Strip and clean Whirlwind spinning wheel assembly

[ronsplooter]

I've recently finished the strip down and clean of the spinning wheel assembly on my Whirlwind and thought I'd post some pics and info as when looking into this myself there wasn't much on the net. The manual doesn't have a diagram either so this may be of use to other people doing the same thing. The spinning wheels on my Whirlwind made a screeching and rattling noise before I cleaned them up and now they hardly make any noise at all so I can definitely recommend doing the work to others.



This is the assembly from under the playfield:

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First I had to loosen off the compass lamp pcb and skyway toll lamp pcb as they block access to some of the nuts that hold in the wheel mech. There's no need to remove these pcbs, just loosen them enough so you can push them out of the way:

[attachment=1931010071.JPG]



Next I de-soldered the wires attached to the motor pcb. For reference when putting them back, the green one goes on the left and the 2 red ones on the right as you look from underneath:

[attachment=1941010073.JPG]



Now it was just a a case of removing all the nuts holding the mech in place and I could remove it from the playfield:

[attachment=1951010074.JPG]



Each wheel can then be removed by undoing the retaining nut on the back and then sliding the wheel and rod out from the front. The pic below shows one of the wheels with all it's associated bits (alll 3 are the same):

[attachment=1961010075.JPG]



Then it was just a case of cleaning everything up before putting it back together:

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The only extra thing I did was to smear a tiny bit of bike chain oil on each of the wheel rods. This along with the general clean made a massive difference to the wheel noise when playing so is highly recommended.

 

[Spandangler]

Nice work mate. Good pics and should give people the confidence to do it themselves.

 

[replicas]

Nice talk through.

Did you change the decal's on each wheel ?

 

[ronsplooter]

Cheers guys



One problem I have found this evening with the original design is to do with the small gear that's attached to the motor. This drives all 3 wheel gears so needs to be robust. Williams used small allen key screws which seem to come loose pretty easily on my machine so I've replaced them with bigger, longer screw head nuts that give a lot more grip on the motor shaft. I'd recommend that anyone else overhauling their wheel mech should think about upgrading these screws.

Did you change the decal's on each wheel ?

Not this time as even though they don't look that great there's quite a bit of texture to them so they affect the ball quite a bit. I've had a look at repro replacements from the US but the delivery cost is crazy. $16 for the decals and $24 for the postage I will get round to replacing them at some point but I think getting the old ones off could be a challenge.