Joining the club. Just picked up a nice LE. Can't wait to get some Led's and some figures added!
lotr2 (resized).jpg

Actually I think my first purchase will be the color dmd. Thing looks sweet on this one! LCD or LED?

Is there a good way to dim the elf ring led? Its blinding me. Like looking into headlights with the brights on.

FYI - I recently had to replace the Gimli switch on my LOTR. My first go at it I purchased a few of the expensive Y switches and unfortunately didn't have any luck getting the new switches to trigger reliably. I stumbled upon a post where drummermike recommended the 180-5209-00 switch so I bought three of them. Installed one and quickly realized I should have read the post more carefully because you have to bend the end of the switch to get it to work otherwise the pinball wont make contact with the switch.

So after bending it flat and cutting the end so it wasn't being struck by the VUK I thought... why not break off the Y part of the old switch and reuse it? So I did that and super glued it to the top of the other switch and wrapped them together with a piece of tape. The thing works perfectly and is extremely responsive.

Moral of the story. Don't buy those expensive crappy Y switches. Keep your old ones and break off the Y part and reuse them on cheaper 180-5209-00 switches. Hope this helps other new LOTR members replacing their first VUK switch.

On another note, has anyone used threaded inserts for that whole VUK assembly? Good/Bad idea?

Yeah, welding would have been a lot cooler, but this was a quick and dirty prototype.

For the elf ring I ended up cutting a circle piece out of some spare computer privacy screen material and taped a small piece of white paper on it to cover the 3 blinding elf led's. hawknole, I remember reading that post where the guy punched through his playfield messing with this so I made sure that the new height with plastic and paper is not touching it at all. I also did not screw it in as tight as it was before just for piece of mind. Much better now!

Update: well that didn't last long. The Y part broke off. Going to have to solder.