Burroughs Adding Machine Company 21466 swivel chair reupholstery

The Burroughs Adding Machine Company ‘21466’ swivel chair

This neat piece was an overlooked leftover from the liquidation of a machine shop down the street from me. I’d picked up a few items at their auction, and a few more scrounging through the scraps at the end and asking the right questions, and I noticed this chair off to the side toward the end of load out. (Some other finds include a Friden Flexowriter and matched paper tape reader from an early numeric-control machining setup, and a CP/M capable TRS-80 Model III, but those will have to wait for another post…)

Looking past the shot vinyl, it was obviously a gem. The seat and backrest uprights are cast aluminum parts which would be an absurd extravagance now. The rest of the thing is hefty stamped steel, high quality fasteners, and more points of articulation and adjustment than you’d believe. When I asked about it, the guy running the sale took a dubious look at it, and told me I could just take it. I loaded it into the van, took it home, stashed it in the shop, and forgot about it until now.

I’d gotten the bug to break out the sewing machine, and was chewing through a few long latent projects with it. I ended up blocked on one of those, and while waiting to get the stuff I needed to continue remembered I had this sweet Burroughs chair just waiting to be recovered. So I dug it out and started tearing things down.

Every bit of vinyl, and most of the stitching and rubber padding, was dry rotted all to hell. Was able to get the old covers apart very easily, on most of the chair the top stitching was long gone, sometimes just tugging on the seam was enough to break it.

The backrest is a kinda cool two piece design that allows it to be upholstered without any machine stitching. The foam in it also yielded a clue as to the age of the chair. The U.S. Koylon Foam logo on it matches up to advertising for the brand from the late 1940s, while from 1950 or so onward the cursive look was dropped.

This was kinda what I was guessing anyway. The heavy use of cast aluminum, simple and robust adjustment mechanisms and construction, green paint on some of the fasteners, and general styling cues all had me thinking immediate post-WW2 era. The post-war era saw a lot of factory machinery and expertise from the war effort suddenly shifted to cranking out consumer goods. Many of those products, especially in the commercial market, retained a bit of a martial quality under the surface as wartime tooling stayed in service and back stock was used up.

I was able to pattern off of the original covers pretty effectively. No major surprises really, everything was pretty obvious as to how to recreate with fresh materials. I wish I’d erred a bit further on the small side with some of the pieces, as I ended up with some ripples I think I could have avoided. I also think the top stitching could have been more consistent with a bit more care taken with the trimming of the leave on the inside of the cover. All that said, pretty happy with the results, considering how few of these types of jobs I have under my belt.

The finished product. Pretty fun project that only took a couple evenings, and I have a nice comfy shop chair now instead of a lumpy grody one that sheds yellow dust that sticks to everything!

Some more reference pictures of identifying marks follow:

Seat base cast markings
“Burroughs Adding Machine Company 21466 Made In USA”

Backrest upright cast markings
“Burroughs Adding Machine Company 21466 Made In USA”

Label sewn in to seat cover edge
“Identification 5180 1-21466 Seats Burroughs”

Label glued to seat base
“Manufactured By Burroughs Adding Machine Company Detroit 32 Michigan”

Pandemic Projects – 1977 Bally Night Rider & 1979 Atari Asteroids

Haven’t been getting out of the house much these past few months except to get groceries, what with that deadly global pandemic and all. But I’ve masked up and made a few exceptions to pick up a couple more projects to keep busy with while I’ve got all this indoor time.

First is this wonderful condition 1979 Atari Asteroids upright, found out at the coast. The owner had bought it from a mall arcade many years ago and had it in a spare room, and was selling it now as they began home renovations and were tired of it getting in the way. It plays but the monitor image is collapsed and the sound is missing. Pretty typical issues for this game, with well documented repairs, and the price was very sweet.

Second is this 1977 Bally Night Rider. My dad has had one of these around since before I was born and I was fascinated by it even before I could reach the flippers. I’ve wanted one of my own for quite a while, but hadn’t had any luck, missing out on two that turned up locally in years past. I put another want ad up a bit ago though, and got a promising lead from a local operator. Agreed to a deal sight unseen since it was buried in storage. Once I got it home and cleaned up I was pleasantly surprised.

Cosmetically it’s in great shape aside from some wear up in the pop bumpers, back glass is minty. “Needs boards” turned out to mean just an MPU, everything else is there and looks usable.

Danger Zone – Williams F-14 Tomcat playfield swap

I checked off another project that’s been a long time in coming with this one. This particular F-14 Tomcat is another of the machines I grew up around at my parents’ shop in Anchorage. I always wanted to get it working but didn’t have the skills, or enough information to build them, back then. As I got into working on these machines in earnest after my move to Portland, it became another project that followed me down here to join Sorcerer and 300.

Even then, it sat for quite some time. Like most of the production run for this title, it suffered from extensive damage due to playfield inserts lifting out of place. It also had mylar installed over many areas of the playfield when new, which had now been pulled up by the rising inserts and taken up art with it. The pictures below are the state I found it in after over a decade in storage.

While the playfield was rough, the machine had been stored dry. It also didn’t look to have all that many plays on it before it had been laid up in storage. The boards were pretty clean, with no battery leakage, and all of the playfield mechanisms were pretty fresh looking, if dusty.

Some time after I took possession of the machine, Buthamburg (AKA Perfect Playfields) announced they would be doing a run of reproduction playfields for F-14 on Pinside. I got myself on the waiting list and after a few months a package from Germany arrived at my office.

Several months of procrastination later (I’d claim it was to let the clearcoat cure, but I’d be lying) I cracked things open and got the old playfield and new laid out side by side.

Disassembly was pretty straightforward. I took pictures of everything I could think to and still ended up with missing information. Next time I plan to take a few slow pan videos over the entire thing to get a more complete documentation of part placement and wire routing. The full gallery of pre-disassembly pictures can be found below (right click and open in new tab to view full resolution).

It took a while but I eventually got everything swapped over… While I kept the original incandescent flashers, I swapped all of the smaller bulbs over to warm white frosted non-ghosting LEDs from pinballbulbs.com, with a couple colored ones for the spots where an incandescent bulb would have had a color gel sleeve over it. I’ve been very satisfied with the results, though I’ve heard sunlight spectrum LEDs offer an even closer look to the original incandescent glow and plan to try them out on my next shop out.

A few things I did to ease the process and improve the end result were:

  • Tracing brackets of each assembly before removal to record their orientation
  • Replacing wood screw posts with machine screw posts mounted to new T-nuts from the underside for high impact areas, where possible
  • Didn’t trust the dimpling on the new playfield. While it was close, each of these machines is hand assembled, and it came down to using my eyes on the top of the playfield while making adjustments to get the proper fit for many of the mechanisms
  • Acquired some new drill bits and a nice set of pin vises for doing holes in the top of the playfield for things like wire guides

There were only two major issues I encountered after re-assembly.

The first was due to my decision to re-install the factory ground braid for several segments of the lighting. I picked up an electric staple gun to re-install it on the new playfield and found it did not have enough strength to drive the staples into the hard plywood. Worse than that though, was I ended up not being careful enough with the staples holding in the lamp sockets, and ended up with a few cases where a staple leg created a short to the barrel of the socket, resulting in blown GI fuses.

After that experience I wouldn’t re-use the braid again, nor use staples to install the sockets. Instead the next swap will include switching to the piggy back grounding with insulated wire used in other areas of the machine. Were I doing a detailed restoration where using factory style braid was non-optional, I’d find a pneumatic staple gun to do the job with less frustration. Regardless of the fasteners used, I’ll also be careful to continuity test a bit more extensively prior to first power up.

The second issue was a mysterious and very consistent air ball problem on ball launch. When you’d plunge a ball it would come flying out of the shooter lane and smack the glass much of the time, and even if it got going up the ramp would often not have enough velocity to make the orbit and enter play. I initially thought this was a wireform ramp alignment issue, and spent too long chasing that red herring… Ultimately though, it ended up being a problem of the alignment of the plunger assembly itself.

You can see in the above picture the outline of the assembly’s placement with the original playfield, and just how far I had to move it over to get the plunger centered with the lane of the new playfield. Following that adjustment, my air ball problems went away entirely.

It’s now half a year, several thousand plays, and a visit to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo later, and so far the machine has played beautifully and largely problem free after the initial shakedown period. Besides the issues noted above all I’ve had to deal with has been an occasional playfield element connection broken due to fatigue. I have seen the development of the dimpling due to ball impacts that is common to new clear coated playfields. I won’t be worrying about it too much as the game plays quite smoothly and I haven’t seen any actual finish loss, only what I’d consider normal wear, but it’s worth noting for those it bothers.

You can view the rest of the post-swap pictures of the machine below (right click and open in new tab to view full resolution). A thread full of others’ experiences with swapping in this particular run of reproduction playfields can also be found on Pinside here.