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I’ve started the refurbishing and refinishing work on the 1964 Bally Grand Tour. This is a table designed by Ted Zale in which you try to complete a Grand Tour of 10 different locations. To complete a tour of one location you need to either shoot the skill shot via the center top lane or hit any three mushroom bumpers to open the Tour Gate which will drain the ball back to the shooter lane and light one of the 10 locations on the backless. One to three replays or 100 – 300 points are then awarded based upon settings. If all four mushrooms are hit a gate to the shooter lane via the right outlane opens up
The table has really nice artwork and when I picked it up supposedly it had “ran” when the seller got it. Someone had sanded off all of the paint on the body/cab and removed the wooden head support. All of the coin door hardware was in a box and the side rails and glass were also included. I was really happy that the glass was in good condition because it is smaller than the standard glass of later tables and would have been hard to replace.
The playfield is in excellent condition but I had thought the backglass was in better shape than it is because once I lit it from behind all of the flaking became apparent. Still for a machine from 55 years ago, it is in surprisingly good shape.
Before I even thought about powering up the machine I pulled the game board and removed and cleaned all of the parts from the score motor and reset banks to the jones pin receivers and relays. Several leaf switches were bent 90 degrees out of shape and needed to be reshaped. There was also a missing 1/4” pin that holds the pivot arm on one of the 115v reset bank relays. I machined a new pin since there was no way I was finding an exact replacement.
I checked out all of the leaf switches and looked for metal pieces that are always floating around in these old machines. A stray star washer or screw can easily get into a switch stack and make havoc once power is applied so I checked around for those and made a few solder repairs to wires that had broken or separated.
The lockdown receiver was missing its handle and I had no idea what the original looked like so I made test handles out of plywood and once I had a shape that worked I make one out of steel.
I then tackled the head unit. The various stepper units were gunked up as is usual so they were all taken apart and cleaned so that they stepped correctly. All of this took several days and finally it was time to power up the machine!
The table has no power switch so I used a power strip so that I could kill the power should a coil start to go up in smoke or flames. The table powered up, the score motor ran, the reels reset to 000 and nothing torched!
There were several burnt out bulbs and of course not everything worked as it should. The 1000 point light didn’t work (leaf switch adjustment), gong didn’t work (leaf switch), match and high score replay payout (reel contact issue). As you can see most problems were switch adjustments.
Here’s a video of game play. The table has the wrong flippers (way too big) that lack rubbers but that’s what it came with and I’ve not put in an order for all the things that need to be replaced. The last ball (around 4:30) is the most interesting as it shows collecting the tour as well as the Free Ball Gate
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Great projects you have I’m jealous
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So here’s the $500+ question… will you be repainting this cab, or will you stain and seal it instead? Repainting it might make it look more authentic, but refinishing it like wood furniture might also be a nice option.
(Note that I’m not a traditionalist with this sort of thing. I figure it’s your machine, you can do with it as you wish.)
Creator of the first PinupPlayer PostDMD mods for VPX - PostDMD for Masters of the Universe VPX and Jaws VPX.
Head Proprietor of Pisces Pinball, a VPX table developer.
Lead Technician of MC Chase Amusements, a private arcade in our home basement.You need to login in order to like this post: click here
I’m going to repaint it, the problem is that I’ve seen a couple of different paint patterns online. One uses only blue and the other is a combination of red and blue, both with the same design pattern.
I’m planning on going with the red and blue pattern. The seller said that when he got the table, someone had painted the cab blue and the head orange and he couldn’t stand it so he sanded it down to bare wood.
It’s interesting to compare the cab construction of this table to the 70’s Williams’s tables that I’ve restored in the past. The wood in this one looks like furniture grade Poplar with some really thick pieces used for the head. The quality of construction is much better on this ’64 table in terms of stock and jointery quality.
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Yeah, I think the two color stencil looks better than the single color.
Creator of the first PinupPlayer PostDMD mods for VPX - PostDMD for Masters of the Universe VPX and Jaws VPX.
Head Proprietor of Pisces Pinball, a VPX table developer.
Lead Technician of MC Chase Amusements, a private arcade in our home basement.You need to login in order to like this post: click here
Yes I think you’re right. Here are three Bally tables from 1964 (Trio, 2 in 1 and Mad World) and you can see the same red and blue in each one. I assume that they used the same paint on all of these machines as well as Grand Tour.
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I forgot to mention that I replaced the old worn out power cord which leads me to another point. These older machines should definitely have locks on them to keep kids out of them. There is line voltage running to the start switch on the coin door (110v) and there is a mercury switch right up front as well that works as a really effective but potentially dangerous machine lift tilt switch.
Of course as a kid I had a small vial of mercury which I used to play with on my desk top. It was fun to bust the shiny liquid metal blob into tiny balls that could reform into one ball. The rules were don’t eat it and wash your hands after playing with it. I also had a huge box of lead soldiers, life was different back then
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My Humpty dumbty has this but older style..
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The GTO (Grand Tour Overhaul) is truck’n down the road. I painted the cab and head white, made a stencil for the sides and airbrushed the red onto it. I then held the stencil up to the head and realized that instead of 3 diamonds I made the stencil with 4
…I then sanded off the red, repainted the white under the red, made a new stencil and airbrushed the cab and head Bally Blue and Red. Now we’re back in business!
The legs were sanded and painted and the leg levelers were wire brushed and the threads were cleaned up with taps and dies so they now spin freely. I tried some Rustoleum Metalic paints for this instead of the black hammer paint which I always use and the results are pretty good. I got tired of Steve from Pinball resource scolding me when I order black leg bolts because “those tables didn’t have black legs.”
The metalic hammer paint would be perfect for coin doors if the texture was a little finer so I painted over this satin nickel which was a little too silver and switched to the dark steel which looked better to my eye. Now the legs and coin door/trim are all painted.
I also picked up another table (this one to keep) but I’m having trouble finding the stepper units to clean them
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Ya gotta love PBR. I’ve come to appreciate his bluntness … he saved me from making several expensive neophyte mistakes.
Great work on the Grand Tour.
Onevox
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You got your R&B!!! Congrats!
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Hey cool, nice to see you got a R&B to go with your avatar.
Bally blue and red particular mixes you get at Home Depot? :)
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The red was 30 drops of Createx red, 2 white and 2 orange while the blue was 20 drops blue with 5 drops of white. The stuff is wonderful to airbrush and cures with heat.
The RaB was an interesting saga. The original deal was RaB, Pirate Gold and GT for $2500 but the RaB wouldn’t fire the Rocky or Rhino inserts when I ran the diagnostics so I picked up GT and PG for $300 and the guy said that he would fix RaB up for $2200. Sliderpoint said that $2200 was a fair but little bit high price so I felt pretty good about the deal since I really wanted RaB. After a month I called the guy up and he did nothing to fix the machine so I offered $2000 as is and drove the 1.5 hours to look at it again.
I asked him to fire up the machine and the Lion insert kept on firing and the game wouldn’t launch a ball into the launch lane. I offered $1700 for the table and he reluctantly took it because he paid quite a bit more for it. When I got it home I checked the fuses on the power board and the first one I checked on the bottom right was blown so I put in a new fuse and “Presto” everything worked!
I need to fix the Nell Log but I found a post on Pinside from SliderPoint on how to fix that so I feel pretty good about that one. Boris button light was burnt out and someone had put the lamp/switch assembly in backwards and broke off the diode attachment so I fixed that. Two of the BOMB switches needed adjusting. The right most two columns on the DMD don’t work so I ground off the top glass and did the defogger fix from Pinside. There is still an hour of dry time left before I see if that worked but I don’t have high hopes that they will work. I also had a fair bit of 60 cycle hum on the right speaker so I put in nylon washers to let the ground float on the sound board and it is about 50% better now. I only notice it when the game is not in play.
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Yeah Steve from PBR is candid to say the least. Every time I order from him there is at least one part number where I hear a pause and then he says “you don’t want that.” At least he’s happy that I always my ID number when I order.
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lol, I’ve never actually called PBR, I just e-mail and Jimmy, whoever that is, takes care of it. pretty good about answering questions and all that too.
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thanks for the bally mixes, I’ll see if can remember it if I ever need them. I have a selection of createx but have only ever used the black and white (used white for speckles). if sinbad ever gets to the top of the project queue I need to repaint a lot of the playfield and will need the better half to help match colors. I’ve read mixed opinions on the curing with heat and the only reference I’ve ever found it referenced on createx instructions is for when used on fabrics. it doesn’t seem to hurt it on the playfield touchup I’ve done that on, but then it also didn’t seem to matter on the speckles where I did not heat cure them
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The Createx needs to dry completely before the heat set or you will get smears if you put a clear coat over it (don’t ask how I know this)
I put the mix ratio here because in a year or two I’ll do another Bally machine and I’ll think “now how did I mix that last time?” BTW that color is just a best guess because the machine didn’t have a speck of paint on it so I went off of photos from the internet which showed machines in various states of fade…
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The GTO progressed to putting on the legs, installing the new correctly sized 2″ flippers, changing out the cracked rubbers for new ones, installing the coin door and trim, remounting the side rails and installing the head. Powered her up and everything still works perfectly! I’ll leave the table like this till I get Pirate Gold’s cab refinished and then I’ll clean and clear coat the playfield.
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Is it just me or do others find that there are a lot of unreliable folks on Pinside? I reached out to a guy who rehabbed a GT and he said he would get me his BG file. A month went by I nudged him for the file, a couple of weeks went by then I got a “sorry I forgot about it, I’ll post the file” and it turned out that he was going to post it on an old Wildman VPU post for GT. I thought if all he is going to send me is an edit of a Wildman BG shot screw this.
I pulled the side metal parts from the BG and scanned it with overlap but the scans turned out blury because the focus of the scanner is on the be and not 1/4″ behind glass. I then pulled out my camera but there were reflections from the glass when it was flat so I stood the glass up but there were still lighting issues from the overhead can lights.
I then pulled out my halogen work lights, spot lit the white ceiling with them and used a screw driver as a stand off so the camera was always the same distance from the Back Glass and shot overlapping shots. I them stitched them together in photoshop, skewed the art a little and now I have a decent piece of art to work with for touch ups!
You can see a reflection of the halogen light heat cage shield in the upper right corner but that will be airbrushed out later.
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After a couple of days of intermittent photoshop touch up the mask and front graphics are done and can be sent of for printing at GameOnGrafix.
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