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In Progress Gottlieb "Road Race" (1969)

astyy said:
Bgresto has done this game, but I think yours will come up quite nice if you can get a good match on that background blue 👍
http://bgresto.com/?p=1379
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I'm not brave enough to do work on the glass, for now I've just done a few coats of Triple Thick just to try and preserve what's there. I'll contact BGresto and see what they can do though, thanks for that link mate!
 
You basically just buy from bgresto once they have the glass on file - cr*ppy $ rate making it less attractive these days.

Have you seen my bg thread it was much worse than yours. The opaque areas are easier, take the glass (or flake) to somewhere like The Range and match the closest quality acrylic you can find, then mix options on the front of the glass (colour wheel is your friend here), let it dry, scrape it off until you're happy. Then paint away and seal with silver acrylic 👍
https://www.pinballinfo.com/community/threads/rocket-iii-backglass.37812/
 
astyy said:
You basically just buy from bgresto once they have the glass on file - cr*ppy $ rate making it less attractive these days.

Have you seen my bg thread it was much worse than yours. The opaque areas are easier, take the glass (or flake) to somewhere like The Range and match the closest quality acrylic you can find, then mix options on the front of the glass (colour wheel is your friend here), let it dry, scrape it off until you're happy. Then paint away and seal with silver acrylic 👍
https://www.pinballinfo.com/community/threads/rocket-iii-backglass.37812/
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You did a good job of that glass! You might of just convinced me to give it ago. I'll see what I'm like for time for Pinfest as it might have to be a job for after that weekend
 
Thank you, mine is no way perfect but serviceable. If you stick to those completely flaked areas you can't make it too much worse. Not to derail your thread but here's a thumbnail of what I'm talking about to get it best you can, acrylics are forgiving I painted the whole thing, didn't like it and scraped it all out with a scalpel to redo. The black text at the top is tricky, perhaps just put the keylines in first with an ink pen and don't attempt the text.

You're doing such an awesome job on this machine it probably deserves a shiny new backglass one day 👍

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Very slow progress the last few days, waiting on a big order from PBR and Euro Pinball (who are closed until the 4th) so making a start on the inserts today - looks promising if they all turn out like the first one I've done! IMG_20190730_140306.jpg
 
Dude, I'd seriously reconsider your plan to use leds. As you can see from cleaning that insert, it's the muck that makes them dull with normal bulbs and once cleaned they should look great. I've tried LEDs in an EM before and they just looked wrong to me, far too bright compared to the incandescent GI.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk
 
Switches on the giant trip relay bank under the playfield all dismantled, cleaned and adjusted. Polished up the reset coil brackets as well as the mounting brackets. Started using Mother's Mag & Aluminium polish instead of autosol and pretty pleased with the results so far

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Took the cabinet to my parents to give the inside a bit of a spruce up, here's after 1 coat of primer, ended up doing 2 coats as it was a bit patchy:
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Much better now:
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Cabinet hardware all polished and put back in along with the relay board:
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The glass it letting it down a bit but will hopefully get a reproduction at some point. First time seeing the machine with the glass in however which is still good to see!
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New jet bumper bodies and caps arrived and I'm so excited over these what an improvement! Was almost worth the debit card fraud to get them:
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Jet bumper brackets, yolks, plungers and springs all polished with brand new coils - I could only get SS coils so de-soldered the diode between the lugs. Also shortly after taking this picture I realised I put the coils on the wrong way round so had to reverse them 😂
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Still waiting on PBR order to arrive. Been keeping an eye on tracking and it only took 3 days to arrive in the UK, yet parcel force have been faffing around with it for nearly 2 weeks now. I also ordered some simple green as I've heard it's the bomb at cleaning yellow funk off of cabinets so hopefully that should be here in a couple of days, in the mean time I will be starting to piece the top of the playfield back together
 
Jet bumper mechs all fitted and am really chuffed with these, well worth the agro they caused!

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Trip relay bank brackets all polished up nicely:
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Starting to reassemble the playfield, obviously I ordered a few wrong rubbers and missed a few out so going to need to get some more:
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Ball guides polished up very nicely too:
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Received my box of goodies from The Pinball Resource today. As a first time customer I'm really pleased with their service. I've always stayed clear as the ordering/payment process is a pain in the backside but after setting up an account on transferwise it should be simpler in the future and I would strongly recommend the PBR. I was a real pain as I kept finding more and more parts I wanted to add after already confirming the order via email, they were very helpful and accomodating with the additions I kept making. Dispatched and arrived in the UK within 3 days. Sadly it then took over 2 weeks for Parcel Force to do anything and I still haven't received the customs charge letter from them. If it wasn't for me emailing them saying that the parcel was urgent and I needed them to give me the customs code I would still be waiting on the letter.

This order contains a full flipper rebuild kit, flipper shaft and shoe (to replace the hacked up one), chime unit rebuild kit, chime unit coil brackets, and a few replacement switches for one of the score reels and one of the point relays in the backbox.
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Paul said:
Why would you now? They usually grab that off you before you are given the parcel...
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They send you a letter which tells you how much duty, vat or customs needs to be paid with a code to use to go online and pay it and then they deliver your parcel. I never received that letter which is why I emailed them asking for the code so I could pay what I owed
 
Metalwork back from the powder coaters today, pretty happy with everything:
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I built the chime unit today for the first time with the new coils and rebuild kit from PBR:
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Trough, apron and top arch reassembled, and the playfield is very nearly complete. Just need to polish up the gate at the top of the shooter lane (I thought it went to the powder coaters but forgot to pack it so will take it to get coated at another time)
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stumblor said:
Doesn't look far off now mate! I take it the powder coaters chromed all those parts then? They look better than new.
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Yeah it's a chrome effect powder coat. I'm pretty pleased with it all but definitely not as shiny as actual chrome. I would eventually like to get the side rails off and powder coated but not going to have enough time before Pinfest so just gonna polish them up for now
 
Hi
Great job on restoring your machine.
Love the clear photo's

I just brought my first pinball last week - Road Race. :)

Which is not working at the moment, It power up / lights come on - that's it at the moment.

I will be following your photos as a guide to restore my machine.

1st job for me is to repair cabinet which has a lot of damage.
 

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Turbo001 said:
Hi
Great job on restoring your machine.
Love the clear photo's

I just brought my first pinball last week - Road Race. :)

Which is not working at the moment, It power up / lights come on - that's it at the moment.

I will be following your photos as a guide to restore my machine.

1st job for me is to repair cabinet which has a lot of damage.
Click to expand...
Congratulations on your first machine. Mine is sadly far from finished, it's been in storage since last august but will be cracking it back out to finish it up as a winter project hopefully so plenty more to come on the shop log. If you need any help or pictures of anything for a reference let me know!
 
Well..... Where has the time gone? 2 and a half years on and its about time I got this badboy finished up. Road Race is now setup in the kitchen (which is more agro than it's worth and I haven't heard the end of it) but at last I can finish her up. Here's where we left off... The thing doesn't work. Other than that it's just small little finishing touches. I was honestly pretty mindblown by this when I set it back up having completely forgot how much work went into this. I started this project before I even had a workshop, everything on this machine was painstaking hand polished whole sat on my sofa. Insane.
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I managed to get a few moment on this last night to see where I left off all those years back.
- 10s score reel not moving (Switch stack out of adjustment on the reel, sorted that and now working perfect)
- No playfield lighting.
- Start button does nothing even when there are credits, but game does reset when credit switch is triggered.
- Game isn't playing, reset seems to complete as the score motor stops but does not release the ball or activate any playfield mechs.
- Coin door isn't finished, coin entry plates need sorting, chutes are missing (I've seen them somewhere recently at my workshop)

Apart from that I have no idea what to expect so time to dig in to some EM goodness and get this ol' girl flipping finally
 
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Forgot I removed the playfield the other day to check everything over. Amazing what plugging it back in can do 🤦🏻‍♂️
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Well another year has passed and I've made space in the workshop to finally get this done, sold, and out of my life (hopefully!) Have made loads of progress the last couple of days on this, the most important part being it's now playing absolutely perfectly for the first time since owning it.PXL_20230324_235419242.jpg

Our main issue was between the indicator unit (the arrow that spins) and the scan relay.
It's a very ingeniously designed circuit this, whenever the arrow is moved, the scanning relay pulses a wiper across a board until it finds the location where the arrow has moved to, awarding a mystery amount of points (either 50, 100 or 150) depending on how long the score motor has to run to find the new location of the indicator arrow. The issue here was that between the contacts of the indicator arrow unit was a little charred, enough to actually short across to the next number, this was the same on the scanning relay too so both units tended to get a bit confused as to what number they were on (causing the score motor to continually run and pulse the scanning relay)
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I filled away the charred areas and cleaned it up as best I could but the pads were still arcing across, so my solution was to cut a small groove in-between each pad to create a nice air gap and remove the shorts. And then we had a beautifully perfect indicator unit.... Almost......

When the arrow moves it's supposed to knock out the light and collect the number it's landed on, this wasn't happening. I'll whittle down hours of searching and say it was a contact on the 1st ball relay not quite closing with enough force to enable the circuit (even though I had continuity through the entire circuit, which was baffling to say the least)

So the main feature of the machine is now fully working for the first time, which was exciting but after spending 8 hours on the thing I was pretty sick of the sight of it. A few other small issues cropped up while testing... The bumpers being the main thing, not staying lit when they should be and swapping over on their own, this was simply tensioning a few contacts in the 2 bumper relays (one for yellow, one for green) and that problem was sorted too.

None of the score reel lights were working so I saw to that and repaired the holders. And none of the blinker bulbs behind the machines name worked either, this was due to a naff contact in the game over relay, which makes sure the name of the game is only blinking during attract and not during gameplay, which I think is a nice touch as to not put off players
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So here's what's left:
- Needs new legs, casters & bolts (I bought new legs years ago but ended up using them on something else, whoopsie)
- Coin entry faceplate. Need to come up with a nice solution to block off one slot, and make the plastic facade for the other slot a lot prettier.
- Ball in play lights all need replacing, tried repairing them, it's one of those ones where there are 6 lamps attached to a common ground bar, they're just old and knackered so will replace those with individual lamp sockets.
- Reproduce and staple all the old tec signage back inside the cabinet.
- Final Clean down. While everything was hand polished and beautifully cleaned 3+ years ago it's all got a little dusty inside while waiting in storage so it will need going over again.
- Sell it!! 😁 The most important part of this will be to sell the lovely old girl!
 
Nice work mate. I’m hankering after an em more and more. I just want a pretty one to put in my living room. It’s a whole new world to me though and wouldn’t know where to start!!
 
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