Dan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago

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

Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago

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

Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago
Alright, it is done, all the stuff is off the playfield leaving only the GI braid behind
Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago
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
Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago
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
Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago

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

Show threadDan Fixes Coin-Ops6d ago

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

Show threadfraggLe!
@ifixcoinops Back when copper was cheap and transistors were expensive?
May 27 at 11:24pmWeb