Is "converting" to an LED light tube simply replacing it with the correct sized LED tube? Or do you cut out the ballast and starter, etc?

I stumbled upon mine by sheer, dumb, luck. The gentleman that owned it prior to me, bought it in 1994 from the original operator. In the nearly 30 years he owned it, it was played a bit in the first year, then his kids lost interest. He told me it was basically powered on twice a year from then on there, on Xmas, and the 4th of July for his grandkids and guests to play.

I got it in late Spring of 2021 when he decided to retire and move to Florida.

Game was, as far as I could tell, all original. Including the rubber. I shopped it out, adjusted some switches, touched up some cabinet defects, and put what has to be one of the last remaining NOS translights in it to replace the UV faded original. It's a solid player's game, and one I doubt I'll ever get rid of. It has a tiny bit of playfield wear down by the flippers that I can only surmise was from a lack of wax and cleaning in its first 33 years (not completely worn to wood, but the black dots on the yellow coloring are gone in a small area that I'll eventually retouch). It ran mostly flawless all weekend at Pintastic, aside from a trough switch that needed an adjustment.

I'm planning on finally doing the ground mods at the transformer this week, and would like to replace the fluorescent tube with an led. Is there a straight plug in replacement for the tube? I'd rather not cut anything out of the game to accommodate the swap. I'm pretty sure they have modern tubes that have on-board circuitry that bypass the initial startup voltage from the transformer and starter, and just run off the low voltage run current. Ideally, I'd like to just swap the tube out, and remove the starter. Does such a tube exist?

Other than swapping in the clips, nothing had to be cut out electrically-wise?

I guess I'm just making a big deal out of nothing, so I'll just get a regular t8 led bulb, and clip out the transformer and rewire what needs to.

As for the ground mods on RW at the power transformer, is it really as simple as clipping off the 5 connectors from their respective harness bundles, wire nutting the individual wires for each bundle together (but keeping the 5 individual bundles separate for trouble shooting in the future) with a larger gauged wire (12?), removing the old molex connector boards, and connecting the now 5 individual wires to the transformer ground using solderless lugs where the 4 screws that held and grounded the old connectors down before?

It's hard to tell, but there are 5 individual connectors going to the 2 molex boards, they are just stacked 3 on top of one, and 2 on the other.

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Sweet! Thank you!

Cut out the spotty molex ground connectors and their chintzy solder dipped headers…it still looks strange to me to see wire nuts in a game (my mind screams “NNNoooooo!!!”), but the grounds are solid, and a few test games proved it. Took about a half hour, and was well worth it.3B398A1F-A501-4069-B350-1425AF35C403 (resized).jpeg

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