(Topic ID: 190085)

Robert & Jonathan take on two Aliens : Asteroid Annie and the Aliens

By puck

6 years ago


Topic Heartbeat

Topic Stats

  • 23 posts
  • 9 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 8 months ago by ImNotNorm
  • Topic is favorited by 13 Pinsiders

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9 Bitchie Power supply rebuilt (resized).JPG
8 Bitchie power supply issues (resized).JPG
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6 dirty backboxes (resized).JPG
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13
#1 6 years ago

We were lucky enough to find someone with not one but two Asteroid Annie and the Aliens pinball machines. Going to post photos as we restore these super rare pinball machines.

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#2 6 years ago

Following

#3 6 years ago

Damn some big files.

1 month later
#4 6 years ago

Time to start catching up on how far this project has gotten! From the time we acquired these twin games in March, a lot of work has gone into stripping the games down: first stripping the playfields, cleaning and assessing, then 'bulletproofing' the boards, prepping the cabs for painting and more! At first we named them A and B only to distinguish them apart. But they soon started showing personalities so they acquired deserved nicknames Annie and Bitchie!

Annie hung out in a smokey bar for much of her young life, was semi-retired in the bar owner's basement for a spell, then found much later across town in a partially working state. Bitchie had a mysterious start in the big city, was given an undignified paint job with a brush and decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars, then played until her power supply popped.

The plan was to do a complete restore on both, so a quick assessment was done for missing parts and damage, then strip the playfields to scan in. Still damn cold here in Edmonton, so it was an effort to keep the garage above 10C to work on the games! Mainly drop targets, lane guides, some posts and pop bumper caps/bodies were worn enough to merit replacement. Only a few plastics were broken between both games, thankfully!

It'll take several more posts, but we'll get caught up-to-date on this fun project.

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#5 6 years ago

Tell your weather girl it's july, that should help

Nice looking project. Funny how two seemingly identical items soon show contrast.

Keep us posted.

#6 6 years ago

Haha, well it warmed up nicely in April so we put away the parkas and donned the mosquito netting! While Puck started work on cleaning up the playfield scans, I cleaned up the backboxes, cabs and boards.

Bitchie wasn't so bad to clean, just dust from the suburbs. Some nasty cheroot soot in Annie that wouldn't even start to brush or vacuum off. Eventually I discovered that it cleaned up nice with rubbing alcohol and magic eraser or a toothbrush. The soot made it into the backbox connectors, so I literally soaked them in alcohol to clean and swiped out each contact as below.

PLUG CLEANING TIP: for an edge mounted plug or one with flat terminal contacts, I made a cleaning poke-stick by Krazy gluing one side of a flat toothpick onto 400 grit sandpaper. I cut out/trimmed the excess sandpaper, and was left with a mini emery board to clean contacts in the plugs. I glued a whole row of toothpicks onto sandpaper and factory produced a few dozen for several projects. I know you have to be gentle enough just to clean off the corrosion and not to over scrub the terminal surface to the point of causing excess wear. The added bonus is you can test the spring tension for each contact as you clean. A terminal that doesn't grab and hold the poke-stick needs retensioning or replacing.

I cleaned up then tested the 2 sets of boards one by one, following the on-line Bulletproofing guide for system 1 (AKA 'the Bible'), originally by Clay. Checked all the components I could and added more grounding connections to these notorious boards. Highlights were replacing the caps for the power supplies, and this is where I discovered Bitchie's board had overheated and desoldered the main transistor and the display capacitor was popped.

I did some bench testing on the CPUs with the homemade power supply and surprisingly both were still alive and functioning. Maybe went overboard to mount in some power supply LEDs on the boards, but I wanted to make them glow and show off that vintage space-shuttle era technology!

From there I loaded the boards one at a time into my working Pinball Pool to check. I even had an old game ROM for P Pool, so playtested the CPUs for about a week each. All good, except both had flakey display issues in the attract mode, where some segments were missing. Understood it's likely to do with one of the 'spider' chips that act as the display driver on the CPU. We've got options, as I have a stockpile of 4 CPU boards to raid for parts. A better option is Ni-Wumpf replacement boards to the rescue when they kaput later.

That brings the project up-to-date till early May, when the mayor declared a civic holiday, and all the cool kids went to the Edmonton Pinball and Arcade Expo, http://www.yegpin.com/.
If you were there and bashed around my Pinball Pool game in the freeplay area, you were play testing the boards from Bitchie as well, so thanks! Posting will continue...

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7 Bitchie power supply (resized).JPG7 Bitchie power supply (resized).JPG

8 Bitchie power supply issues (resized).JPG8 Bitchie power supply issues (resized).JPG

9 Bitchie Power supply rebuilt (resized).JPG9 Bitchie Power supply rebuilt (resized).JPG

10 benchtesting CPU (resized).JPG10 benchtesting CPU (resized).JPG

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#7 6 years ago

Let the reconstruction begin. Glass ordered. Going to attempt UV printing on glass and then screening a reflective layer mask behind it. More to come.

2 months later
#8 6 years ago

After about 6hrs into the glass restore I decided that the pixel acuity wasn't good enough for me. Did a test on paper and while 95% of people looking at it from 4ft would have said it's amazing I couldn't stand it. Found a specialized scanner that had a depth of scanning that would do the trick.

Robert and I went and looked at the UV double strike on white with the reflective mask on the back and we were pleasantly surprised by the color saturation of reverse printing on glass. Here is a sample of the new scan. PRE color correction. PRE sharpen. Gives you a good idea of how much work we have to do to clean it up, but you can clearly see the difference in sharpness. Pink is where we have no paint.

As much as I would like to have someone who can screen this for me, I don't think it's feasible to do. If anyone has advise on this or contacts that are willing to try, please get in touch.

Anyways thanks for following along on the journey. We are also re-producing one playfield, so stay tuned for that.

#9 6 years ago

wow, that's quite a scan. you guys are going above and beyond on this.

#10 6 years ago

My favorite machine of all time...I wish I were there to help! Thanks for giving Annie the love she deserves! If there was any way to produce more than one playfield I would be all over that...PM me and let's discuss!

5 months later
#11 6 years ago

Any updates?

#12 6 years ago

Thanks for the bump. I’ll post photos, but not much has happened, we picked up glass for the printing and have tested direct to play field printing on a Bally table for testing color saturation and alignment.

Cab - both are sanded and ready for paint. It’s winter in Canada so we are waiting for good weather, maybe next month? Vector decals are done, decal cutter acquired and tested,
Boards - all good!
Play field - retouch was put on hold for a bally project mentioned above
Back glass - same status, but glass is all cut ready for print,

I’ll let Pinball-Rob update his side

#13 6 years ago

Very nice to see these old and rare System 1 Gottlieb machines being restored. I hope you will equip them with a Janin motherboard. This is your insurance for lasting and reliable working.

I love the artwork of that Machine and that Annie is just gorgeous.

Yves

3 months later
#14 5 years ago

back to work

#15 5 years ago

Get busy!

5 months later
#16 5 years ago

First play-field print test done. Color needs some work. If anyone has a pantone book and a NOS play-field I would love some swatch numbers.

#17 5 years ago

Also, backglass art done. Still finding small imperfections.

#18 5 years ago

If you are ever able to offer a playfield for sale - I would gladly take one!

@iwantansi bought the last known NOS playfield and may be able to provide some color matching. If we need to come up with a Pantone book to make it happen, I can source one.

#19 5 years ago
Quoted from xeneize:

If you are ever able to offer a playfield for sale - I would gladly take one!
@iwantansi bought the last known NOS playfield and may be able to provide some color matching. If we need to come up with a Pantone book to make it happen, I can source one.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind! I don't have the skill or the materials to make them from scratch. We will be printing on the old wood. I imagine there would be some issues with putting these up for sale so no plans to do that at this time. Here is a low-res preview. If you see issues please let me know still finding things to fix myself.

#20 5 years ago

Looking very nice.

Are you thinking of doing the white light reflect areas under the plastics white like the one on the right? How about things like the cards etc, would those originally have been truer white?

#21 5 years ago

puck thanks for sharing the scan!

Mirco aka Highclasspinball has the rights to reproduce Gottlieb playfields. He and I have discussed (on this forum) the ability to make reproduction Annie playfields, but he lacks the artwork. If you could touch base with him and provide the scan, we could greatly increase the likelihood of seeing new, clear coated playfields for this title.

Thank you so much for the effort you're putting into restoring yours - it is my favorite machine of all time!

#22 5 years ago

I would buy a new playfield for mine if available. Though I don’t think they could sell very many. Can’t be more than 50 AAAA pins out there. If that, how many people would buy?

4 years later
#23 8 months ago

Absolutely gorgeous job puck & Pinball-Rob !! Looking forward to playing it tomorrow when the YEGPIN tournaments are all done.

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