Quoted from KenLayton:Go look inside old Midway video games like Dog Patch, Sea Wolf, Boot Hill, etc. and look at the plastic wiring now. You'll find big sections of plastic insulation cracked, fallen off, or big exposed sections. How safe is that?
Look inside old radios from the late 1950's and into the 1960's where they used plastic covered wire. You'll find it all busted up and falling apart. How safe is that? Older radios used cloth covered wire which never had problems.
Cloth covered wire is still manufactured today and I have bought several spools (different colors & gauges) of it to use in repairing modern pinball machines.
Plastic vs. cloth vs. "safety" aside, do you plan to rewire an entire game in cloth? I'm not sure why you would need any lengths of wire to repair a machine. If a wire comes off a coil, solder it back on, don't need a spool there. Plus we have fuses on our driver boards in case things do go wrong.
Ontop of all that, these machines were not designed for cloth wiring in their game, assuming there is even a difference. Changing things out of spec could be less safe, or one could argue that.
Finally, a collector buying an AFM with cloth wiring in it might shy away, also making it difficult to repair when the wires don't line up with the matrix, unless you have so much wire you can match the color codes correctly.
These are pinballs, not radios. Maybe plastic wiring from the 50s were not a good idea in radios. But I doubt pinballs are going to get hot enough, draw enough current all over the place, to cause heat to make the wires that old and brittle.
My thoughts.
