too, but I can't bring myself to add $100 just for those yet. I might try painting mine instead.

The habitrails were all gross, but after scrubbing them with steel wool they seem passable. Again with the "patina" bit

Have to order some LED's too because there's no way in hell I ever want to replace some of these bulbs ever again. The ones in and under the scoreboard assembly, WTF was Gottlieb thinking with that design?

The only part I need and don't think I can find, is the top rear cabinet rail for the pf glass. The wood piece and plastic channel is gone.

Anyway. Sorry for the TLDR here but after many months, it's a lot of progress in a short amount of time. I'll post some pics later maybe.

Some pics just to prove the progress...

Can't believe in the 11 months this thing was apart, I never took pics of all the subcomponents. I can say, it was a nice feeling to put the head back on the cab for the first time since I unloaded it out of my van in May '16.

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I had the same thought! Or maybe even yellow or purple to match the cab... Anything other than that nasty weird brass or bronze or whatever that I honestly don't understand what they were going for, even though I recall brass badges were a strangely popular option on cars back then too, ugh...

... At any rate, I unfortunately cannot imagine that paint would hold up to ball travel and impacts. Especially given how tough these would be to paint evenly while ensuring even coverage on all sides and crannies. Powder coating makes more sense but gets into big bucks, nevermind the prep required since mine aren't perfect to begin with.

In the home stretch now...!

While touching up some wear spots on the pf, I noticed how well the Createx Black filled in a couple small areas... and then bled into the crazing of the original clearcoat, hiding it very well as a bonus. Hmm! The area around the pop bumpers was HORRIBLE on my game, and the ball trail in the orbit shot was bad too...

...so I used a thin wash of Createx Black straight from the bottle, and spread it around that area to fill the crazing. Wow! It's not full restoration / CQ level quality, but for minimal expense it's a HUGE improvement in an area that had no feasible hope before:

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Of course you see the pops mock assembled in that pic. The rejuvenated color in the pf thanks to the Createx wash discovery was a huge motivator. So after protecting the bare and retouched areas with fresh mylar, I spent the weekend puzzling out the reassembly.

It was... both not as difficult, and every bit as difficult as I thought. There are so many random one-off small special parts that absolutely must be accounted for in their exact location, often in a specific order... I got really good at identifying clues though, which reduced the trial and error quite a bit. Still, it's a very tedious and meticulous process.

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In the end, I was short a couple post inserts thanks to the originals having snapped off in the T-nuts and me using the replacements I bought then, in other games meanwhile. I have a couple "will work for debugging purposes" substitutes in there for now. But it's pretty much all reassembled and complete, I think.

Last night the pf went into the cabinet for the first time since the day I took the game out of my vehicle nearly a year ago.

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But, still not done. There are a few issues:

- Left flippers are dead. The buttons work, the fuses are good, wiring looks OK.

- Motor is LOUD and slips some. I see a rebuild or replacement in the near future.

- Drop Target #2 coil shorts on. I thought this problem on my original one was a fluke of having it upside-down while testing with burr that kept the metal tang open. But I've replaced the coil and this still happens so maybe I do indeed have a driver board issue.

- When I have the tournament mode switch set to "on", all the switches in that matrix column short on. Is that normal?

- Random lamps seem to be locked on, with no matrix correlation. Maybe this is an LED ghosting issue, this game seems very sensitive to them.

Right now I want to figure out the flipper problem first so I can debug other issues. But starting a game with just the right one working, I remembered why I thought this game was such fun and worth saving...

Flipper issue turned out to be grungy cabinet switches. A bit of filing and holding them closed and boom, flipper action!

Motor isn't quite as loud with the glass on, but still seems a little off. Sometimes when a game starts you hear the thing buzz loudly and not move until the a ball falls in the warning track, then the game has to go into ball search... when it reactivates the motor relay the glove begins to move (and knock the ball out of the track) and is fine and smooth for the rest of the game.

The Driver Board > Drop #2 Trip issue is very vexing. Replaced the mosfet and cap for that circuit and no improvement. I unsoldered the coil for now... the game seems to recognize this and disables the moving target skill shot but all other drop features work normally.

So anyway, last night I finally played it for the first time:

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"Put it on the boarrrd.... YeeeeeSSSSS!"

The Grand Slam Derby is a ton of fun! I think I will need to add some spotlights to the game though... when it turns GI off it's almost impossible to see the ball. Then again, people complain System3's are too easy so maybe that balances it out...

Yeah I was thinking about doing the same thing with spots. Too bad I just ordered a ton of stuff from Comet, so it might be a while.

Still, if I can get the motor and drop target trip bugs worked out then take care of the other rough edges first, they will be a worthy improvement!