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Put all of the cab back together today and everything worked!
The easy stuff is now done and it’s time to repaint the apron, pull the playfield, depopulate it, clean it, repaint a large portion of it and clear coat it.
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When you do your minwax polycrylic clear coat of the cab are you using the rattle cans or the stuff out of the big can? If the can are you spraying or brushing?
Thanks.
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I brush on two coats and the stuff has a weird bluish tint to it when it is in the can but dries clear. It has a long enough open time that the brush marks level out, it will run if you put too much on. I use latex for the base color and the createx is flat so the Minwax gives the surface a uniform sheen and helps protect the paint underneath.
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Awesome Restoration … wow
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Hello,
I purchased this same machine today at a garage sale for $100. At the time all the lights were on. I inserted a dime an the flippers started to work as they’re supposed to. The ball was stuck in some debris under the glass. So I opened the front door to dislodge the ball. When I closed the door, all the lights went out. The machine is on, but wont work. When I insert a coin, all the lights come on for a few seconds, then they all go back off and it won’t paly. What have I done?
Thank you for any advice!
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Congrats on getting the table for $100, that is a very good price! I really can’t say what is wrong with your machine but it seems odd that it would work and then die after the coin door was opened and closed.  There is a slam tilt switch on the coin door, I’d start there in your trouble shooting.
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1 user thanked author for this post.
Thank you sir!
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Obligatory thread bump. @scottacus, any progress on Pirate’s Gold?
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1 user thanked author for this post.
double bump
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Hey guys thanks for the interest in the restoration, wow it’s been since August that I last posted progress! I was just playing the table last night and sadly the game play doesn’t live up to the awesomeness of the graphics. The cab is all done and I must admit that the playfield is in such bad shape that I’ve been a little intimidated by all of the work that will be needed to get it looking great again so the plan is to get Grand Tour and Rocky and Bullwinkle fixed up first since they will only need deep cleaning.
I did get the backglass restored by scanning the glass and painstakingly fixing the damage in Photoshop.  I stripped all of the old printing from the glass and had GameOnGraphix print a color outer and black inner masks from vinyl which I installed behind the glass.  The result was excellent and the cost was super low compared to all of the alternatives so once again I highly recommend GameOnGraphix for anyone who needs to redo a backglass.
I also had a switch stack in the backbox get stuck which nearly caused the hundreds solenoid to burn up. The problem was that the stack is really high and the thin fiberboard that holds the switch leaves in place had warped over time so that the the top curved away from the stack and eventually the top switch’s leaf slipped out of the slot when the solenoid fired and got stuck in the on position. This energized the 100’s solenoid and caused it to nearly burn up before I figured out what was happening. I 3D printed a reinforcer which I epoxied onto the fiberboard to splint it straight again. It is the black piece to the left of the fiberboard and now everything plays correctly and safely.
I also made a rear door for the head out of plywood and put a lock in it.
What has really stalled the restorations and taken a lot of time is a project that I’m pretty excited about. If you’ve ever played Rocky and Bullwinkle (live or the VP version), you might remember that there is a saw mill on the right middle of the table with Nell tied to a log on it. When you drop the targets twice, the game slowly drives Nell towards the spinning saw blade. This is a fantastic toy which unfortunately was poorly engineered. The designers chose to use an asynchronous AC motor to drive Nell and these motors are like the ones in your microwave, they will spin either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on their starting point.
The bottom line is that the motor drives the wrong way half of the time and put a ton of stress on the reduction gear system so that by now virtually all of the Nell units have broken. Marco sold a replacement motor and I bought one of the last ones they had but unfortunately it too is asynchronous and is too weak to drive Nell against the return spring that brings her back to the start so all she does is randomly move either toward or away from the saw blade.
I decided to try to come up with an alternative solution and my brother suggested using a stepper motor to drive Nell, that way I didn’t need a return spring because I could drive her either toward the blade or away from it via software control. I went through several designs before I settled on the final one and now I’m building these boards and selling them to Pinsiders who want their Nell units working correctly. The unit consists of an AC to DC conversion section with a Buck Converter to step the voltage down to less than 12v DC. This converter has to handle the high voltage and I chose one with a readout so that the user can be sure that both the voltage and amperage are in the correct ranges. There is an Arduino Uno that runs everything as well as a stepper motor driver board to interface between the Arduino and stepper motor. The original gear and pulley won’t fit on the stepper motor shaft so I 3D print these parts as well as a motor mount. Here are photos of the board and gear/pulley.
 
The end users have been very happy with the units which is really gratifying. It’s been a lot of fun coming up with a way to get these old machines running like new again! Here is a video of the unit in action.
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That’s some crazy stuff right there. So…you saved Nell??
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Sorry to hear PG doesn’t live up to the artwork. Sure looks great. That backglass would make some great wall art.
The Nell fix is really cool. Not a fix really but a legitimate improvement. Super-impressive!
Thanks for the update!
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Also bummed to hear you’re not happy with PG game play. The playfield does look a bit sparse but I’ve come to learn that doesn’t always mean boring. I’m a huge sucker for horseshoe lanes…so was hoping for a VP version! Thanks again for your posts. Always learn something. I’m tracking down a start up sequence issue with my EM and you just gave me something else to look at. And if I ever decide to get the backglass restored I may hit you up for more info on what you did, although I think you provided plenty of info already. Looks fantastic.
Been using your 4 Mil BC table to try and get my recently installed pinscape/pot based plunger dialed in. Something’s still eluding me there but really came to love this table…and one just showed up on Craigslist for $850. Dang, if this was a one or two player I might offer 500 and see what happens. Burlap, the worlds oldest fabric.   and you better believe I’m pulling out ‘That’s an asyncronous AC motor in there that will spin either clockwise or counter clockwise depending on the starting point’ at the next house party I’m at and a microwave gets used.
This Nell fix you and your brother came up with is fascinating. Also fascinating is how in just a few paragraphs you covered all kinds of territory. Hope you can post more soon.
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Thanks JR, PG seems to me to be a game where you launch the ball, it spends a little time at the top of the table and you spend the majority of the ball working around the flippers with those steep sided slings. The center drain is super small so not a lot of balls get lost there and the small flippers don’t seem to be able to get the ball easily back up to the top. The horseshoe is the best part of the table though and a quick 500 for each pass.
You found a 4MBC for $850 on Craigslist? If it were in good condition I’d buy it in a heartbeat! @Bord and I were looking forward to playing a 4MBC at the Tom Taylor event last year but Tom had sold it since last year’s event. I was really looking forward to playing the table again to compare it to the VP version.
Glad to help out with your cocktail party small talk, I learned that one from “the Google” as we call it around here.
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Yeah, $850 for a 4MBC is a no-brainer!
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I’ve had a bunch of projects stacked up that I wanted to get through before I could get back to work on Pirate Gold. I pulled the playfield yesterday and got it mounted onto the rotisserie for stripping parts from the playfield.
The playfield is in pretty poor shape which was part of the reason why I’ve been putting off this project. In addition to all of the dirt it looks like someone put a bunch of cleaner on and never got it back off again. Some of the support nails behind the switches were really solidly in the wood and some screws were pretty soft in their screw holes. The black in the lower right corner has me concerned as to what was going on there.
Oh well…Â I’d like to take the machine to the MGC in Milwaukee in April so I’ll see if I can get this done by then.
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Today the playfield was stripped and cleaned. I’m still a bit concerned about the lower right corner of the playfield, it looks to me like it could have had some water/mildew damage at some point in time.
I used Novus 3 on all of the playfield and then sanded and used wood bleach on the lower right section to try to lighten up the dark areas. All of the plastics have little pits with dirt in them that I’ll end up wet sanding since rubbing compound won’t touch it.
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Great to see progress on this. Did you take everything off the back side of the playfield, too? I’m just nearing this stage on my Moulin Rouge project and trying to figure out whether or not I’m going to 100% strip the thing to make touch-ups and clearcoat easier.
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No don’t pull the parts off of the back just the things that stick through the playfield like leaf switches, flippers, pop bumpers and lamps. BTW the pop bumpers are partially held in place by the light wiring so you will need to desolder the leads to the lights.
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Damn..wish you were my neighbor.
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