Hi Gang,

Thought I would share my reborn WW. I bought this game in Winter 2014 100% working, but completely unpresentable, something below players condition. It had major bubbling mylar, playfield wear/raised inserts , clipped and burnt connectors, a broken ramp, a fried interconnect board, soda spill on the lock bar, and endless grime. Even so, the game had some great potential: very little rust, cabinet in good condition, translite, speaker panel, coin door, etc. I did just about everything aside from redoing the cabinet (details below)

Getting this game coincided with becoming a dad, buying my first home, and a huge increase in work responsibilities, so finding time to work on the restore was an incredible feat, usually involving many long nights. Needless to say, this was a major undertaking. I owe a lot of my ideas, techniques, and will to go on to threads by Skypilot (FH restore), swampfire (WW restore), and Vid (pop bumpers/flippers) -- to name a few -- Thank you!

Before (will post after pics shortly):image_3.jpgimage_2.jpgimage_1.jpgimage.jpg

During:

New stuff:

CPR gold playfield (from another member)
CPR plastics & protectors
Star posts
Rubbers
Flipper rebuild kit
Great Lakes interconnect board replacement
Back ramp
Rubber spacers
Drop target stickers
Spinners decals
Cliffys

Process:

Hand polished every metal piece (I'm investing in a tumbler in the future, though this polish is the bomb...) image.jpg

In addition to polishing the hardware, every coil got a new sleeve and wrapperimage.jpg

Regrained ball guidesimage.jpg

Washed the harness with water and simple greenimage.jpg

Cleaned and sanded the inside of the cabinetimage.jpg

Washed the boards, check out my antique dryer! image.jpg

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I scrapped the interconnect board (you can see the jumper wire). The IDC connector was equally scary... The harness picture is also pre-zip ties, so it was still a small mess in that photo

Getting closer. You'll notice in these shots that I desperately need a rotisserie:image.jpgimage.jpgimage.jpgimage.jpg

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After Part #1 (direct comparison shots)

I can't forget I added the new spinner decals. Essential for WW. It's a very loved game and they tend to be beat to death

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After Part #2:

I added a strategic combination of comet non ghosting cool whites and natural whites. The blues in Whirlwind go incredibly well with cool white.

(Edit: pictures on my phone were slightly better, so I swapped them)

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Thanks guys. The amount of pics I had to take was crazy. Even more mind blowing is all the shots/angles I didn't seem to have and needed to find elsewhere. I think what makes it so difficult to take enough pics is that stopping to take photos disrupts the workflow. It's a fine line.

If anyone is wondering, I also used ziplock bags & labeling. I put the plastics themselves in the bags to keep screws and plastics together. I also washed and relabeled coils separately so I wouldn't mix them up, even though that was pretty tedious.

Here's my intimidating harness pile:image.jpg

Originally I intended to pull the mylar on the original playfield and try restoring the playfield to save some $$. So that's what I started doing. I spent a lot of time prepping the playfield and pulled the mylar with the freeze spray method. The playfield isn't terrible by any means, but I knew I wasn't going to be 100% happy after all the work. I wasn't sure I could do it correctly without making this a 2-year project. Here is the original playfield after pulling mylar and before going to work on the adhesive (pic is from last fall) image.jpgimage.jpg

Once I decided to do a CPR swap, then I couldn't stop myself from more craziness: I novus'ed the multi lane ramp, tried my hand at flame polishing the pop bumper caps, which turned out nice. I plan to recap and bullet proof the board set, perhaps adding an NVRAM in the near future, but I wanted to move on to my other projects (shopping my Shadow, finishing my Galaga and Centipede cabarets, etc). Never ending things to do