Professional playfield eightball deluxe swap. Glued braid for lamps and gottlieb flippers!!

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Not really a hack. Just why?

How could taking a bunch of junk wood scraps, finger jointing them together, then wrapping them in vinyl be cheaper than painting a piece of oak. Ugh.

Maybe because Sttng has a really light pf?

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Gottlieb Flippers interesting and why?

I’ve got a glut of extra Classic Stern flipper mechs. I’ve been tempted to swap a few into my Bally games with linear flippers because ugh those linear flippers.

I’d really want to know which “professional” did the swap…

because staples are so 18th century and overrated?

Doubt I still have any pictures, but I picked up a Bally Viking several years back that had the ground braid held on and, in some cases, connected using thumb tacks.

Not the worst, just typical Bally operator hackery.

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We kept 'em making money in the field.....

I had a customer once that had done a playfield swap on a Centaur and then called me cause 'it didn't work right and wanted a professional to look at'. Among many, many other things - he also went the thumb tack method. It made replacing bulbs to LEDs impossible with those God awful 555 sockets and were quickly replaced.

While I'm here - found this in a customer game the other day. He said the game didn't do anything. Actually, it just had a blown solenoid fuse and 80B games won't do anything till the ball kicks over.

Anyway - here's what blew his fuse... Looks like the EOS failed and someone very poorly attempted to wire around it. Except - it blows the fuse instantly so... yeah

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Good that the coil survived. Next step would have been to short out the flipper fuse, then burn out the coil and eventually flipper supply.

As Beavis and Butthead would say...Fire, Fire!

Thank goodness for fuses.

Well isn't that nice! Too bad it didn't include some sort of measuring device (or glasses!).

Matching blue tape for the missing target.

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Very nice. An electrician friend fixed his outhole problem by covering it with black electrician's tape, on Royal Flush. Match your tape to the playfields, folks! It’s the right thing to do!

I guess multi-ball was overrated on this game.

The deal with sp is half the lights could be out as well as half the features as well and the game will still earn very well.

Gottlieb - Pinball Pool

This will be hard to beat...

Take your grandpa's underpants, remove the elastic and now you can replace/fix that broken spring.

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LOL. I guess the next question is how well did it work?

I’m somewhat curious where grandpa is walking around commando all day long…

curious, grandpa, commando... three words that should never be in the same sentence.

Who would've thunk you could be fully equipped to fix a broken flipper return spring just shuffling around the house in your BVDs.

Underwear elastic will last a lot long than a rubber band.

Also, check that lower cabinet for a pile of broken rubber bands.

That'll be a stretch to beat...

It worked badly, very very badly. The plunger cannot return to its "home position", because the elastic lost its strength years ago.
The full story, current owner was desperate for this Pinball Pool and bought the machine (with the flipper problem) from another person and him (the seller) was who "install" that elastic band on it as a quick fix and to close the deal, quick too. That's current owner told me.

Certainly today's rubber rings are much worse than in the past. They don't last long, especially the white ones, instead black rubbers are more durable.

Williams - Dracula (BSD)

Double or triple jackpot...

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Somebody had fun with those targets.

My OP friend told me that same thing. That the new white rubbers don't hold up. He got in the business in the 70s.

This one isn't strange, just dumb. Why replace the broken coil mounting bracket when you can just throw a hideous weld on it?? People seem to just love making things complicated, ugly, and unreliable...

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What game is it from? You need to remember that just 20 years ago, there was no Marco website or any other website selling pinball parts. So if you didn't have a distributor in your area with the part you needed, you were out of luck. That was back when you had to buy your way into a distributor. People off the street couldn't just walk in and buy parts. Had to have an account with the distributor. Not to single anyone out, but I think a lot of people forget just how hard it used to be to get parts. Even simple things like coil stops

I want to say that weld looks horrible, but I'm not a welder. Did it work?

It's from Popeye. And of course I understand parts availability, but Marco and others did have websites 20 years ago with stuff like this available. I was just getting into collecting then, and I remember ordering online with my first game. Also, places like Betson would've had this extremely common part as well. It was just lazy.

Anyway, yes, it did work until it cracked again. It was creating slop in the mech, so out it went...

I see that and I raise you this homemade coil mounting bracket.

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Nice. It appears that Iowa is currently the place to find crappy coil mounting brackets.

Marco website came online in 2004, 19 years ago. Pinball Life website started in 2005. Pinball Resource was online before that, but that was it for parts in this country 20 years ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/Marcospecialties.com

Happ Controls
Amusement Emporium
Amusements Plus
Mazzco

Many coin-op distributors still had a good stock of WPC parts into the early 2000’s.

I get your point, dude. I was here then. No need to belabor it to me. But you also need to understand that I know where this game came from, and there was no reason for them to do what they did.

But as far as Marco goes, per their website, they have had an online retail presence since 1999. Maybe they're lying about their own company??

Mayfair Amusements as well.

Practice makes perfect!

Was at an expo the other day and was asked to look at this pin (not mine). The flipper link exploded, which was fine but .. up to that point this somehow worked while epoxied in place?

Also had a gnarly regular switch bastardized onto the cab switch, but I forgot the take a picture of that one.

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I like how they added the finishing nail between the shaft and pawl, just to be sure. Epoxy works 99% of the time, finishing nail makes sure it works 100% of the time. Always keep finishing nails in your toolbox.

And Drywall screws.

Noticed the game worked with fuseholder missing. Figured out what.

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Who ever had one of these folding travel alarm clocks?

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Edit:
Wrong Topic!

Self reported fail. I tried to 3D print a replacement goalie for a friends Striker Xtreme. Came out looking like a shocked Morty lol

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Can you post a photo of what it's supposed to look like?

This is what it 'should' look like

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This was the model available on Thiniverse
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I think someone stole the 3D model for the goalie from a Virtual Pinball table and slapped that into cad to make a printable STL

This one I approve of. $0.50 fix to make the eject hole easier to stick (it’s an IJ)

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mine says Made in USA

Sneaky.

Williams - Flash

Bad overlay attempt, bad repairs, bad hacks. Even the backglass are a fake/fail print. All in one package, poor Flash.

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