shooter

All posts tagged shooter

I’ve put the top right plastic issues to the side once again as I haven’t managed to get anywhere with it.

I decided instead to install the clear plastic in the top right and fire the game up to actually play it! I haven’t had the machine in a playable state since the first few nights it came home. Once I started to clean parts, I didn’t want to play it and spread all the dirt, dust and goo around the cleaned areas – so have held off playing.

It was great to actually -finally- play it. The small play session doubled as a good shakedown on the machine to see what sort of issues still remained and what required some fine tuning.

A few things turned up.

Firstly the ball save kicker was unreliable. Sometimes it would save the ball, other times it would kick out, but not make good contact with the ball. My first thought was the switch – perhaps not being sensitive enough. So I tested the switch, but that came up fine and was very sensitive. I removed the apron to have a look at the assembly. I found the coil was actually loose. The reason for this is there are two small screws which to the coil bracket and lock it in place. I had made the mistake of putting these on the outside when I reinstalled it after servicing it. The screws should sit inside. There is no thread on small metal bracket – only on the large assembly frame, so they have to be screwed in from the inside. Thankfully this was a nice easy fix.

Fireball Classic ball save screws wrong
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The shooter rod on the Fireball Classic was in pretty good condition. It still operated fine, but was in need of a good clean and service. The shooter rod is fixed to the cabinet by 2 bolts that are part of the face plate. Once removed you can just pull the shooter back away from the cabinet. I found that I needed to remove the rubber first though to get it through the cabinet hole.

Fireball classic shooter rebuild

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I’ve been a bit quiet on my Nugent lately – more playing than tinkering.

I’ve got a batch of parts arriving in a week or so to fix up a few more things, so will hopefully have more work to report shortly.

I have been meaning to get under the apron for awhile and check it out, so decided to do it last night.

The apron itself isn’t in bad shape. There are a few marks across the “for amusement only” text and some very minor scratches around the edges. But overall it’s clean, solid and the artwork clear.

Nugent Apron
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I just have to keep tinkering with my Nugent. Since it’s my first pinball machine and my knowledge on pinball is small, I enjoy getting under the hood and making changes. I’ve started with a number of simple things like changing the bulbs and rubbers but want to start focusing on a few other areas of the game play. I’ve purchased a flipper rebuild kit, which I plan to use shortly. Before that though, I decided I’d change the flipper buttons and shooter/plunger.

The old buttons has faded in colour and were quite dirty. They are cheap to replace, so wanted to do it.

Old nugent buttons
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After playing my Nugent a lot over the last two weeks, I decided it was time to make some improvements to the gameplay – this means giving some attention to the playfield. For now, I’m keeping it simple but in the long run I plan to use some Novus 2 and wax along with leveling the inserts to really improvement playfield.

First step was to get access to the playfield. To do this, I need to remove the lockdown bar which side across the end of the pinball table. Just inside the coin door – at the top right – is a handle. Pulling this to the left unlocks the lockdown bar.

Stern lockdown bar
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