Day 01 - The Breakdown

The playfield before the breakdown

The first step to cleaning this thing is taking as much off the playfield as I can / I feel comfortable doing. You could clean around everything on the board, and for the most part that will be what I do in the future, but with how old and dirty this is I want to give the whole board a good scrub. Removing everything will make that way easier and let me get into the nooks and crannies. If I were doing a full restoration I would be taking everything off the playfield board so that it's just a slab of wood. That requires a lot of soldering and re-wiring to put it back together. Not something I'm horribly comfortable at the moment. So the game plan is to only remove what I can with a screw driver. Perhaps in the future I'll be more adventurous and do it all.

Removing the posts

After taking off the artwork I started working on all the little red things (technical term). These are semi transparent to let light through so I want to clean them up pretty well. About half of them used regular screws which was awesome. The other half is what the artwork and other things are connected to which required this odd top that was a big pain to remove. I understand the need for it but man does it suck.

Also with the red poles I started to remove all the rubber on the field. Old rubber loses it's spring as well as cracks/flakes which dirties the place up. I have no idea how old this rubber is, but rubber is dirt cheap so I'm going to replace it all.

It's at this point I have my first well... while I'm at it I might as well do _______ too.

Metal

I'm looking at this somewhat bare playfield and start thinking you know I could take off the metal that's along the edges, as well as the wire ball guides through out the field. Polish it up nice and what not. Welp I already took off this much, might as well. So that's then the pile under the machine appeared. I got some metal polish on it's way. I'll tackle that after the playfield.

Coin slots are off

Initially I was just going to focus on the playfield and only give the cabinet a general quick wash. Well after taking the metal off of the playfield and deciding to polish it I'm looking at the coin door and thinking hmmm... So then the coin door came off.

Everything is off

At this point the only thing left on the playfield is the switches, the lights, the pop bumpers, and the flippers. Lights are lights and come out easy. The switches would requiring soldering so I'm leaving them on. They're small enough to clean around so no worries. Same goes for the flippers and bumpers.

Onto the cleaning!

Day 00- Tri Zone

Since I'm starting this blog a little late into the project the first couple posts will be rapid fire so I can catch up.

The Itch

So where did this all start. Back in February a guy in my 501st Garrison posted he was looking to sell his Tri Zone pinball machine. I entertained the idea at the time but felt I probably didn't have the room for it and I probably didn't need a pinball machine. Oh how time changes a mind. Fast forward to late March Pinburgh 2012 happened at PAPA, the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, in Carnegie. I was curious and checked it out with a couple friends and wow. They have hundreds of pinball machines and it was awesome. That rekindled the notion of getting this machine but it wasn't until nearly a month later that I decided to pull the trigger. Fortunately the machine was still for sale, so I snatched it up.

Tri Zone

Tri Zone is a pinball machine made by Williams in 1979. It's one of the earlier solid state machines, meaning instead of mechanical things and moving parts changing the score and switches on the field, computer chips and electronics are used. Knowing the machine is pretty old I was expecting the worst, but upon seeing the machine in person for the first time I knew I lucked out. It is in very good shape for how old it is. Dirty, but good shape. The cabinet is probably in the worst shape with chips along the edges and corners from it being moved over the years, but the playfield and other inside parts are as good as I could have hoped. Even though the machine is over 30 years old, pinball hasn't changed a ton since. Most of the parts controlling the flippers, bumpers, targets, etc are still the same and are still produced. This means any repairs I would have to make isn't horribly expensive, and all that is really required is knowing how to use a screw driver and some basic soldering. Piece of cake.

Initial Look Over

After getting the machine home I hooked it up for the initial look over. The machine turned on and lights up! Unfortunately that's about all it does. Going into it I knew the score displays were possibly iffy so that wasn't too much of a surprise. However I did learn this could prove to make my life difficult as I need to use the displays to cycle through different options, and if they can't display properly... it's a lot of guessing. I was able to get the flippers going so I know they work, however nothing else on the field seemed to trigger. This could be them not getting proper voltage to a blown fuse somewhere. I'm not too concerned with it at the moment and will look into it later. I tested the speaker and sound system and that works great which is a big plus. A lot of the problems I have could be minor and easily fixed, but since I kind of don't know what I'm doing at the moment I figure I'll figure it out later.

The Plan

So what do I want to do? Since I'm not sure why certain things aren't working at the moment and I need to do some more reading, I'm not going to worry about that at this time. What I can do is clean the crap out of it. So for now I'm going to disassemble what I feel comfortable doing and go from there to get this machine to shine.

Intro

Hey all!

I've decided to blog my pinball project. This will be a place to give a little more context to the photos I've been posting on Facebook as well as a place to put down my thoughts on the process. Also people who aren't my Facebook friends can see what I'm doing. I'll try to post something after every time I do some work on the machine.

That's all I can think of for the intro. Onto the posts!

-Kyle