Speed Heart

Posted on 2015-11-14 by Ken

Just when I was getting a bit of space back in the shop, another too good to pass on deal popped up. I thought it was a bogus ad at first, what kind of person offers, among other titles, Paperboy for $150 in working condition?

A friend had more confidence in the promise of Craigslist to deliver a steal every so often and texted the seller… They got an answer back, and a seven trip Friday night of acquisitional frenzy later we’d packed his garage solid. Thankfully, only two of our purchases would follow me home.

What’s six and a half feet tall, four hundred fifty pounds, and doesn’t clear the rear door latch of my van by about an inch?

The allegedly ‘compact’ version of Atari’s 1990 sequel to Hard Drivin’, Race Drivin’. I nearly passed this one on to another collector by virtue of its size alone… Moving it is awful! But a couple rounds at the wheel convinced me otherwise and I conned some friends into helping me drag the beast home.

The second, much more diminutive addition is another Atari title, Roadblasters, circa 1987. This example is the kit version of Roadblasters, installed in a System 1 cabinet that originally came outfitted as a Road Runner.

All of the games in the lot had signs of being taken off route at about the same time in the late 90s.

Roadblasters had something I’d never run into before attached to its main board. An Atari repair tag from 1992. The distributor noted, Dunis, is one I’ve found property tags for in several places, not surprised they were the go between for repair work on a local machine.

Roadblasters needs a little bit of attention to its controls, but is otherwise in good condition. The accelerator pedal needs a new potentiometer and the yoke has some missing parts and a failed repair to the trigger buttons on one side. I’ve got the parts I need on the way and as soon as its fixed it’ll be replacing one of the machines in the row of games at the office.

Race Drivin’ needs a little more in the way of repairs. It has no sound right now, despite the sound board passing its self test routines. The first gear shifter position and brake pedal are also non-functional. The shifter is a simple microswitch replacement, but the brake pedal uses a strain gauge rather than the typical potentiometer or microswitch common in other games. As far as I know, a proper replacement is unobtainable short of finding old stock or used parts, and neither really grows on trees… So I may have to figure out an alternative.

Interstellar Safari

Posted on 2015-08-30 by Ken

Took a little step back the timeline from prior projects with this last one. Designed in 1978, Stern Stars is part of the earliest wave of solid state machines, and bears many resemblances to its electromechanical predecessors. Most noticeably, it uses a chime box for its sound effects rather than a speaker.

The example I have landed alongside F-14 Tomcat, both fresh out of very long hibernation.

If the musty odor of long dead cigarettes didn’t give it away, the op tag confirms this machine spent some time on the bar circuit in Anchorage. While this machine survived its stint, the phone number for the Anchorage Amusement and Vending company now points to a physical therapist. Their last address of record is a still standing but one step above derelict warehouse with boxes and equipment piled high in front of the windows, and a high fence festooned with ‘No Trespassing’ signs.

While filthy, strung with rotten rubber, and malfunctioning, the bones of this Stars are quite good.

All that grodiness is probably the only thing that save the playfield from having a groove worn into it by the dragging right flipper, so I can’t complain too much about the mess.

The flipper assemblies needed an almost complete rebuild, the only original parts left now are the frames underneath the playfield. For some reason Stern used aluminum for most of the metal parts on this machine, including the flipper shafts, and one was bent enough to cause the entire mechanism to bind.

I had to modify the bushings I received from Marco, despite them being labeled as appropriate for this machine, because they were too tall for the playfield. A few minutes with a saw fixed that right up though.

The drop targets were another area where the aluminum hardware caused problems. The arms the targets ride on had deformed around the pins that hold the mechanism together, causing them to mushroom out around the pin shafts and in the most extreme cases this would cause them to bind against other parts of the drop target assembly. I straightened everything as best I could and filed down the burrs caused by this wear. Now the mechanisms work, albeit a bit sloppier than from the factory since the holes are wallowed out and some material was lost in the process. The reproduction drop targets from Marco are slightly different in design from the broken originals, but the changes didn’t cause any fitment issues.

The relatively simple layout only took a few hours to relamp and refresh the rubber on, and some light cleaning made short work of the built up grime on the artwork.

All of the playfield plastics cleaned up nicely, looks sharp reassembled and lit up. I’d originally intended to make a quick flip of this machine, but it’s grown on me since I took possession. The simple, colorful layout and straightforward rule set give it a character much like its EM ancestors, and the art is a great example of how a generic theme can pop when illustrated by a talented artist.

Together Again To Tear It Apart

Posted on 2015-05-11 by Ken

From this…

…to this…

…took about 3.5 hours over two sessions. Or, to put it in relative terms, about a third of the time I put into Sorcerer, and even more favorable compared to Comet… Though I can’t say exactly how much better since I didn’t keep time for that one. I’m very pleased with how streamlined my workflow is becoming. During disassembly I basically break the playfield into a 2×8 grid and work my way through each section, photograph it, remove parts in logical (to me, at least) groupings, and bag and label each subassembly.

I found that the most time consuming part of reassembly on the previous two tables was filling in the blanks where I hadn’t done enough documentation during teardown. Being extra methodical with breaking this one down saved me a ton of time in recomposing it, despite the significant increase in complexity from System 9 pins like Comet and Sorcerer to the more feature laden System 11 based Big Guns.

Given there are 2-4 layers of parts to remove to get to any given bulb, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of having to tear things down to get to short-lived incandescents, so I decided to go the LED route. I used Pinballbulbs.com non-ghosting LEDs in warm white for the #44 general illumination and cool white for the #89 flasher bulbs on the top of the playfield and in the area behind the ‘wall’ at the back.

I think the results look pretty nice. The photo makes it look like a lot of the plastics are blown out by the brightness of the LED bulbs but in person they have a nice bright, even light behind them that shows off the art and lights up the playfield nicely without being overpowering. After seeing how the top of the playfield looks I’m going to go forward with replacing the lamps under the inserts on the bottom of the playfield, and replace the lamps in the backbox as well. The previous owner installed a color ‘coordinated’ LED kit in the backbox and it makes the art look really bad, since the color of the LEDs completely overpowers the translite’s coloration.

Now that Big Guns is back together I’m going to swap it in for Sorcerer at the office and bring that one into the shop for some MPU diagnosis… After having several hundred balls played through it without a hiccup during a party the company hosted I turned it on the day after and it was resetting randomly during gameplay. Poking around (very literally) narrowed the issue down to a bad connection or flaky component in the lower right corner of the MPU board, but tracing it further than that is more than I want to do with the limited tools I have at the office.

If you’re interested in seeing what the disassembly process looks like (or have one of these things you’re trying to piece together yourself), see the gallery below for all of the reference photos I took while tearing this thing down:

[Show as slideshow]