I need to find the thread where I bought this thing but I think it might've been two servers ago. Very long story made very short: I got a Firepower for $250
* Although the backglass survived, its head was destroyed so thoroughly that I ended up fabricating a new one from scratch
* The boards have gnarly battery damage
* The playfield art was roached beyond even the most optimistic hope of repair (and I've restored playfields with a LOOOOOOT of mouse piss soaked in) so I got a still-fucked-but-less playfield and restored that instead

Anyway I started the underside today. All that stuff has to come off and get put on the new playfield

The sheer Volume of wire in this thing

Fun fact: if you took all the wire out of an 80's-era pinball machine and laid each piece end to end in one straight line, I'd be really mad at you

Alright, it is done, all the stuff is off the playfield leaving only the GI braid behind
If the new playfield already had its GI braid in position we could just schwuff all that stuff over to the new playfield and start screwing/soldering it down, but I gotta transfer the braid too. So for now everything's in a big pile inside the cabinet
GI stands for General Illumination, meaning the bulbs that stay lit all the time so you can see what you're doing as opposed to the bulbs that flash to tell you what you've done and what you should be doing next. But Gastro-Intestinal is funnier. Anyway tomorrow I'll swap out its GI tract

Pinball machines are designed to be very very easy to fix and swap parts out etc but Williams absolutely did not expect anyone to swap out The Actual Bit Of Plywood In The Middle Of The Electronics Sandwich

Like it's reasonable to have feelings like, oh, why oh why did they staple the GI braid in like that, but honestly they figured this thing would get hammered hard enough that you'd replace every bulb and rubber a few times, rebuild the flippers, do some board work maybe and then this'd end up in a skip having earned its weight in quarters, they absolutely did not expect Some Guy to be tearing it down this deep *checks watch* forty six years after they'd made the damn thing

Lots and lots of wire.

See Williams used a matrix for the lamps as well as the switches. So you have eight transistors on one end to let the electricity in and eight more on the other end to let it out again, to turn on one lamp you go "Turn on the transistors on row 2 and column 3" and you could control 64 lamps with 16 transistors. Bally just had one transistor per lamp

A playfield swap/restoration is the second hardest thing you can do with a pinball machine aside from trying to restore a flaked backglass (you have to match the colour AND the transparency and good luck with that)

I saw a reddit thread about a lady who bought a Bally machine, I think it was a Xenon or a Space Invaders or smth like that, anyway all the paint was ground off my the ball and her feller thought he'd do something nice to surprise her and he got one of those made-brand-new reproduction playfields with the automotive clearcoat, they're like seven hundred bucks. Anyway he took all the stuff off the old playfield and then realised how deep in over his head he was and left it in buckets for ten years

That's how I got my Skylab, someone went "Right I'm gonna restore this playfield" and took everything off and put it in buckets and then donated it to PAPA
I got the Skylab I wanna say seven years ago and it's been 90% finished for about five years
Anyway it's not gonna be like the reddit thread or the Skylab, I'm gonna finish the playfield swap TOMORROW
It's gonna be really embarrassing if my next post on this is five years from now

This new playfield didn't have its GI braid laid out the same way as the old one. I've drawn out where it'll go...

(pictures show old PF with GI braid and a couple bulbs, and the new PF pencil-marked with roughly where it'll go)

It remembers its shape
Right, GI braid in place

I'm gonna replace these, but not yet, I wanna do one order and get everything I need. So for now I'm just giving them a quick clean.

The new ones are bright white

@ifixcoinops Many years ago I had one of these fracture in pieces. Naturally I didn't have an extra at hand, no 3D printers or anything, so I painstakingly first glued it together and then filled the other side with epoxy to hold it together. I intended to get a spare when I order something later.

This picture reminded me that the epoxied part is still there, apparently doing fine.

I really just need to model this at some point.

@ifixcoinops What's the next step? How much time to do it, and which supplies are needed first?
@Cheff transfer the GI braid, maybe an hour, no supplies, it's just gonna be a fiddly pain in the arse
@ifixcoinops @Cheff more or less of a pain in the arse than Ms. Pacman?