Well, after a couple of weeks of vaction I'm back at work and back to spending some free time on Quicksilver.

Before I left I did manage to put together a "playfield rotisserie" - a rotating frame that a pinball playfield can be mounted to. This makes dis-assembling the playfield a whole lot easier, since you can simply flip from the playfield surface to the under-side in seconds to get at any hardware that might be holding components to the surface from underneath. If you do a search you'll find several different styles of home-made rotisseries, I built mine using some plumbing hardware, some angle braces and some scrap 2x4's that I had lying around. It's comprised of two identical pieces, bolted to my benchtop and the playfield itself is held on with four clamps.

It turned out to be much more sturdy than I expected and even though my Quicksilver is relatively light compared to most, I would imagine that it could take a lot more weight.

Once I got it clamped to the rotisserie, I started stripping the lower playfield. As I removed each piece I put it into a container along with a piece of masking-tape with a quick note to remind me of what the part was and where it came from. I took a close-up video of each piece being removed since I'm overly paranoid about taking it apart and then not figuring out where each little piece came from.

As I'm stripping the playfield, I notice several parts use wrong or different hardware (like one of the flippers which was using part of a hair-clip as hardware) and most of the red plastic posts had been fastened too tightly to the playfield causing them to crack. I'm taking notes of all this as I go along and will pick up some more parts once I get an idea of how much I need. Some nuts refused to come off some of the post machine screws (probably due to sstripped threads in the nuts), so I had to take a mini angle-grinder to them and cut off the nuts - surprisingly the machine screws survived this ordeal just fine.

I had no idea how to dis-assemble the drop target assembly in order to get the filthy targets out. I'm not sure if I went about it the right way or not, but I did manage to get them out after some persistence. I'll post some photos and a short video of this in a couple of days, right now it's time to clean up for the day...

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