Years ago I bought the upper playfield from a Gottlieb Haunted House from eBay. It has been just in storage until the end of the last year when I was unpacking and sorting stuff and found this piece and I got this crazy idea that I should build a Haunted House pinball from scratch, at least I got the upper playfield, how hard can it be?
My background is repairing pinball machines so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with how it works. So I started to look for game specific parts and what I can't find I will make my self, so far I found most of the critical parts.
So, what I will write about here is how the project is moving forward, my plan is to try and finish before the end of the year, yes it's an optimistic plan but hey, you need to have goal.
So here we go, from the start:
Starting to get parts in march 2021, not the easiest bit since I want it to be as much as the original as possible.
Trying to imagine what the end result will look like.
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I tried to find a five target drop target assembly for the lower playfield but it seemed impossible so the closest one was a ten target drop target assy. 3BD5418D-D5D8-4663-A532-537A16464832 (resized).jpeg
Well, take it apart and cut it in half, buy the five target reset arm and trigger shaft and the put it all back together, and tada, a five drop target assembly.
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Most mechanical parts were old, dirty and needed a lot of love but after some cleaning and fixing they startet to look nice and ready to be put on the wireboard.
The vertical upkicker before cleaning
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Clean and shiny
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I thought it would be a good idea to start with the lower playfield to practise on before the main playfield. Since I didn’t have the measurements of the playfield I printed the layout from the manual and compared it with the plastics for size.
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Once the measurements where okay I cut the a plywood board and glued the printout on to it and cut out wholes for lamps and mechanics.
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Then placing all the parts on to the wireboard and screws/nails to guide the wires.
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To keep the game as close as possible to the original and also to be able to trace the wires I make the wires the same colors as the original following the manual, only one problem, you can’t buy wires in the original color. So after searching the internet and stumbled upon pinballmakers.com I made a wire coloring device.
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So now I’m ready to start making wires, I will tell you more about the progress in the next post.