Yo…it’s Saturday night. I just got back from seeing Cloverfield. It was pretty good. If you haven’t seen it yet, the monster looks just like Yogi Bear, only taller. He runs all over Central Park stealing pic-a-nic baskets and killing people. I snapped this pic with my cellphone in the theater.

The other day I followed info on testing my MPU board that I found on Pinrepair.com. Whoever setup that site should win the Nobel prize for pinball repair. Here’s the main page for Bally MPU boards.

I followed their advice on cleaning up corrosion, and proceeded to this area that explains how to test the MPU board “on the bench”. I don’t really have a bench…I’ve been working on my computer desk. That page explains that you can test a Bally MPU board by hooking it up to 12V and 5V. I used a power board that I setup for my Pac-Man project. It has a switching power supply mounted on it. I followed their instructions, hooking up 12V, 5V, and ground. When you power it on, you should get 5 flashes, which are explained here. Here’s a video of that in action.

After doing that test, I was pretty psyched. I kept reading and found out that normally a Baby Pac-Man MPU board should flash 6 times to indicate everything is OK, and then it goes into attract mode. The test that triggers the 6th flash fails because the first thing it does is look for the presence of 43V, which is missing. I followed more instructions on that site which explained how to trick the board into thinking the 43V is present so you can finish the self test, by putting a jumper from one leg of R23 to one leg of R17 (read their site for exact instructions). OK…so I hooked up my jumper, and this is what happened:

The LED lit solid with no flashes. It took me a few minutes to notice that I screwed up, and hooked the jumper to R2 instead of R17. They are very close together and the labeling on the board is a little confusing. Hoping I didn’t fry anything, I moved the jumper to where it should be, and tried it again:

The damn thing actually works! Next step will be to test the Vidiot board. I ordered some Molex connectors from Bob Roberts so I can use them for that test….hopefully I’ll get some more moon pies with them.

BTW – The empty Baby Pac-Man cabinet that I bought in Kentucky has been picked up by a shipper finally. I don’t have a scheduled date for when it will get here, but I’m hoping it will be soon.

This is a continuation of the post I wrote last night in case you couldn’t figure that out by the “Part II” in the title. (DUH!)

I removed the old rechargeable NiCad battery from my MPU board and cleaned up all the damage it caused. The battery is not really needed. It’s there to maintain high scores, settings, and book keeping info. I figure high scores and settings are important enough to warrant putting in a replacement for the battery.

Someone had already done something similar (but different!) on my Defender. I’m guessing they followed this tutorial by Bob Roberts. For that, they put a shiny round lithium battery in as a replacement…similar to a watch battery but bigger. I was thinking maybe that would be the route to go for this, so I searched the RGP and RGVAC news groups for more info.

I figured that maybe a lithium battery would be the best bet because they last so long. The alternative is to setup a remote mounted (3) AA battery pack. Bob Roberts has a tutorial for this as well (because he rocks). No matter which way you do this, if you put in replacement battery(s), a blocking diode needs to be put in-line before the battery pack to keep the MPU board from sending voltage to the batteries to try to recharge them.

On some posts in those aforementioned newsgroups (50 cents please), they mention that lithium batteries can be dangerous when hooked up improperly and can start fires. I’m not sure about this, but I figure that if I did put a lithium battery in and the blocking diode crapped out, my Baby Pac-Man might end up a big smoldering pile of ashes. Because of this (and because so many people seemed against lithiums for these boards) I ruled this option out. I don’t need any visits from Smokey the Bear, thank you very much.

There is also another option that I read about, where you can use a special capacitor that will hold the charge similar to a battery. With that method, you have to make sure to power the game on at least once every 6 months (I think). This sounds pretty cool, but I figured I would just go with the AA battery option following Bob’s tutorial. I ordered some diodes from him and a battery holder for $1.00, along with more lamps for the playfield. Here’s what I got:

Before I did anything, I ate the moon pies. Then, with my sugar buzz going strong I hooked up the battery pack per his instructions.

He mentioned putting a connector in-line so you could remove the board without having to remove the batteries. I thought that was a good idea, so I used some of these from Rat Shack:

I crimped them using my HT-1921 crimper that I got from Bob awhile back. He’s got a tutorial on crimping here.

I wrote the polarity for each battery with a sharpie, and added some zip ties in a couple places so if the wires get pulled, they don’t put any pressure on the solder joints.

One other thing I did a little differently – I didn’t use wires to connect the batteries. I’m talking about the 2 small wires seen here in Bob’s pic:

Instead, I turned the terminals down…

…and soldered them together:

If you do this, just be careful none of your solder drips down and touches the metal housing because it does conduct.

Here’s the other end connected to the board:

I ran my wire around the back, through that middle hole, and tied it off again through itself so pulling on the cable won’t pull on the solder points.

The last thing I did after hooking the batteries up was a test that I think I read about on Pinrepair.com. The whole purpose of the batteries is to keep a 5v (ish) charge on the RAM chip in socket U8 when the game is powered off. To make sure it was doing what it’s supposed to do, you can check the voltage on that chip with a meter by putting the red lead on the power pin of the chip (pin #22), and then ground the black lead. Here’s that test, showing it’s doing it’s thing.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion….

Wow…I haven’t posted in a week. Time flies when you are on acid repair duty! Because I’ve saved up info and pics over this week (and so I don’t bore you with a giant post), I think I’ll save some of it to write tomorrow and the day after. Here’s part one.

Before I start babbling, I just want to let you know that most of the info I’m going to bring up was figured out by others much smarter than I (Pinrepair.com, Bob Roberts, etc…).

Baby Pac-Man has 3 boards. The main pinball board is a slightly modified Bally “-35″ MPU board. It had a rechargeable NiCad battery mounted on the board that overtime leaks all over the place (like your incontinent Uncle Larry). If left on the board it can cause major corrosion damage that needs to be repaired. The corrosion follows the traces and spreads quickly (like your Aunt Gladys?). My MPU board had this damage big time.

I followed this great tutorial from Pinrepair.com on cleaning battery corrosion damage. They recommend replacing any components that look corroded. I bought a kit on eBay for $10 that contained most of the parts that usually go bad on this particular board from corrosion. Here’s what it looks like:

I scraped and sanded at the corrosion using 100 grit sandpaper, a Radio Shack soldering tool with a scraper on one end and a wire brush on the other, and a fiberglass sanding pencil:

The scraper worked good for very loose stuff. The sandpaper worked good to get most of the rest of the corrosion off the large ground traces, and the fiberglass pencil was awesome for cleaning up small areas (solder pads, etc…).

Click here to buy one of these. Click here for the refills for it.

A paint brush comes in handy for brushing off all the crud while you are working.

If you compare this pic to the second one in this post you can see exactly where the corrosion stopped:

The shiny spot that looks like the bottom of Texas was fine. I just scraped it a bit to see the difference. All the gray/green/blue crud below it is corrosion. Here’s the same area after cleanup:

Basically, I went through the entire board cleaning up the corrosion and installing the parts that came with the kit. Here’s the end result front and back.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the battery pack hookup (I bet you won’t be able to sleep now!).

To be continued…

I finished putting everything back on the Baby Pac playfield, including the flippers with new yellow rubbers. Before I attempted to put the new drop targets in, I searched online to see if there was any info out there explaining how to do it. I didn’t want to risk screwing something up. I couldn’t find anything, so I just flew by the seat of my pants (wooHoo!). I’m writing this post as a tutorial in hopes it might help the next guy searching for the same thing.

This would have been a lot easier with 2 people! I had to hold the playfield up on it’s side the whole time I did this. Too bad my wife wasn’t home yet.

Tools/stuff needed:

• Phillips head screwdriver
  
• Needle nose pliers
  
• 1/4″ nut driver
  
• Fingers – get as many as you can. I have a whole jar of ‘em for emergencies.
  
• Bandaids for above
  
• 5 New drop targets from PBResource.com – $4/each.
  

Instructions

1. Turn playfield on it’s side (duh)

2. Here’s the drop target bank:

The bottom of that picture is actually the back end of the playfield (opposite flippers). Remove the two screws that I circled.

3. Here’s the other side:

Remove the 6 circled screws – 2 of them are phillips, and the rest are hex heads.

4. Remove the two metal plates and it will give you access to the inside.

5. Start with the drop target on the end. Knock it down if it isn’t already, then push all the others up to get them out of your way. Remove the spring for one target from the metal rod so it’s still attached to the target.

6. Pull the drop target down a little so you can work on it.

7. Remove the lock washer at the end with pliers.

8. On some of mine, the post holding the drop target fell right out. On others I had to push on the end to take it out. Here’s one of them:

9. Remove the drop target from the metal arm thingy:

10. The target is now free…pull it out.

11. Put the new target in the same way the old one came out, but be careful not to grab the top. By now your hands are going to be pretty greasy.

12. When you have all the targets back in, put the metal bottom pieces back on, lining up all the guide arms (or whatever they are called). This part was a bit tricky by myself.

Here they are on mine after I finished.

I’m very close to being done with this…the only thing I have left to do is to replace the bulbs on the underside. Here’s a couple of shots of the top done:

Yo. I’ve been working on the Baby Pac playfield for the past few days as time permits and am almost done with it. I placed an order with PBResource.com that came in today!

The new drop targets are awesome:

I also ordered a rubber kit, 2 balls, Novus to clean the plastics, and 4 boxes of bulbs. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I ordered the bulbs. He sells them in 100 packs. I almost ordered 100, but figured I would save money and order 4 boxes of 10. At the time I thought that was plenty, but when I counted later I’m way off. I have 2 extra boxes for arcade games and hope that that will be just enough.

I couldn’t find new spinners or decals for the spinners anywhere. Someone used to sell them awhile back but no longer does. Here’s what mine looked like:

As you can see, they are pretty worn out. The art on the top was missing on both. I brought that image into Photoshop and touched it up. Here’s the final result:

I printed a couple out on glossy photo paper using my Epson R300 printer, cut them out very carefully, and stuck them with double sided tape on the spinners. Then, I used mailing tape to cover the entire face of each spinner, wrapping it around the back. I had to trim it with an exacto knife so the tape wasn’t visible. The pic below shows the spinners afterwards (but before I cleaned up the metal and replaced the rubber rings).

I’ll throw the file for those up on my downloads page for anyone that needs it shortly.

I have most of the parts back on the playfield, and will probably finish it tomorrow. Most of the plastics were pretty warped:

I read some posts on the rec.games.pinball news group explaining how to flatten bent plastics in the oven. I was very scared to try this, but I did and it worked great:

I started with the small pieces, which are all done. I have 3 big pieces to do tomorrow. Cross your fingers!

Here’s the process I followed:

1. Clean the plastics extremely well. Any dust or fingerprints will end up on these permanently

2. Get a non stick cookie sheet. Make sure it’s clean.

3. Put the oven on 200, and put the plastics upside down on the cookie sheet. The painted side will be on top.

4. Put the plastics in the oven, and keep an eye on it. After 5 or 6 minutes, the plastic will start to drop down and flatten. As soon as that happens, remove the cookie sheet.

5. Take the plastics off the sheet and put them on top of a plain white piece of paper on your countertop. Put another piece of paper on top, then a heavy book. On top of the book you might want to put something else that’s heavy to weigh it down well.

6. Wait 30 mins, and then check ‘em out. Hopefully your’s won’t be all bubbly and ruined like your mother’s lasagna.

Wow! Looks like this will be much longer than a trilogy! Hope you don’t get bored.

The 2nd coat of poly seemed to dry rather quickly, and looked good. I decided to skip the 3rd coat and get on with installing the overlay. Here’s a couple pics of the playfield after I finished the polyurethane.

I was really looking forward to putting the overlay on, but at the same time I was dreading it. This stuff isn’t cheap, and if I screw it up I don’t exactly get a do-over.

I decided to do this on the kitchen table because we don’t really use it for eating .

I’m very happy with the results. I opted to spray the playfield down with Windex first so I could reposition the art if needed. I read about this in forums and it worked well. After spraying down the playfield, I peeled the entire overlay off the paper backing with the help of my wife. She held her end up high so I could position my end (please, no jokes!). I had to lift it a few times to get it right (thanks Windex!).

After I was happy with the positioning, I started to press it down with a plastic squeegee thing-a-ma-whats-it:

I’ve used this for sideart before. I think it might have been leaving some scratches, so I switched over to a formica roller which worked better:

Here are some closeups:

I may wax this…haven’t decided yet.

I think the first coat of Polyurethane I did back on Sunday was a little too heavy because it took way too long to dry. I just did the 2nd coat now. I didn’t take pictures because there really isn’t much to see.

Hopefully I can do the last coat today. The guide I’ve been going by says to wait at least 2 hours after the last coat before putting the overlay on. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with that, seeing the can says to wait at least 72 hours for a recoat if you can’t do it in 2. 72 hrs must be the time it takes for it to completely dry/cure/whatever. It also says wait 24 hrs before normal use, so maybe I’ll just wait a day before putting the overlay on.

If you’ve been keeping up with all this, you know that the cabinet I got was in horrible shape. I’m not afraid of wood work, but this stuff isn’t really wood. It’s like a fiberboard, and it’s swollen beyond belief due to water damage. I was debating on how I would deal with it, and spotted a gutted Baby Pac in Kentucky on eBay that looked to be in great shape. I won the auction for $50, and am working out shipping now. This will be the first game that I’ve had to ship, and I’m not looking forward to that part of it. Here’s some pics from the seller:

He sent me bigger pics showing more detail but my email client screwed them up when I detached them and they are lost.

I’ll post some more pics when it arrives.

Here is part 2 of this ongoing playfield restoration series. I’m guessing this will be a trilogy, but who knows.

I forgot to mention before that I’ve been using this article on PinballMagic.com as a guide.

I finally had everything removed from the playfield…with the exception of the roll over switches (I think that’s what they’re called).

I left these in because I’m lazy. I found a good way to keep them below the playfield, and it only cost me 50 cents:

The drop targets stuck up every so slightly, but I decided to leave them and just sand over their tops. They are worn out, and you can get replacements. They looked complicated to remove so I figured it would be best to remove them right before I’m ready to replace them.

The playfield had a mylar protective layer in the center. I had heard that some people used a heat gun and paint scraper to get these off. I was reluctant to put heat on it so as to not loosen the glue holding in the clear plastic inserts. I figured maybe I would try to sand it off, which didn’t work very well. This pic was taken when I gave up on that approach.

The areas on the right that are down to bare wood are just outside the area covered by the mylar. I opted to use my fingernails to pick at the edge and pull it off. It actually worked pretty good. Here is a shot of some of it in the process of removal:

The area below the mylar was super shiny from the adhesive, but didn’t feel very sticky. This sort of reminded me of peeling skin after a bad sun burn (I know, gross!).

After picking at it for a good while, I got all of the mylar off. I hit it with my orbital sander using 60 grit sandpaper. The adhesive started to collect in areas and turned into the consistency of bubblegum. At this point, I figured it would be best to remove as much of that gunk as possible. I did so with Goof Off. I sprayed it right on the playfield, and let it sit for a minute or so. Then I went at it with one of my favorite tools…a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. This did a good job of getting the adhesive off, but it was time consuming and the fumes were getting me pretty goofy (hence the name “Goof Off”).

After getting the glue off, I was able to make good progress on sanding off the old art…

…so close…and finally:

I made sure that I sanded right over the plastic inserts until they were flush. Some of them were slightly raised.

In part 1 from yesterday, I posted a pic of an area that some dumb ass drove a drywall screw through. I finished the day yesterday gluing that back in place. Here is that area after sanding:

It’s not perfect, but much better. I wanted to use wood putty on this in case it was visible but forgot to buy some. I opted for Bondo because I had it in the house and the playfield overlay should hide the area. Here it is after I finished bondo-ing (new verb) and sanding it.

After that, I hit the whole thing again with 120 grit and again with 220. The article said to use 400 and 600, but there was no way 400 would have stripped the paint off easily. I’m guessing maybe they are assuming you should know that. I couldn’t find 400 or 600 grit for my sander (I’m guessing they don’t make it?), so I used a sanding block and hand sanded it down with 400 grit. In the article, they then put polyurethane on it. I didn’t like the look of the plastic overlays, so I opted to hit it with 600 grit first.

Next, I blew off all the dust with the air nozzle on my compressor. I followed that up by wiping it down with a tack cloth, then cleaning it with Naptha and a rag.

At this point, I was ready to hit it with polyurethane. I bought Minwax “clear gloss” polyurethane in a can. It was too cold in the garage to do this part…I was afraid it wouldn’t dry right. I also didn’t want to fill the house with fumes. I opted to spray it in the garage and then bring it inside to dry. I had to do this carefully so as to not make a mess of the wet surface. I put handles on each side of the box so I could carry it easily into the house while wet.

The article recommends 3 coats of Poly, sanding in between with 600 grit sandpaper. The can says to recoat within 2 hours. If you can’t get the next coat on in that amount of time, it says you have to wait 72 hours! This is probably to prevent it from wrinkling. I found this out the hard way with Rustoleum awhile back.

I did the first coat at 6pm EST, and as of 9pm its still a tiny bit tacky. I’m guessing I’ll have to wait until Wednesday night now before I can get back to this which really bites!

CAUTION: This post has lots of pretty pictures. If you don’t like pictures OR if you don’t have eyeballs turn back now.

It was unusually warm today for December in RI, so I figured I better take advantage of it. I spent all day in my normally freezing garage working on my Baby Pac-Man playfield.

I plan on installing the playfield overlay from Phoenix Arcade. In order to do that, I have to remove everything from the top of the playfield and prep it. I’ve been reading tips on how to do this, and someone mentioned it is a good idea to build a box to hold the playfield while working on it. This is pretty much a must unless you want to crush all the fun stuff on the underside of the playfield (lights, wires, coils, etc…).

The guide I’ve been reading recommends building a box out of 2″x6″s. This seemed like overkill. I don’t think I need something that heavy duty. It’s not like I’m going to be walking around on the playfield or anything. I opted to use 1″x8″s. I couldn’t use 1″x6″s because it wouldn’t be tall enough for everything hanging off the bottom of the playfield. Here is the amazingly cool box that I built:

I had to cut those notches in it to account for things that were very close to the edge of the playfield. Here it is holding the playfield:

OK…now for the fun part – removing everything from the top. This took forever. Here is what it looks like naked.

I took all the pieces that I removed, put them in a box and shook it up really well. Actually, I made a pseudo playfield with them using a piece of polystyrene foam insulation:

That stuff is pretty useful. I was able to actually screw the posts right into it. Now I should be able to remember where everything goes when I go to put this jigsaw puzzle back together.

Along 3 edges of the playfield, there were black wooden pieces that were stapled from the underside of the playfield. I carefully pulled these off, leaving the staples sticking up in the air. I snipped them off:

…then I went at them with a nail set…

…no more staples.

After doing this, for staples that were banged partially out, I pulled them all the way out from the back using a small screwdriver. Some of them I just left in. The wood trim will cover the holes, so they won’t be seen.

Some no talent assclown repaired 2 coils and must have lost some of the screws to put the mounting brackets back on. He uses drywall screws as replacements that were way too long. What a dork. One of them actually didn’t do much damage. The other one, however…

Here it is after I changed it out for the right size screw:

You can see the very tip of the screw I used, but it is still actually below the top of the playfield. I put some wood glue in that area and clamped it down. Hopefully that will take care of it.

Here’s a shot of the playfield overlay compared to the old playfield:

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at it tomorrow. To close, here’s a pic taken from the perspective of a pinball that I thought was kinda cool.

I ordered a new CPO, sideart, and a playfield overlay from PhoenixArcade.com right before Christmas, and it came faster than I expected. Here’s what arrived:

The cabinet on this Baby Pac is in horrible shape, but getting this art in inspired me to get going on it. I figured the first thing I should do is gut it. I started to do that today, but was hindered by the fact that I have hardly any room in my garage. I managed to rearrange some of the project games in there…stuffing all but 3 in the back…

…then I hung up 3 of the bikes that never get ridden:

The fourth bike that is still sitting on the ground is not ours. We’ve been bike sitting it for about 4 years now, and the plan is to get it back to its owner ASAP. To the right of the above picture is Baby Pac, Space Invaders, and Breakout – all three of them blocking the garage door. You can see them a little better here:

I pulled all the boards out of Baby Pac. They all look pretty good except for the MPU board which has battery corrosion damage. I clipped the old battery off the board and will work on it when I feel motivated. I pulled the playfield out, and plan on working on that next. It’s not in horrible shape, but does have typical wear in certain areas. I’m hoping when I’m done it will look brand new.

In order to work on that, I have to build a box to sit the playfield on top of so as to not damage everything on the underside while sanding it. Here’s what the bottom of the playfield looks like (in case you’re bored):