Well I have bought a couple of things from Mezel Mods before, and both were not cheap and completely useless. One was a snake fangs for Metallica which came with no instructions or explanation, and was impossible to fit on my machine.
The second was a electric hat for Sparky with light up cables which were pitifully weak and which interfered with the ball flow.
Nothing like the great quality stuff I have had from @Judge Dreads, but some people never learn, and I decided to take the plunge and buy Mezel Mods' Crazy Bobs signs illumination kit which is supposed to allow you to reposition the signs and illuminate them at the same time. They deserve illuminating because they are very pretty.
The problem with the signs is that they are positioned in such a way that you can only see one, with difficulty, and the other faces the back of the playfield which is ludicrous as that means you can't see it at all:
The signs are to the left of the yellow round standups.
So here's what arrived, thanks to @Neil McRae and @Monkeyboypaul (it's a long story).
There's the sign illumination kit and a power adapter that plugs in to the machine's leccy 12V supply.
Mezel do apparently provide a link to instructions now - or at least a help center where by digging around you can eventually find the instructions. Which are wholly inadequate and leave vast parts of the installation out, so you have to make it up as you go along. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
More serious is the fact that the hardware supplied is a pile of junk. Basically, you remove the sign plastics from the playfield plastics, and attach them to the white plastic brackets with some double sided tape that doesn't work.
There's also a glaring design fault. For the small sign, there is not enough room for the power cable, so when you place the sign it partially pulls the LED illumination strip from the bracket:
The bracket is supplied with a bit of double sided tape to attach it to the playfield plastic it rests on, but the first time I lifted the playfield it fell off and I had to replace it with a Sticky Fixer which has done the trick for now.
As for the big bracket, its width doesn't match the plastic it supports, and the design of the back of it means that you can't even center the plastic in the bracket to make it look smart.
You can see that the bottom of the sign extends over the left of the white bracket, and a little over the right as well. Pretty shoddy, and the white is pretty ugly and doesn't match the playfield plastic.
One last thing: once I wired up the illumination kit to the 12V power (which is supplying 12V according to my Voltmeter) it didn't work. No LED illumination on the signs from the LEDs built into the brackets at all. Zilch. Perhaps they have been wired wrong or the connections are badly made or... who knows?
The end result is an illumination kit that doesn't illuminate, which is a new low even for my already poor experiences with Mezel Mods:
There's always a positive side, and in this case it's that the signs are actually visible now and look pretty good where they are. Shame that the design is flawed and shoddy and the illumination bit is a joke.
So there you have it. It's three strikes and out for Mezel Mods.
A shame really, as I have met Tim Mezel and his wife and they seem genuinely nice people trying to make innovative mods. But I won't be buying any more of their stuff after three very disappointing experiences.
The second was a electric hat for Sparky with light up cables which were pitifully weak and which interfered with the ball flow.
Nothing like the great quality stuff I have had from @Judge Dreads, but some people never learn, and I decided to take the plunge and buy Mezel Mods' Crazy Bobs signs illumination kit which is supposed to allow you to reposition the signs and illuminate them at the same time. They deserve illuminating because they are very pretty.
The problem with the signs is that they are positioned in such a way that you can only see one, with difficulty, and the other faces the back of the playfield which is ludicrous as that means you can't see it at all:
The signs are to the left of the yellow round standups.
So here's what arrived, thanks to @Neil McRae and @Monkeyboypaul (it's a long story).
There's the sign illumination kit and a power adapter that plugs in to the machine's leccy 12V supply.
Mezel do apparently provide a link to instructions now - or at least a help center where by digging around you can eventually find the instructions. Which are wholly inadequate and leave vast parts of the installation out, so you have to make it up as you go along. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
More serious is the fact that the hardware supplied is a pile of junk. Basically, you remove the sign plastics from the playfield plastics, and attach them to the white plastic brackets with some double sided tape that doesn't work.
There's also a glaring design fault. For the small sign, there is not enough room for the power cable, so when you place the sign it partially pulls the LED illumination strip from the bracket:
The bracket is supplied with a bit of double sided tape to attach it to the playfield plastic it rests on, but the first time I lifted the playfield it fell off and I had to replace it with a Sticky Fixer which has done the trick for now.
As for the big bracket, its width doesn't match the plastic it supports, and the design of the back of it means that you can't even center the plastic in the bracket to make it look smart.
You can see that the bottom of the sign extends over the left of the white bracket, and a little over the right as well. Pretty shoddy, and the white is pretty ugly and doesn't match the playfield plastic.
One last thing: once I wired up the illumination kit to the 12V power (which is supplying 12V according to my Voltmeter) it didn't work. No LED illumination on the signs from the LEDs built into the brackets at all. Zilch. Perhaps they have been wired wrong or the connections are badly made or... who knows?
The end result is an illumination kit that doesn't illuminate, which is a new low even for my already poor experiences with Mezel Mods:
There's always a positive side, and in this case it's that the signs are actually visible now and look pretty good where they are. Shame that the design is flawed and shoddy and the illumination bit is a joke.
So there you have it. It's three strikes and out for Mezel Mods.
A shame really, as I have met Tim Mezel and his wife and they seem genuinely nice people trying to make innovative mods. But I won't be buying any more of their stuff after three very disappointing experiences.
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