Does anyone have a good picture of the trough switch / shooter lane lights on their Xenon? I'm putting mine back together but I'm baffled by the way mine was wired before tear down. According to the schematics, the switch should be White/Yellow and Black/Orange which is the way the switch was wired before...but why is that Gray/White (or Light blue/gray) wire doing on the Normally Closed contact leg of the switch? And where is the other wire for the two lamps? Thanks for the help!

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Thanks so much - that makes much more sense. I like that metal shield on top of the trough - I have an early run Xenon that used a plastic shield. I only have one speaker in the cabinet as well whereas most people seem to have two.

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My Xenon restore is finally finished! Xenon is the only pinball I remember from the arcade in the early 80's and IMO is one of the prettiest games in the history of pinball. This Xenon was a complete rebuild - new CPR playfield (the limited gold instead of yellow run from 2009), tons of chrome (ramp, ball guides, armor, etc), XPIN displays, etc. Thanks to all the folks on here that have had great ideas for tweaks - I incorporated a few of them in my build.

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Why yes, all the blue posts are lit....and it looks good.

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I tied a 20" blue comet matrix strip into the shooter lane bulbs. You'll only see it lit up when multiball is ready, but it is a really neat effect.

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I didn't want to wash out the drop target plastic with red, so I used red flex bulbs pointed at the drops and a 4" blue strip to light the plastic.

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I loved the idea of the small natural white strips behind the robots on the backglass.

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I covered the bleh transformer paper with matte label paper. Much cleaner!

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I used a slightly larger 5" Flipper Fidelity speaker with small spacers so that I could run a subwoofer output just under the speaker. The external sub makes a HUGE difference!

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Underbelly shot.

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Thanks for the kind words everyone.

Back in 1980, the designers only had one choice for lights - yellowish white (incandescent). They did use colored plastic bulb covers in a few places on this game - the 4 rear GI lights under the plastics and the 4 lights behind the drops had red covers on them. So in those cases, it makes sense to use red LEDs. As mentioned above, I used flex red LEDs behind the drops as it allows for a more directional placement - lighting the drops, but not underneath the plastic.

As for the main GI, it just comes down to personal preference - cool white looks really nice with blue tones and ice blue is still mostly white but with a tinge of blue which gives clear titan rubbers a really neat light blue glow. On my game, I used ice blue in all of the GI locations and a small ice blue in the trough area. The star posts are actually a deep blue - it's a shame that iPhones can't take pictures of LEDs (everything just looks too bright and washed out in the pics).

Ghosting/strobing with the LEDs wasn't really that bad on my game with the original boards using comet bulbs - but I had already purchased the Alltek boards. They do offer some improvement, but it's not a huge difference. You can basically replace the original boards with Alltek boards or buy the adapter boards that Comet sells. These are cheaper but require the use of your original boards.

I tried doing it that way initially, but it's really dark in that area when they aren't lit. I elected to leave them on constantly, but I'll probably add a strip somewhere that flashes when those bulbs flash. A small strip tucked up at the top of the rail under the plastic might work. It would be invisible until it started flashing.

Here was my optimal wire shape on the ramp switch:

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And under the two posts, I’m using a Lexan ring. It should keep the post from digging in and looks a little nicer than a metal washer.

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I was able to find a near perfect match of nail polish for the spinner at Wal-Mart. The color is “mintage”.

I was initially skeptical about using nail polish for high impact pinball areas, but my wife convinced me to try it on Rudy’s lips in our Funhouse. After 15 years of being hammered in the mouth, it still looked flawless - so I’m a fan now.

On the spinner, you just need to get a good coat around the edges, then use the Marco decals. See Spinner pic in above post for the results.

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https://www.cometpinball.com/products/2smd-bulbs?variant=1806558101548

44, Ice Blue, Frosted in the selections

FYI - mine are regular blue in the chaser lights, cool white behind the Backglass.