In Progress Baywatch refurb

[edsr]

So I got bored while my DMD was being fixed and started pulling bits off the machine. I’m now knee deep in a refurb.

Before I go any further, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped me get this far, especially @pinballmania @Sgt GrizZ and @RobZombie

First thing I did was play the game to find what was working and what wasn’t.

Actually, no, first I gave it an initial clean with some baby wipes and Car cleaning kit as it was absolutely filthy and stank of ashtrays.













Delivery:



The machine would light up but wasn’t playable as an issue on the power board meant it wouldn’t boot.

So I fitted a new bridge rectifier and that fixed it so It booted and I could play it and make sure it all worked.



I also found some nasty hacks to the GI circuit (power supply board and the playfield power board) so replaced both sets of header pins and fitted molex connectors.

Before:





During:









After:





On the next picture I’ve soldered a piece of header pin across the four pins together on the underside of the board. Prevents any one pin getting too hot by sharing the load across all of them. The connection is actually on the top side of the board so the connector is in the way when you’re working - this helps ensure a solid connection with no weak points to get hot again. Conformal pen to touch up and prevent arcing / shorts



Next I removed the other boards, cleaning them with a brush in an isopropyl bath and rinsing them with clean iso.

Cleaned behind the boards and removing any crud from the metal plate. Then put back in place, with the correct number of screws!

Also stripped the flipper boards and fitted new fuse holders. The fuses literally fell out of the originals; I have no idea how the game was even working with them as they were. Boards cleaned in isopropyl.







More operator hacks...

The green wires below were twisted together and taped, not even soldered. Tut.

 

[edsr]

Next up, starting at the coin door, stripping back all the parts, tumbling them and cleaning everything...

 

[edsr]

Then the ball trough - removed, cleaned, new sleeves, and fixed more operator “repairs”.

















Also removed the opto boards, cleaned in iso, reflowed the connector pins on one of them, and refitted.

Pics taken before steam cleaning the harness, getting a matching replacement e63 switch, and coil wrap.

 

[edsr]

Some more progress on the tear down and ramp cleaning...





Oh and this little beauty to fix [emoji30]



The thread of the original sheared screw is still in what’s left of the wood.

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[Moonbus]

Wow, good job so far and on those ramps.

I guess in the field it is easier to drill a new hole rather then work on the playfield.
On my em I was working on one flipper mech fell off the bottom of the playfield when I first set it up. Turned out it must have happened a few times as it had about 5 sets of screw holes. Someone had decided to keep on rotating the mech and drilling new holes, problem was they kept putting the same wrong 'too short, too small', screws back in.

 

[edsr]

Can’t really take much credit for the ramps - just used this bathroom cleaner stuff (see Tools thread) and they came up an absolute treat. I’m no ramp cleaning afficionadeo, but I was expecting to do a lot more work than just spray some stuff on and rinse them off! Not sure how much more I will do to them yet. Not quite perfect but not bad at all, and all the plastics have come up the same.


As for the play field I’ve now realised from looking at a replacement part that the metal piece does have the correct number of holes in it. So it should be OK to plug the holes with cocktail sticks and PVA and then refix, but as you said, with the right length screws - the three I removed were all different!

 

[edsr]

Finally a morning to myself and made some progress...

 

[Paul R Owen]

All those yellow standups, they're right bar stewards, mine is a right drain monster.

 

[edsr]

All those yellow standups, they're right bar stewards, mine is a right drain monster.

Ha, yeah I find I lose a lot of balls down the right side under the shark flipper - mine has an adjustable post to make this easier or harder. Where is yours set? Any recommendations!?


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[Paul R Owen]

 

[edsr]

View attachment 55520

Snap! I’ll leave it there then


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[edsr]

Flying along now...

 

[Paul R Owen]

Talking of flying along.........

 

[edsr]

Ready to respray the satin black interior and tidy up the chips out of the back box over the weekend.




Wiring loom cleaned. That was a fun few hours.



Replaced a section of the corrugated trunking with new as the original had been mangled by the back of the playfield.

 

[edsr]

Some more pics... even cleaned the power plug. This is getting obsessive...





Replaced all three pop bumper brackets with the correct blue ones from Europe (damn they were expensive), new yokes, metal rings, caps, all moving flipper parts and stops, new slingshot moving parts, new drop targets, stickers for the fixed round targets, new slingshot plastics, new flippers with the sonic logo...
keeping everything original... will post up some pics of rebuilt parts as they come together...

 

[edsr]

Backbox panel cleaned and boards refitted...



Plastics ultra flat after 30mins at 90deg in the glass sandwich





Play field pre clean







After a few hours and lots of foam cleaner



Dowelling the hash up of an operator fix on the upper ball launcher (now clamped) and received the new metal bracket for it yesterday. Will be chiselling and sanding and re-varnishing that section once the PVA is dry. Also did the bumper,
Flipper and both VUK screw holes.




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[edsr]

Cleaned the wireforms with 00 wool and autosol. Before right, after left.







You can now see those letters are supposed to read SPF! Completely obscured by dirt before...





Cut back the dowels and planed with a sharp chisel and then a final sand. Just waiting for some clearcoat to arrive to touch that in.



And did the other dowels.



And cleaned all the inserts with isopropyl alcohol and an artist brush.

 

[edsr]

Clay bar around Mylar edges has taken the dirt out to make it blend with the playfield and given it a final clean before waxing and polishing.



Transformer cleaned up nicely but didn’t wanna scrub the brown protective bits off so will always look a bit grubby.

 

[RudeDogg1]

You could of done that with novus rather than an expensive clay bar

 

[BigIan]

that looks like just a corner of a clay bar though.

A clay bar would cost about the same as a set of novus spray bottles but would do a better job at removing ground in dirt.

Great job Edsr but I thought you said you where a noob at this ? certainly doesnt look like the work of someone new to all this

 

[edsr]

that looks like just a corner of a clay bar though.

A clay bar would cost about the same as a set of novus spray bottles but would do a better job at removing ground in dirt.

Great job Edsr but I thought you said you where a noob at this ? certainly doesnt look like the work of someone new to all this

I got into car detailing a while back as I did up an old S3 my wife had driven for a few years so I’ve got a cupboard full of stuff to use.

Yes it’s just the corner of a much larger autoglym clay bar. I keep it in its tin (in a wrapper) and only pull off a small lump to work with which then goes in the bin at the end (or if it gets dropped on the floor).

I thought the more grit and dust I can get off the board before I polish the better, otherwise I’m rubbing the ingrained dirt that’s removed back into the playfield. So trying to get it as clean as possible before I use my novus on it. I got a 3 pack of those smaller bottles. Then I was gonna use liquid/solid wax on it.

I saw a great guide on here from someone who did a simpsons playfield using a quite elaborate waxing process so planning on following that.

The clay also helped get some of the crud out of the cracks around a couple of the inserts. I guess blu tack would work the same. I used foam cleaner as ‘lube’ instead of detailing spray though. That foam cleaner is amazing!

Thanks for the kind words. I’ve just spent an unhealthy amount of time reading stuff on here, asking questions, googling stuff, flippers.be guide, etc. I’ve got a bit obsessed with it if I’m honest.

 

[RudeDogg1]

K I assumed u had bought the clay especially to do it

 

[astyy]

Enjoying this thread too, shame you didn't get more time to play it before it broke!

This is a great thread on cleaning/waxing process, but in the UK Gerlitz Guitar wax is the wax of choice for a lot of people;
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cleaning-and-waxing-pinball-machines-vids-guide

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gerlitz-GNO-No-1-Carnauba-Guitar/dp/B000EEHJS8

 

[edsr]

Enjoying this thread too, shame you didn't get more time to play it before it broke!

This is a great thread on cleaning/waxing process, but in the UK Gerlitz Guitar wax is the wax of choice for a lot of people;
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cleaning-and-waxing-pinball-machines-vids-guide

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gerlitz-GNO-No-1-Carnauba-Guitar/dp/B000EEHJS8

Tell me about it and now there’s new code to play. Really hope I get my screen fixed before Xmas. The rest is in my hands. I’ve got some hard wax already. It’s not that stuff but it should work well. Also got some liquid stuff so will use both in due course.


Autosol on the lock mech:



Clear coat on the repair I did:



And on some areas where there was wear from ball travel (under lock tower, around shark hole, VUK x 2 and ball trough. Sanded, cleaned, masked, etc first...





Mask close to the area you want to coat and then mask right up to it. But when you do, fold the masking tape back on itself and bend it up so the spray feathers in underneath it - stops you getting pull-lines when removing the tape.

May touch up the play field a bit around the shark hole if I’m feeling brave and then give it another coat. I’ll see how everything else goes. Having seen how much better those small patches look in fighting myself not to coat the whole damn thing.

Lacquered the transformer on the sides that had rusted and lost their coating while I had the can shook up and dust sheets down.


And cleaned up the top-side switches and lights.




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[Tony]

This is great

 

[RobZombie]

Seriously impressive. To go to these lengths on your first machine in such a short space of ownership must be unheard of. Great stuff.

 

[edsr]

Cheers guys. At the point of no return now!

Started filling some big gouges out of the corners in a couple of places with two-part epoxy filler.

You might think I’m nuts trying this but it worked. I cleaned the back box with meths.

Some muppet had put Brown parcel tape around it at some point. And it was the only thing that would shift it. Obvs tried in a small area to check. As long as you don’t soak it and wipe it straight off again it’s worked a treat. Not only that but it removed the crappy black over spray that someone had done previously that had bled onto the outside faces so while it’s never gonna be new paint, the nicotine is gone and so is all the crap:





With black overspray:



Without:




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[RobZombie]

Best thing for cleaning off glue residue is spray furniture polish e.g. Pledge.

 

[edsr]

Best thing for cleaning off glue residue is spray furniture polish e.g. Pledge.

Hmm I did try that first (remembered you’d recommended it when I first cleaned the machine) but it wasn’t lifting it. It was very old and ingrained and I was worried that too much scrubbing was gonna damage it.


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[ronsplooter]

Best thing for cleaning off glue residue is spray furniture polish

but it wasn’t lifting it

The best thing is a proper residue remover such as Goo Gone:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Goo-Gone-O...=UTF8&qid=1513253680&sr=8-1&keywords=goo+gone

Maplins also do their own version called Sticky Stuff Remover or something along those lines