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All posts for the month August, 2014

The last few updates I’ve done have been rather small.. It’s time for a jumbo picture update. In this post, I’m turning my attention to the door of the headbox (something you don’t often see covered in restore threads, so I’m glad to be covering it). It requires a decent clean and there are a few issues I need to investigate (I’ll get into as I go along). I also want to sort out the translite and glass with the aim of getting the backglass installed too. The main thing I wanted to do though is clean the door and head to remove as much of the dust that had built up over the years. Once I started on this path though, it ended up being a bigger job than I had originally thought.

The starting point – the door.

Pinbot head door
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What better way to spend a rainy Sunday than to do some work on a loved pinball machine 🙂

Despite being slowed down a little as I build up funds for the next bulk parts order, there is still plenty of things to do meanwhile. They’re not always exciting, but it’s always forward motion to the end goal – getting this machine 100% and looking great. Today I wanted to look at the shooter.

Pinbot Shooter Assembly start
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First off the bat in this update is the ball eject assembly. This is the guy that serves the ball up into the shooter lane. Nothing is wrong with it other than it needs a good clean (although I have to admit it’s the cleanest part of the ball trough on this machine).

Pinbot ball eject assembly
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Time to get my hands dirty and do some rebuilding on Pinbot. Funds have dried up a little for now with the recent purchase of a CPR gold Pinbot playfield. I had not planned to purchase a new playfield, but couldn’t resist. Pinbot is a keeper so I will have it for a long time to come, making the extra outlay worth it in the long run.

Since I had the machine powered up successfully, the language sorted out and battery save mod completed – it was time to start pulling a section of the machine to bits and rebuilding it. I decided to work in a similar fashion to how I did on my Fireball Classic – start from the bottom up and work through areas of the machine until complete. So, time to lift the apron and see what lurks beneath.

Pinbot apron
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Earlier in the week I had planned to “fix” the battery holder on the MPU board. My initial thought was to rip the 3 x AA holder off the board and replace it with either a lithium holder + button battery, or install a remote AA battery holder to avoid any possible acid damage in the future.

Pinbot battery holder
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