Denton, TX
This concerns the Hat Trick plastics and hardware involved in the backbox to Rocky and Bullwinkle, with mainly notes on what to look out for.
First, I bought new plastics for Bullwinkle's arm, the Lion hat trick plate, the Rocky hat trick plate, and the Rhino hat trick plate all from Marco. The replacement Lion plate was simply superb and actually looks better than my original plate. Unfortunately the Rocky and Rhino replacements were off on a few areas. I've included comparison pictures with the replacement plate artwork on the left and the original artwork on the right. As you can see from those images, the coloring is wrong. The replacement artwork has a shift to the red spectrum on the gray tone, while the original has a balanced "teal" grey tone with the red slightly reduced compared to the blue and green values.
The Rocky replacement artwork is missing the "wrinkles" in the bunny hat at the bottom of the ear. Also it has mistakenly filled in the left loop of the tie knot completely with grey ink, when there should be white going to the arm border in the background.
The Rhino replacement artwork is even worse off, with the white pupil completely missing from the eye, and the horn is painted the wrong color as well. As a result, I decided to keep the original Rhino plate intact in my machine.
Next, I began ordering hardware based on the service manual. As per usual with DE manuals being less than accurate, I found some issues as well as tracked down parts that Marco forgot to tag with the appropriate DE part number. In my machine, somebody failed to track down the correct parts, and jury-rigged the lever pivots with twisted wire to hold the hat trick plates on the arms. The correct part is an "e-clip" found here:
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/20-8712-18
Although the service manual does not list a washer to put in place before the e-clip, I found that the jury-rigged wire job a previous owner had done included washers. So I left the washers on and replaced the twisted wire with the new e-clips. It works great, and prevents the plastic plates from possibly hanging or rubbing on the e-clips.
With Bullwinkle's arm, I replaced the pivot screw with a new one here:
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/4006-01005-32
The other major part is the pivoting shaft, but Marco is out of stock on those, so I left the original in place (since nothing was wrong with it anyway). I should also point out that the replacement Bullwinkle arm's pivot hole was slightly too small. You need this hole to be big enough to easily rotate on the pivot shaft, so I carefully bore the hole out larger using a modeling knife.
Then I attempted to replace the hand peg hardware and discovered an issue with the parts there. The service manual lists the hand peg part number as 254-5000-06. I ordered the part from Marco, but discovered that Marco has this part number designated for a plastic standoff. What the service manual lists for that part number is a metal 6-32 hex spacer of the same length (1 1/8 inch), which is secured with a 6-32 x 3/8 inch sems machine screw. So here are the correct parts for that:
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/254-5008-17
http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/4006-01003-06
On my machine, somebody improvised by using a couple half-inch plastic spacers and a slotted screw long enough to hold both, retained on the other end by a nylock nut. I left it as is since it seems to work well enough.
That's all for now. Just a heads up for those looking to restore the backbox hat trick guts.
Hat Trick Rocky Comparison.jpg
Hat Trick Rhino Comparison.jpg
