...then my "roadrunner" is the Firepower project that’s been taunting, fighting, and mocking me every damn step of the way since I got it almost a year ago in May 2015.
(Yeah, I'm a wordy sonafabich… but as a summary log of the past year, 3 pages is pretty damn brief. So if you wanna laugh at my hard-earned lessons in stupidity, then pour a drink and settle in!)
~~~~~~~~~~~
Of course, what else should I expect from a $300 wreck?! The seller wanted $800 but I said there was no way it was worth that. Clearly in no shape to even test with balls rusted into the locks, inserts popped out, cabinet trashed and de-plied, and boards with visibly blown transistors and charring. The most amazing things were that it escaped a bonfire sendoff for so long, and imagining what the abandoned warehouse or brothel it came from must have looked like. In the end he agreed so I couldn’t be mad; $300 seemed reasonable parts value… and since I’d only paid $200 for the van (trouble-free for 3 years and 20K+ miles since purchase) I was loading the game into on that fine day, I guess things have to balance out somehow. 
So let’s review: The cabinet was filthy, planked, and chipped, but easy enough to deal with: I replaced the missing layers in the back and neck with new wood; peeled off the delaminating parts and rebuilt with putty and sanding; masked off the striping and repainted all the black, then touched up the stipes themselves. Left enough “patina” to hint at the machine’s sordid history: not showroom perfect but very clean and presentable through tedious and time-consuming effort, but robotically easy over a few weekends in June.
20150519_204217_(resized).jpg
20150601_210243_(resized).jpg
20150606_131723_(resized).jpg
20150606_234734_(resized).jpg
That would be the end of “easy”.
The plastics cleaned nicely but were still a little yellow… so I sacrificed one to a retro-brite experiment thread here on Pinside. Whereas others touted success, this once ended in disaster. The original ink was incompatible. So I repainted that one and learned to accept the others. “Patina” they say.
The playfield was a wreck but Vid has an awesome guide going here, right? I decided this would be my entry to join the big boy club: Design and build my own rotisserie to suit my space. Pop out all the inserts. Remove old mylar via witchcraft of flour and alcohol, hey, only lost half the paint around one pop bumper. Touch that up. And the other paint. Mask and spray the GI pads white. Order new inserts after sourcing them from 3 different vendors. Discover that none of them fit even after sanding… so route each and every hole by hand. By hand. By. HAND. Inevitable “oops” moments yield rougher edges and loose fits. The epoxy couldn’t fill them all. 
So I devised a way to the gaps safely with UV resin.
20150615_221847_(resized).jpg
20150616_214209_(resized).jpg
But of course even after all that, not all the inserts set or glued cured perfectly level either. Oh, and halfway through this, part of the top (artwork) layer delaminated from the pf so I had to set that down too. But hey, the pros say insert leveling is easy with 2PAC right? Instead of clearing this one with a brush and Varathane like I did my first pin, I could try the 2PAC spray…
...except I don’t have a garage, and the local weather last year ended up setting a record for the second wettest / rainiest year in history. I got one ideal break weather-wise, and in a bit of a rush to use it, I created one mild disaster over an especially troublesome insert I tried to level with clear. 
Oh well, live and learn. That one insert may look a little “extra sparkly” but at least it’s inconspicuous (and rarely lit). At least the insert decals I printed worked beautifully.
I didn’t touch it for 3 months afterward: partly out of disgust, but mostly out of being too busy to choke down said disgust. Meanwhile, at least 3 months gave the clear plenty of time to harden. So I tinkered on stuff like the boards, replacing the “obvious” stuff like blown components. And rebuilding the coils. And touching up the backglass - it’s a Firepower, of course a bit of the ink was long-gone! But why the hell is "magenta" such a @^%@! impossible color to mix?!
Eventually I turned back to the pf and realized, bleah, it’s still not level enough to my liking for all this effort. It’s winter, but I need to remake traction, so this has to be indoors now, so, sigh.... back to Varathane topcoating after all. (At least I learned from the last time how to do it better, though or what it's worth, that last time survived 1800 plays before receiving endless praise at a recent expo). But I daresay, it turned out well…?!
20150520_184259_(resized).jpg
20160131_222023_(resized).jpg
After cleaning, and scrubbing, and losing, and finding all the metal parts, I rebuilt the upper pf. After first polishing all the pf bulb sockets with a Dremel course. It was looking so nice I got excited and ordered LED’s from trust Art at Comet… installed them, put the boards in the game, connected the lamp harnesses and pf, turned on the game and marveled in the post-Chirstmas color extravaganza until one of the sockets caught fire.
Varathane smells funny when it gets warm... 
Fortunately but no real damage beyond my ego was done.
Replace the suspect socket. Tidy up some wiring and connections. Remount the long bulb bracket under the 1K-20K bonus lights on the playfield using the ORIGINAL SCREWS which I never even fully removed from that bracket so I wouldn’t lose them… hear a *crack* as the top pf ply goes prone over the screw hole. WTF!?!?! It’s the original screw, how the hell is it too long?!?! Curse you Williams and your shoddy arcade boom assembly!!
Sigh. No way glue or set it down perfectly at this point. But it’s nothing a little careful sanding and perhaps a preventive mylar patch can’t fix. This game still has some scars and bruises I’ve left deliberately and created accidentally so, add this to its list of character traits.
At any rate, now I can do the boards! I did the power supply from the start and that was easy. I recapped the sound board - even letting my 11yo daughter do most of the work - and HOLY SHIT I HAS THE SOUNDS but not speech. Eh, OK, speech is a different animal, I can deal with that. Let’s test the displays now.
Nothing. Well, cathode dots on 3 of the 4 player displays, but not the Master. Swapping around shows the one display is possibly bad. But since I have no digits, OK, let’s get into the MPU.
Nothing. Hm. OK time to read Clay’s and Mark’s guides.
OOOOOOOOOOH after lots and lots and lots of trial and error, I’ve got two of the player displays showing two digits each! Awesome! It’s coming alive now I need to evaluate the next steps to get the other displays to light not to mention the other digits and hey you know those lit numbers look reaaaally bright and almost more pink than orange CRACK 
Welcome back to high school chemistry, glass cracks when it gets too hot! Sigh. Given the dead master and likely now two dead displays, arrgh, time to spring for a modern replacement. But I’ve got so much into this now, let’s spring for the X-pin. Hook it up and… sonuva! Same bad patterns as before! 
Meanwhile the MPU testing is flagging issues with the 6808 chip. Hey, I’ve got a known working one from my sound board so let’s confirm by swapping that one in: yes indeed, the MPU tries to boot so its original CPU is bad. Well lemme put this good one back in the sound board and FUUUUuuuuuuu sound board is D-E-A-D now!
Another TL;DR SNAFU chapter of MPU / Diver silliness (it’s in THIS thread if you want to read it... featuring such thrilling red herrings as good bench supplies going bad, chips flaking out, sockets toning but not working, etc etc etc, patiently indulged by some Pinside Heroes) and SUCCESS!! After re-socketing five 40-pin chips, crystals, caps, resistors, connectors, and other stuff it boots!
And my fancy, expensive, leap-of-faith-so-you-better-not-eff-em-up-you-idiot, displays work!
20160216_213334_(resized).jpg
20160317_184413_(resized).jpg
So let’s connect the playfield and test: Happy Saint Patrickmas in March, on attract even! Except one row sticks on and an RGB bulb gets so hot it melts the solder off the SMD. Heh. You know what? I have to laugh at that one now. Easy fix at this point. I’ve got that.
So let’s Switch test! All pass more or less, except the special solenoid switches. Hmm... So speaking of solenoids, let’s test them and…
POW goes the fuse. Oops. Which ones stuck on?
Let’s try again… damn, that blows fast.
OK so this is not going to work. Let’s check every one again and… oops, I missed a reversed diode under the apron (or more likely I resoldered that one backwards when sleepwalking one night).
OK. Fix that. Driver board still looks good. Rig a momentary trigger/breaker with an inline fuse holder and… 5 coils triggering at power-on. Including some that were visibly blown when got the machine, pre-rehab. D’oh!
OK so let's measure and test the transistors and 7408's and... holy geez, they all have pins dead which tie into another chip upstream now? ARRRRRRGH!
~~~~~~~~~~~
For every hill I climb, I barely get to enjoy the downslope before the next peak shoots up from the valley. I’m so close to getting this wreck of a machine playable through my own questionable force of will, grit, and questionable life decisions that I can’t hardly wait…
...and yet there’s troubleshoot the coils on yet another deeper more advanced level. And my sound board boots but is still dead even after verifying sockets and replacing the sound roms and speech op-amps.
I haven’t even tried the special solenoids yet because their non-registering switches have me scared to do so…
This game kicked my ass in the virtual versions, and wouldn't you know it’s kicking my ass in the real world before I ever get to play it. After tinkering with endless projects both adopted and forced over nearly 39 years I have finally found my true nemesis!
But zeusdammit, once I get this machine to play the first game I think I’m going to drink so much beer I might black out before it fails on me. If it’s going to be the death of me, what better way?!
Mr. Ritchie may have the last best laugh on me yet... 
Well at least he said my BG is 'better than most he's seen'... which was nice since he hadn't seen the *before*
Oh, and he'd have been signing a fair bit of rust if I hadn't masked and repainted the apron, too.
Cypress, TX
