About a week ago, a replacement Capacitor kit arrived in the mail for the power supply board. Great Plains Electronics sells a number of kits for Williams power supplies (among other things). The caps on the power board were old so I was keen to replace them with brand news ones.
parts
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Having given the playfield a look over and making a few notes on things that will require attention, I decided to start working on it. The first thing I wanted to do was get the playfield stripped down. The small upper section of playfield was already stripped (both top and bottom sides). The lower section (large area) had lots of parts to remove.
There is quite a bit of work to be done in the top area. Two saucers, an upper ramp section, pop bumpers, messenger ball, gates, mylar and a few plastics. I decided to work on the right side of the play field first, and then work back around to the left. I’m waiting on parts for the pop bumpers to arrive before I can properly service them, so i’ll be skipping them for now.
First up is the ball saucers, which allows you to trap a ball. There are two on the play field, one on each side – which allows for a 3 ball multiball during game play.
Fireball Classic has 3 mushroom bumpers on the play field. These are small ‘passive’ pop bumpers. No coil attached, and are simply hooked up to a switch below the play field. The yellow cap sits just high enough so the ball gets under it and lifts it up. That causes the switch below the play field to close. I had never seen them before, so was curious to pull one a part to see what it was made up of. Plus, there was one missing on my play field, so was going to have to track the parts down.
Time for another installment on the progress so far.
This time, I’ll be focusing on the lower play field. I’m working my way up the play field – from the apron (which I covered in previous posts, all the way up tp tje top). This allows me to focus on specific areas and assemblies and then test them once they have been serviced. It also helps stop feeling overwhelmed with everything still to do.
The lower play field is quite dirty. Mylar covers some sections, while others either have chunks taken out of it (or it was removed by a previous owner). When it was removed you can see some damage that was done to multiplier and bonus inserts 🙁
I needed to service the slingshots, so figured that while I was doing that, I could also remove the remaining mylar and give the play field a much needed clean. Before I’m done with the machine I plan to give the play field a solid wax too. Doing the play field in stages will mean more work in the future as I’ll have to remove everything to clean and wax it, but I’ll live with that.
