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Pirate Gold is a Chicago Coin table from 1969 and was the other machine that I picked up a week or so ago as a two table for $300 deal. This table is not in as good condition as the Bally Grand Tour. The cabinet is pretty beat up.
And the head is not is great shape.
The playfield has more than a fair amount of planking to it and looks a bit more like one of Hauntfreak’s Barn Finds than what I usually restore.
The game board which should be white like the areas under where the washers were that held it in place in the cab is uniformly covered in grime.
The interior of the cab has the usual pile of dirt, blown fuses, nuts, washers and screws in addition to pieces of corner reinforcers for the cab that have separated.
Unlike Grand Tour which is in really nice condition despite the dirt, Pirate Gold is not in great shape. I didn’t want to spend days cleaning up the machine only to find that it is DOA so I gave it a quick once over.  I checked of all of the switch stacks for badly bent leaf switches, checked all of the coils for burns, made sure that the score motor turned over, checked that there was no bare wire sticking out of the 50 year old power cord and cycled all of the stepper units to make sure that none were completely frozen up. I then plugged all of the Jones plugs in, connected the power cord to a power strip and flipped the switch…
The score motor turned and nothing burnt up so I used an insulated handled screw driver and pressed the rusted start switch on the coin door and presto magic the reset solenoids fired, the score motor ran and the reels on the head all reset to zero followed by the the ball kicker firing!
Now that I know it will probably be fixable I’ll tear it all apart and start the many days of cleaning. I don’t have a schematic for this one so my hope is to look it over while I’m cleaning it and figure out what I need to order to fix it up and then put in an order with Pinball Resource for a schematic and all of the parts for Pirate Gold and Grand Tour.
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While your other project is probably the better game I’m excited to see what becomes of this! Glad it found a good home.
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Sweet, I love the aged look, definitely build a vp table that way with the planking and chipping and insert wear .. just a suggestion.
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I’m most of the way done with the cleaning of the insides of Pirate Gold. There is one thing that every machine manual that I’ve ever read through ALWAYS says “DO NOT lubricate the internal parts of the machine.” There is a very good reason for putting this in print because most guys natural reflex to fixing something that doesn’t move well is to lubricate it.Â
Unfortunately some knuckle head who owned this machine in the past didn’t get the memo and used some form of lubricant on the stepper units. What happens with time is the nice lubricant that gave the afore mentioned knuckle head a moving stepper finds every particle of grime in the machine and eventually turns into something with the consistency of honey. I swear he used 10w40 on this thing! It was a bear (substitute any “B” word of your liking) to clean up and get the parts moving again.
The proper thing to do is to clean out the grime and the unit will once again run just fine. The metal parts don’t need lubricant. You can use a super tiny amount of conductive silicone lube on the brass/copper rivets and traces that the stepper’s arms move across, that is perfectly fine to prevent corrosion.
Rant completed, and the table is working for the most part! Now to trouble shoot the Pirate Cave in the middle of the playfield, figure out why the right pop bumper only fires when a ball hits it from the right, figure out what triggers the Special, figure out what triggers the Extra Ball. Hard to do without a schematic…
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During the broadcast from IFPA16, there was a machine that had issues and the chat was lit up with guys screaming when a tech pulled out a spray box of what looked to be 10w40
Yes, I’m that crazy. I stay up and see those competitions live if I can
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Found this Scottacus, hope it helps. https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/DOC2156. just read,you already ordered one.
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Thanks Oldschhol4, I hoped I could get the machine working without a schematic but it looks like I’m going to have to break down and buy one. I’ll check with Steve at Pinball Resource tomorrow and if he doesn’t have one I’ll go with Marco.
I was looking back at the photo of the grime in the bottom of the cab and I forgot to point out the rusted pinball that you can see next to the cross support in the bottom of the machine. There are two sizes of metal balls that can be found in most/many machines and the smaller diameter one is not a spare ball but is part of the anti-tipping mechanism for the machine. This ball sits on a metal ramp and if the player end of the machine is lifted, it rolls to make contact with a switch that tilts or shuts the machine down. This table had two of these rolling around in the bottom. My guess is the tech never looked for the missing ball and just threw another one in and somehow that one got lost in the machine as well.Â
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Wow. You are providing some very instructional info on your posts. Thanks so much for taking the time to share.
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Taking some time away from fixing and cleaning and now I’m working on backglass artwork. I scanned the backglass and stitched it together in Photoshop. Can you tell which portions have been touched up?
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Yes. :)
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Messing with the VPinball app and push notifications.
So if you haven't downloaded app yet what are you waiting for!?
for IOS and Android********************************************************
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Here is the end of today’s Photoshopping, still a bit of clean up left to go…
And the really good news is that a Pinsider who rehabbed a Grand Tour is going to send me his backglass files! This should save another full day of editingÂ
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The Apron and Shooter Guide are in really bad shape so they unfortunately will need to be stripped, primed, filled, painted and have the graphics replaced. Here is what they look like now.
I scanned them and re-did the graphics in Photoshop.
The Shooter Guide has a thick black line around it because it has already been formatted for printing for the Decal Pro system, the apron is too large to print as one because the Decal Pro uses standard 8.5 x 11 sheets so that one I divided up into three sections for printing.
I’ll explain Decal Pro for those who haven’t seen it in my other rehabs once I get to the stage of putting the graphics on.
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Thanks to the schematic that arrived the other day, Pirate Gold now works pretty much completely. Here is a video of it in action and watching it I see that the 1000’s reel is not incrementing with every pulse so I’ll have to look into that…
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Great video. I know a lot of guys hate to work on Chicago Coin games. Did you find anything particularly different about PG compared to your other projects?
Also, any plans to do PG in VP?
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That’s a really interesting question that I’ve been thinking about during this restoration/resurrection.
One the down side I don’t like the press on (not screw on) stamped steel press on acorn nuts for holding the plastics in place. They look ok but there are a lot of them missing and I bet that is because they don’t hold well. Steve at Pinball Resource groaned when I asked him for a schematic for a Chicago Coin table because they are printed on a huge sheet of paper and they run up and down in orientation rather than side to side. The wiring looks to be steel but so were both of the 70’s Williams tables. They stack their switches pretty high on their relays and the brown bakalite parts that move the leaf switches seem a bit flimsier than on the other machines that I’ve worked on. The one that had the gong leaf switch had that switch at the top and the piece had curved enough for the leaf to all out of the slot (which was why the gong wasn’t working).
On the plus side I like the modular design of the table. Everything is mounted on boards and can be removed from the machine for servicing. So in addition to the standard main board in the bottom of the cab there is a board on the side near the front that has all of the fuses and tilt mechanisms, a board on the back wall with both bells and the knocker. The backbox is different because the entire backbox board tilts backwards and the backglass is removed from the inside of the head, not lifted out from the front of the head. What this does is allow you to pull the board out of the machine which probably made manufacturing the machine a lot easier since you could build it on a bench and not have to build it inside of the head. The downside is that the head is more flimsy because it is a box with only four walls not one with four walls and a bottom.
I also like the way they do their schematic because all of the information is on it. It not only showed the “wiring” but also lists what coils are used and where they are located in the schematic all on the schematic.  The layout of the relays is well thought out and the wiring looms are extremely well done (better than anything else I’ve worked on thus far but I haven’t worked on a Gottlieb yet). For example at the Jones plugs they run all of the wires down the middle of the two rows which makes the wiring compact and clean.
Overall there are good and bad points to the design but I wouldn’t say that they are not hard to work on, just different.
Yes I’ll do a Pirate Gold and Grand Tour but that is after these are restored, I code your Fashion Show, fix up Capersville, Sea Ray, Mariner and Gulfstream to my newest system and finish The Wiggler…
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One other thing is that Chicago Coin marks things well. For example a score reel has three screws so if you don’t mark the location of the zero position on the unit you might not put the reel on correctly. On a Chicago Coin table there is an index mark so the reel can only go on one way. They also put red paint marks on the stepper unit finger and base units so you don’t need to use a sharpie to mark finger units that can go on two different ways.
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Alright time to give PG some love. Because the artwork is complex I scanned the side of the machine and stitched the images together in Photoshop. Next I put a piece of cardstock with the side of the machine traced on it, taped it to a wall and projected the side art onto it. I traced out the dark green and white sections, cut out the dark green areas, made another side mask, traced the dark green cut outs onto it, sketched in the white art and cut it out. I then did the same for the head and cab front whew!
I had my wife help me pick out a stock shade of green that matched one of the hundreds of clean to really dirty gross greens on the table and had a quart mixed. I then sanded off all of the paint on the machine and was surprised to see that Chicago Coin used craft paper covered plywood for the front and sides of the cab and sides of the head. My dad got ahold of some of this stuff back in the 80’s and it was really nice to work with for painted items. I think that it is used in sign making but I had not seen any of it since then till I sanded off the gross paint.
The entire cab and head got painted white and any scratches or gouges got filled with bondo, sanded flat and then coated in white again. The entire cab and head then got two coats of green to make it minty fresh.
First the white mask was put onto the cab. I found that I couldn’t hang it with the cab in the usual upright position because there was so much material cut out that it would not lay flat so I put the cab on its side and airbrushed the Createx white straight out of the bottle (yea no mixing). It took about an entire bottle to cover the cab and head.
I then mixed equal parts green and brown to make an entire bottle of green and put the mask on and airbrushed all of the dark green sections of the cab and head.
Arg me matey, she looks pretty sweet! Next everything will get a coat of clear water based minwax poly.
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Looks really nice. Did you strip all of the mounted hardware and switches out before painting or just make sure they were masked?
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Yes everything that was attached to the cab was taken out (flipper buttons, flipper bearings, plunger, coin door hardware and door, cab cushions, lockdown bar retainer, rear glass support, side rails…). Everything else is still in the cab like the daughter boards and main game board.
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Looking very nice. Â
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