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Complete Fish Tales - Mini shop log

DRD

DRD

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1 10 Years
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Oct 26, 2014
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Bought this from an ebay seller yesterday.

A successful businessman had endured many years of health concerns before passing away. He had a games room with lovely full size snooker table, 2 fruities, 2 pins. But nothing had been touched for many years.

Normally I do not waste my time with eBay sellers, but @JMP had seen this place and kindly shared intel with the forum.

Cab fade to one side only, but still much better than most examples of this game ...


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Zero fade this side
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Drilled for lockdown bar
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Topper mercifully uncracked and seems good ..

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Head in ok shape. I might do a head decal job if this game turns into a keeper ...

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Topper was dead, luckily just a case of a separated connector block under the pf.

Autoshooter was feeble. If only all problems were as simple as this to solve. One lost screw, one loose screw ...
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Game is really clean. No black dust. This is a very low mileage game ...

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2 dead slings. The nylon links have snapped on both, but a really easy repair at 60p a link...

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Rubber really crispy ...

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Mini pf is mint, main pf in very good order indeed for a ft ...

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Only two damaged plastics on the whole game ...

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Pinball cat keeping an eye on things, but got bored ...
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Got all bulbs, flashers and switches working today. About 12 dead bulbs. Levelled it. Polished the legs with autosol. Light clean of the cab with kitchen cleaner, pf with pledge. The belt driving the lock reel has long since snapped, so I can't really play a game. Topper flaps about, but needs a bit of attention as the plunger is a bit sticky. Flippers very stodgy, but are the correct lightning ones.

Parts order is in - rubbers, flipper rebuild kit, posts, plastics, boat decal, drive band for reel ....
 
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Apparently you can replace the reel belt with a pinball rubber. Can't remember the size but I saw it on a Pinball Ninja video
 
cooldan said:
Apparently you can replace the reel belt with a pinball rubber. Can't remember the size but I saw it on a Pinball Ninja video
Click to expand...
Yep. My old one ran with a pinball rubber belt when I first got it, never missed a beat. I would recommend using the real McCoy though. Especially on a beauty like this. Love Tales, I'll have another one day.
 
Thanks Dan.

To be honest I just ordered a load of bits today including this band. Summer is a busy time for me and I want to get FT running. Impatience, wrong priorities and all that

The old belt was completely rigid. It hád snapped. Rigor mortis had set in, so when i touched it, it snapped again. This game must have been left for many, many years for this to happen. But mercifully, no battery damage

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Not sure, but did this game start its working life abroad - 115v ?

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This envelope was inside the game. First game I have owned to still have it ...

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All sorts of goodies inside ...

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The underside really is clean. Normally, I strip the mechs, polish plungers, clean or replace coil liners .. But with this game I will obviously do the flippers, pops and slings, but will just see how the rest of it plays before taking things to bits.

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The damned thing does not even smell

Luckily the games room it had inhabited for many years was upstairs, so she is bone dry
 
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DRD said:
Not sure, but did this game start its working life abroad - 115v ?

View attachment 33515
Click to expand...

That looks like a domestic-spec game; export production at that time had an upper case 'I' at the start of the individual number, so it would've been I024213 if it had been for export. The door is another sign that it wasn't u.k. production.
 
Initial parts orders arrived today ...

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Factory decal is far too light a shade of blue, the repro is much closer...
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Rebuilt the smashed up slingshot links. Used a pin punch to open up the roller pin, held the plunger in the pipe channel of my workmate ...

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Easiest way to return the roller pin is to use a vice ...

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Both support brackets were loose, soI tightened the rivets using a large punch and hammer ...

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Cleaned the sling mechs with ipa.

Voila, 2 powerful, properly working slingshots. A bit slow to trigger, but nice and powerful, new rubber will finish the job.

Stripped and cleaned the reel mechanism, inserted the new drive belt. AT LAST, I could actually play a game.

Two switches were still intermittent. Traced the problem to a loose wire on the previous switch on the column. Fixed

The shoot again light had terrible ghosting. When other lights fired, this one did too despite it being incandescent. During gameplay it was basically lit the whole time, despite being switched on as you would expect in the test mode. It transpired that the diode on the light was good, but the wire was soldered to the wrong side of the diode, effectively effectively bypassing it. Fixed.

I was disappointed by the under playfield lights at the bottom of the playfield, far too dim. Removed light board, cleaned bulbs with ipa. Cleaned inserts with foam cleaner. Noticed that the light board was not properly aligned with the dimples. But the dimples were also wrong. So I removed light bulb holders and realigned it by eye, to get the bulbs much nearer the centre of the inserts. Transformation. SO much better now ...

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This stuff is brilliant. I saw @chris b using it on one of his shop logs, so I bought some

https://www.pinball.co.uk/shop/cleaning-products/foaming-spray-cleaner/

Great on playfield and dirty (not rusted or tarnished ) metal. Saves so much time compared to using solvol autosol. I still use autosol on the tarnished stuff.

Fully cleaned the pf , wireforms' and removed all plastics and cleaned them too with this stuff.

Put new foam pads on the standups .. Just look how clean this game is after the foam cleaner ...
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Replaced the flipper mechs. The flipper shafts are not even gouged. Cleaned the flippers with foam cleaner then polished with novus 2. This is the easy way of placing superbands on your flippers ...

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I use these hedgehog microfibre cloths as i like the logo ..

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Love the technique for fitting the superbands mate. I'll be using that one.............. In 50 years when my wear out :thumbs:
 
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Removed and cleaned the bulbs. The game looks so much better now. The contacts on the wedge bulbs were all tarnished. When i moved them, about 10 stopped working. So i scraped this off with a flat bladed screwdriver, this did the trick.

Installed the head locking mech as this this was missing. Had to grind the locking tab down on the quarter turn cam lock ...

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Adjusted the pop bumper switches to sensitise then. Cleaned the contacts with ipa.

As the metal was in such good order, the foam cleaner was enough for all but a couple of pieces. So rather than a playfield strip, i did the job section by section. I had bought spare plastic posts, nylock nuts and screws so I could just replace filth with new. I will clean this lot up for future use ..

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The playfield is now ready for waxing, i will use gerlitz ... The sectional clean was a much faster way to do it, as i did not need to take photos or note down which screws went where, but it means that waxing will be a bit trickier

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I still need to fix the damaged fish topper - thanks to @Andrew Stockdale for sending me some rubber to use as a patch.

I also need to put in a weaker solenoid, the topper is ridiculously noisy...

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A wire had fallen off this solenoid, but it welded itself back on. When I touched the terminal with it in the solenoid test. Finished the job off with solder
 
You could just add a couple of rubbers on the plunger ,do it just taps it , instead of hitting it !
 
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Repaired the fish. Glued the crack with loctite 401 ...

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Then put a bike tube patch on, having roughed the area up first, then put in a soft washer made from some silence of the lambs style rubber kindly sent by @Andrew stockdale ...image.jpg

Hopefully a belt and braces solution to stop the crack spreading and also help preserve the fish in the future

Adopted the @carl lawrence suggestion to quieten the fish down, but using a single rubber at the right hand side of the plunger...
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Bit of a clean, and the topper is done. Flaps away, but far less noisily now. So it is a feature, not an annoyance ...


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Altered the eos switches to take a bit of power out of the flippers.

ALL DONE !

Today's lesson for me is that clean has a value. That this games was clean, with no tarnished metal saved me absolutely ages. I still stripped, cleaned and adjusted the major mechs - flippers, topper, pops, slings, reel. No need to tumble anything. I only needed to use autosol on a couple of parts, the foam cleaner or ipa did the rest. So no need to take detailed notes.
 
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The scoring started quite well on Fishy with @windoesnot aś we trained for the world Cup revisited tourney the following day.

But after we had been to the pub and each consumed chicken and chips, washed down with three pints, a jack daniels for the road and then 4 stellas at home things went awry. A dismal game when we both scored below 10m called time on the evening
 
You know you're a true pinball legend like myself, when attract music is playing on all 5 machines at the same time post game.
Oh yeah :thumbs:
 
This is looking really nice. Love the fact you still have all the original envelope with everything in! Nice one!

Dunc
 
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