Paul Murphy, Thursday, 07 August 2008
Since first reading about using 'rock tumblers' and 'vibration parts polishers' to polish old pinball parts (see here), I've been keeping my eye on eBay in hope that a cheap rock tumbler might turn up. Then I realized that if I want a good tumbler there's really no way of getting one on the cheap, so I had a look into the vibration parts polishers. These are much more affordable, and probably better suited to pinball parts anyway since you can fit larger parts into them.
 
The vibration polisher of choice seems to be the 400 Tumbler by Berry's Manufacturing. You can buy this directly from Berry's for $60 +shipping, but in my infinite cheapness I decided to have a look around for a better deal. I ended up finding the exact same model, rebranded and sold by Cabela's for $45. They also sell the 'Cabela's Case Tumbler' as part of a kit with a sifter, corn cob media and brass polish for $56. I'm not sure if I'll use the corn cob media or brass polish, but figured what the hey and ordered the kit.
Now to find a local pet store that sells crushed walnut shells (used to line lizard and bird cages). If I can't find anywhere I might just go ahead and use the corn cob media. What's the worst that could happen?  (0) Comments |
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Paul Murphy, Saturday, 02 August 2008
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... (0) Comments |
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Paul Murphy, Tuesday, 01 July 2008
As I've said before, there's a huge amount of material out there related to pinball collecting, restoration and repair. To help condition myself for the long road ahead I've been scouring through some of it. Here's some of the books, dvds and websites that I've been soaking up (I will update this post as I come across more useful resources)...
 Pinball Machine Care & Maintenance by Bernard Bear Kamoroff.
I bought this book a few years back and it's been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for its golden hour to arrive. The book covers the basics of what pinball machines are all about; all their various components as well as common problems and repairs. It gave me a great introduction and I've been looking up stuff in it contantly.
I bought it direct from the publisher, but it's also available from most suppliers (such as GameRoom Magazine ).
Click the 'Read More' link for the full article... (0) Comments |
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Read more...
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Paul Murphy, Friday, 27 June 2008
 There's a ton of excellent pinball restoration info on the net and in various books and DVDs. As a complete newcomer to the pinball world, I find a lot of this to be overwhelming. So, to help document my first pinball experience and hopefully help out a few clueless pinball newbies like myself, I'm starting a new blog section here on RetroBlast called 'The Pinball Noob'.
While working on my first pin (a Stern Quicksilver), I'll be videoing everything I do up close; this is mostly for my own benefit so I can figure out where every teeny little part is supposed to go when the time comes for me to re-assemble it all, but at the same time I figure these videos may be helpful for others to see how (and how not) to do things.
If you're a seasoned pinball shopper I doubt that you'll find anything useful here - but feel free to poke and laugh at me as I undoubtedly make a complete balls of everything I touch.
Let the pinball idiocy commense! (0) Comments |
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