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Before embarking in my first playfield teardown, I'd love to hear any tips/techniques people may have to make the process a bit smoother. Methods of determining the order, organizing and taking photos, whatever.
For example, for soldered connections, do you de-solder everything and re-solder it again, or carefully leave certain wiring attached? How do you manage the wiring harnesses, leaving them in place?
Anything goes here, I'm looking for wisdom. Thanks!
Let me start by saying I FREAKING LOVE THIS FORUM. Thank you everyone. Amazing.
Quoted from ForceFlow:What game will you be tearing town?
Theatre of Magic. I plan to have the playfield restored by a pro, as I don't happen to have a clearcoat painting chamber in my house, but I figure I should step up to tearing down and cleaning up the parts.
Quoted from Dante:I snip all coils and add molex connectors when I reassemble. GI and other smaller connections, I leave intact.
Do you have a photo of one of your coils once you put the molex connector on?
Quoted from boneman91:I do not re-solder, unless there is a bad connection or reason to do so.
For the underside, I label everything with a number, with a corresponding number on the playfield, with a sharpie. So hole 27 takes the GI socket that I put a 27 on, etc. For some things, like transistor boards or switches, I'll outline them with the sharpie as well as number them. Once I have everything disconnected, with lots of photos, I slide the wiring harness onto a large piece of cardboard, labeling head and foot.
Quoted from Phatchit:Unless you are doing a playfield swap there really isn't a need to unsolder anything
There are definitely connections, like single mounted bulb sockets, that are soldered under the playfield. So when you guys say you don't de-solder, I'm assuming that means you leave the connected socket connected to the wire harness and then move the wire harness in one move to your staging area (and back later). Am I getting this right?
Quoted from epthegeek:One thing I've done recently that helped with full teardowns is use a piece of foamcore to mount the posts into temporarily, in a layout similar to where they go in the playfield (but scaled down) so I don't have to remember which type of post goes where. I had it on carpet, so I just used one layer and poked them out the bottom, but if you put it on a hard surface you'd need a few layers to cover the post depth.
epthgeek that sounds like a winning method. If you happen to have a photo of your foamcore loaded, I'd love to see it!
Again, these tips are fantastic, keep them coming.
As I prepare for a teardown, I have another follow up question here. The teardown I'm about to start is with a BoP that clearly has a ton of missing pieces. Posts are gone and plastics are flapping the breeze, there are drywall screws holding up ramps, and the plastic posts that are there may or may not be the right ones. I'm 95% sure the main mechanical components are right, but the devil is in the details.
Unfortunately, there isn't a reference per se that is easy to use at this level of detail. I've seen others post their teardown pics of their machines and I can try my best to reference that.
In any case, I'm wondering if you experienced folks have any particular technique for validating the parts are the right ones for a specific area of a machine? Is this just a case of experience informing what you think should be in a particular place, and getting a replacement?
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