Just a suggestion but that game looks like it was under water for some time?? By the time you replace most every part and board many of which are game specific you may find it better to simply by a Beater game in need of some parts and use yours as a donor unit. Just a suggestion as your game may prove to be a money pit of sorts. My guess is you could then take some time and clean up a few of the salvageable parts from this donor to sell and recoup your beater game cost. Just a thought.

You can see lots of examples in this thread:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/pain-in-the-frass-termites

You can see where they have eaten away some layers of the playfield here making it weak and spongy, and it has been broken away. The damage to the cabinet is probably more of the same. Probably why the wood rail is missing too.

termite (resized).jpg

Wow, you got your work cut out for you. You’ll probably spend a decent TZ in parts alone!

I fully agree. Don't want to be negative, but this is not a realistic project.
Salvage what you can from parts and move on. Unless you have unlimited time and money.

I’ll take some unlimited time...let me know where it’s at!

Where can I get complete flipper board assemblies? Marco shows them out of stock

Game wasn't under water. I don't see any signs of that. It's got a thick layer of dust from likely sitting in a warehouse for years, but it comes right off when cleaned. No swelling of the wood anywhere.

The broken wood seemed like areas of blunt force trauma and some idiot used ratchet straps so tight it bent the metal rails and broke the cabinet in matching spots. In fact there is much more evidence of mishandling, many bent metal parts etc. I'll investigate closer for signs of termites now that I know what to look for. The contents of the debris pile in the bottom of the cab should be telling. If there are termite carcasses, wings, or pellets from eaten wood then I know for sure. If not, I'll ask my bug guy to take a look.

I do consider this project to have unlimited time. As I'm doing it for me, and there is no rush. as much as I'd love to buy another beater and use this as a donor machine, beater TZs aren't exactly common, and if I did find another I'd have to beat back the other vultures with a shooter rod and pay out the ass to get it home.

FJIMG_20180921_183448 (resized).jpg

FJIMG_20180921_183702 (resized).jpg

I wish u the best on this project....was the machine free?

I do wish you the best. At the very least consider an inventory list of all of the must buy items before you start to see if this might be a “I can fix this but Should I?” project. Best of luck.

Do you have a detailed list of missing parts?

That's the first step. Planning the project out and seeing how much $ it will take, then deciding what to do. I'm currently working on the parts list.

Did a more throrough check after educating myself about termite signs, I can't find any evidence that the wood damage is anything more than trauma damage from mishandling. No soft wood, no pellets or termite feces/wings, no tunnels, no pinholes. Just an idiot tossing a game around. Thanks for alerting me to check for this, even if I lucked out and don't have to call my exterminator this time, I'll always know what to look for in the future. This is a lesson I'm glad I didn't have to learn the hard way.

If you decide to back out, i'll buy it and ship it.

Pinball Life. Much preferred over Marco.

To those that got new project games.. That made my skin crawl. I hope ya'll do right by the games, and do what you can to save.

If I decide to back out, I'll contact you. Thanks for the out, even if I don't take you up on it I'll sleep better at night haha

Yes, all decals were replaced. The cabinet was also sanded down, filled and has a gloss black paint job. It is pretty stunning with the chrome to accent it. They also installed a Rotten dog board and a few other upgrades. It is the nicest playing machine I have found. One thing that surprised me was the original Cherry microswitch in the slot kickout trough. It was in a failed state. I would have thought this would have been replaced when the machine was restored 4 years ago. It was easy enough to fix as I had a spare, but just seems odd it was not replaced while the whole machine was apart. This is my all time favorite pin. The lights, sounds, shots, etc are hard to beat. It is so refreshing to play a machine that is just "fun" that doesn't require callouts with obscenities to make the game desirable. Pat did a great job integrating the original TZ series into this machine.

Wondering if someone can tell me what I'm missing here. My daughter was playing TZ the other night and the slot kickout refused to kick the ball out. I took the kicker assembly apart and had a look at the end of the plunger, and it looks like something is missing. Is the plunger supposed to be open like that? From the diagram in the manual, there looks to be something there, but I can't quite work out what. I've checked everywhere on the playfield and in the cabinet but can't seem to find anything that might have fallen off. Anyone have a picture or part number for what this should look like?

tz1 (resized).PNG

tz2 (resized).PNG

Flipper Fidelity is good. Drastic change in my LOTR.

Your kicker plunger is busted. The plastic insert (a cylindrical piece of plastic, either white or black, about 1-2 inches long) brok off from the metal plunger. You will need to get a new one. Part number is A-13270

Yep, my Monster Bash kicker was like this; the ball would go all crazy and sometimes not ever eject. Get a new one, they are $10 or so. I don’t believe this is fixable

Thanks guys. Thought so. I can’t find the remnants anywhere. Maybe they disappeared ... into the Twilight Zone

You'll find it in anywhere between 4 to 18 months. And you'll wonder what the heck it is.

It’s currently stuck in the wiring harness, and invisible for a minimum of 6 months

Unrelated..
There was some talk about 'unknown' scoring tactics. I just remembered this one:

If you have The Spiral mode running, and the powerball out, shoot to start Powerball Mania.

Once Powerball Mania starts, let the ball out of the slot machine (from the gumball) drain. Let the next two balls shot out of the autolauncher to immediately drain.

All three balls will be relaunched. The first ball launched from the autofire will award the second two award shots. Then the next 5 ball launched will award a Spiral Breakthrough.

Also: the Powerball Jackpot is a combination of two switch matrix closures in close succession: 75, "Mini-playfield Top", meaning a ball was at the top of the mini-playfield, followed by 42, "The Camera", which would normally indicate the _same ball_ exiting the top the of mini-playfield and going through the "subway" to the Slot Kickout.

If, during Powerball Multi-ball play, you hit the top of the mini-playfield with one ball, and then shoot the Camera shot within a second or two with a _second_ ball, you'll score the Jackpot.

This works during LITZ as well.

Here is a
Special offer blue (resized).jpg
for my Twilight Zone Clock Board - only for members of this TZ-Owners-Club and only for this week:


Available are 8 white and 8 green boards.

Here is my special deal:

1 X WHITE board (warm white LEDs preinstalled) + 1 set cool white LEDs + 1 set blue LEDs + 1 set rainbow LEDs + shipping

or

1 X GREEN board (warm white LEDs preinstalled) + 1 set cool white LEDs + 1 set blue LEDs + 1 set rainbow LEDs + shipping

All for 110,00 USD - so you can save about 40,00 USD to the regular price.

Please send me PM!!!!


Here are the boards:
6 + 6 TZ Clock Boards (resized).jpg

WHITE board:
white clock board 2 german-pinball-modular (resized).jpg

GREEN board:
Green clock Board (resized).jpg

Perfect illumination:
white clock board 1 (resized).jpg

RAINBOW color changing LEDs look fantastic:
white board with rainbows (resized).jpeg

TZ sound sucks, unless you want to go pinsound to make the input side of the sound better, its still going to be bad on any speakers. It'll be "better" bad, but still not good. typical GIGO sound.

My TZ sounds awesome with Flipper Fidelity speakers, but granted the amp is not really up to the job of driving them particularly well. I don't feel like I'm missing anything though, and certainly wouldn't want to change the music and SFX for non-original ones.

Pinsound is a revelation on this machine. There are a bunch of great mixes and enhanced versions out there. You do need at LEAST a better cabinet woofer to get the best out of it.

Has anyone removed the big fat plastics on the back of the ramp? Im slowly starting a partial restore, and I just took them out - original, yellowing and warped as hell.

I assume those are there to eliminate a ball trap, but they are kinda ugly.. and I have no idea how a ball could get up there or get stuck if it did. Should I bother even replacing them?

Not only to eliminate a ball trap, but to stop a powerful shot from launching the ball OFF the ramp to get caught.
I took them off my game when I did my restore, and promptly had to put them back because my balls would ride up the far edge of the ramp, fly into the air and get stuck by the UR flasher up there. Fff..

So, try it. If it works, keep them off. Be prepared to have to put them back on, though.

Gotcha - hasn’t happened yet but sounds like it sure will!

I'm hesitating regarding the Convolux mod - not "if", but which color to choose...
Would be great with a reference from a member that has one installed

Like I said unless you want to change the input sound via pinsound you have garbage sound regardless of the speakers.

Uh huh. Adding that sub does help a -LOT- but it does nothing to improve the quality of callouts and the low-fi sound in general

Hey TZ fans - I have a strange issue or maybe I don't. I'm not really sure. My game plays great. I have a newer Rotten Dog MPU installed with the remote battery pack and fresh batteries. About every 10 to 15 power ons the game reports "factory settings restored". The funny thing is my settings are all still there including free play. I just ignore it and continue to play on until it show up the next time. Is this one of the undocumented features????? Anybody else seeing this?

Someone reported this exact same thing on the UK pinball forums this week, albeit a different WPC machine. Rotten Dog board in that too.

The consensus was that they eat batteries.

If you take your batteries off you'll probably find they have very little charge remaining.

Yeah, that's not normal.
Likely, batteries are low enough to cause a checksum mismatch in the RAM, causig the error to appear, yet some settings are still readable and *aren't* resent to defaults.

Just an update on my Twilight Zone issues. Initially I had to change the plunger in the solenoid with a broken tip. Taking the slot kicker assembly out in order to replace the plunger I took the opportunity to test the whole assembly and found that the solenoid was also reading around 1.2ohm, which didn't sound right so I chose to replace that as well. Putting the unit back together I found the tip wedged in the scoop, which took some fishing to get out.

When I finally got the broken tip removed and the assembly replaced, during game play testing the ball refused to be detected correctly when it entered the slot machine. Testing all the switches along the way appeared to be correct and manual testing also verified all the switches work as expected. It was only when I took apart the switch under the slot machine I could see it had been vaguely bent, probably when the tip broke off and wedged in the scoop and 3 or 4 balls got stuck in with it

To cut a long story short, a small correction back to the switch spring wire fixed the machine and it's now playing better than ever. I think the wire had been previously bent a little and when the tip broke, it finished the job. The difference between working and not working is only a few mm...

Yup, my FT has a rottendog CPU board and new batteries die in less than 2yrs and you get the reset message. Sometimes settings are lost, sometimes they are not.

Is it easy to put NVRAM in Rottendog MPU boards? While it won't keep your game's time correct (and some people like having the clock on the playfield show the correct time), it does mean never having to deal with this problem ever again.

TZ is the only game that I own that I have batteries in (my other non-clock dependent pins have NVRAM), and just as a matter of course, I change the batteries once per year as a standard maintenance practice.

I use Lithium batteries in all the stock holders. They last a long time. I do not have any problems with my two Rottendog boards.

I'm rebuilding my TZ (still ever so slowly.) I'll be putting in a gumball light kit but am undecided on which one and looking for input from those that have seen them in person.

Dazzler by PinballPro or
Pinbits Lamp kit

I'm using Pinballbulbs kit LEDs if it matters.
I'll have colored glass gumballs in the machine.
Price isn't a deciding factor, looking more at functionality.
I've watched the video(s) but it is more zoomed in than I would care for and isn't the best to help me decide.

Dazzler seems like it does more (more lighting modes) but I'm not sure that is a positive or not. Pinbits seems like it is basic but that may not be a bad thing.

Does Pinside have a feature to add a poll to a post? (doesn't look like it)

Thanks for the input.

Hmm... Didn't know that Rottendog mpu's had a history with draining batteries. That would explain why my Congo went through fresh lithium batteries in less than a year lately. Expected them to last a long time but only went around 9 months.

If you are having worst problems with batteries, I would look into nvram. Not sure if that is a pain to put in a Rottendog board but it sure is nice not to have to deal with batteries. You loose some features like the clock telling the correct time but I wouldn't call that a big deal if you have to change batteries often.

I went Pinbits, but use silver pachinko balls in my Gumball machine (roughly 25-30 in each side) to match the translite more.
Using Comet 2SMD frosted Sunlight, with LED OCD and GI OCD.

It does seems like the Rotten Dog board is eating my batteries. The batteries are testing weak after only a couple months. Got to have my clock working so NVRam isn’t an option on TZ for me. Has anybody tried a memory capacitor on a Rotten Dog MPU? In theory I think it should work.