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All posts for the month January, 2015

It’s time to finish off my Fireball Classic restoration. When I started my Xmas / New Year holidays, I had the goal of finishing this off before I went back to work. Looks like I’ll get there with a day to spare. With the presentation of the machine completed in my last update, I wanted to address the last few operational issues with the machine. The first thing to look at is the MPU board. As mentioned a few times in earlier updates, the MPU board has suffered from corrosion. A battery left in way too long managed to spread damage all around the outer edges on three sides of the board and it had begun to work its way in at the components. Damage was also done to the J4 pins and even the female connector pins on this plug.

I was able to obtain a second hand original Bally MPU board in excellent condition with no corrosion damage at all. The male pins at J1, J2, J3 and J4 were all replaced, along with new 5101 RAM and a lithium battery to ensure there is no risk of battery damage in the future. This one came from a Baby Pacman machine I’m told. New game ROMs were also burned and installed.

Fireball Classic Pinball
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I’ve managed to build up a backlog of crap boxes to get through. I’ve been focusing on various projects and the spare parts boxes are a low priority. That means they have been sitting around collecting dust. I’ve stopped buying them now as I’ve got more spare parts than I know what to do with. The boxes have come in handy on recent projects, so purchasing them has been worth it. But with my shelves full, there is no need add to it. This post will cover crap box #4 which will be followed by #5 and #6 when I get to them. At a grand total of $21 for the content in this post, it makes the box the most expensive crap box to date, but there was one part here I really wanted. This box looks to have a nice mix of things in it too, so time to dig in 🙂

Pinball Parts
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It’s time to once again dive into a pile of trash pinball parts and see what sort of gems I can uncover. This lot of pinball spare parts (or crap box as it’s also termed) cost under $16AU. There wasn’t anything in the original photos that caught my eye, I just wanted more spare parts available at hand for my projects. So, let’s have a look.

Pinball parts
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I find it hard to believe I’ve had my Galaga machine now for over 3 and a half years. This machine is where it all began for me. Seems like yesterday I was constructing it and playing it for the first time. Before this project, I would struggle to hang a picture on the wall properly. I’ve since gone on to build and restore several arcade machines and I now find myself wrapped up in Pinball restoration and repairs. Time flies all too fast. Recently I purchased a 4/8 restrictor board to install into this machine and decided to fix up two other issues at the same time.

Over the 3.5 years, the machine has held up really well. Even with two young kids in the house, there is minimal cabinet damage and marking. The coin slot has survived a few scares as the kids loved to insert anything they could find into the slot (and if they were lucky, it would pass straight through and come out the return slot – which made doing it again even more appealing).

Galaga
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The end is in sight for the installation of my new Fireball Decals. The headbox was completed a few weeks ago. The right side was completed last week and now this week, it’s time to knock the left side over. This includes a new side rail to finish the cabinet off nicely. The left side decal was in a similar condition to the right with the colours badly faded. The condition of the cabinet was better though and less damage to patch up.

Fireball Pinball
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