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I’ve been enjoying playing RaB too much to rehab it but since I just finished refinishing Grand Tour I figured now is the time to give RaB a deep clean as well. The table is in great shape so all it needs is a good cleaning as well as a few other tweaks.
I started by pulling out the CPU board because I couldn’t figure out just exactly which terminals on the battery case were the ones that needed to be soldered to the external battery pack. I should step back and mention that on these boards the RAM needed constant power or all of the settings and high scores would be lost at power down. The really stupid thing that the designers did is that they mounted the battery case at the top of the CPU board so that if the batteries ever leaked, the material would run down the board and potentially take out multiple traces and chips. A standard solution is to mount an external battery pack that would not leak down the CPU board. The problem is that there are multiple tap points on the back of the board behind the battery case and the manual didn’t seem to indicate if +4.5v and +3v were needed my the board.
I took a look around online and found that many folks are using NVRAM in place of the original RAM which is a really sweet solution because it gets around having to use batteries at all in the machine. I put in an order for a chip and we’ll see how that works out.
One of the problems with the table that helped drop the price by a ton was that the machine wouldn’t function because of a bad fuse on the power board which caused the machine to behave in a super weird manner. At any rate, many of the soldered on fuse holders are fractured and are ready to fall off if you look at them sideways so I pulled the Power Board and ordered replacements that I will switch out.
Next I shot a ton of photos of the playfield and started taking apart the ramps and plastics so that I could clean everything up with Novus 2 and then coat the table with a good layer of paste wax. This went better than expected and in the process I found that there was one fractured wire to a gate switch and a few bulbs were missing.
Some of the best artwork on the table is hidden under ramps like this cool drawing of Bullwinkle as Douglas Macarthur.
The playfield is in really fine shape and it is a treat to work with playfield where the inserts are completely flush with the surface!
During the process of taking everything apart I realized that many of the bulbs on this table will be a MAJOR PIA to change out when they go bad so that pushed me over the edge into buying LEDs for the machine. When I first picked the table up I figured out how many of each kind of LED I needed and made a spreadsheet but I held off on ordering because I like the look of incandescent bulbs and am generally pretty cheap. I went with Ablaze Ghostbuster bulbs in warm white and didn’t use any colors because many bulbs have silicone covers for them and I like being able to see the colored covers when the bulbs are not lit.
I also ordered a replacement set of rubbers for the machine and was surprised to find that the original color of them is black and not the white that the machine came with. This is awesome because the black hides the black scuffs that the white ones pick up from the balls hitting them.
The plastics are in good shape and I’ll hit them all with Novus 1 before reinstalling them.
Lastly I removed the goofy looking yellow plastic leg protectors that were on the machine. These are designed to prevent the edges of the legs from digging into the sides of the table when the table is nudged. My cheap and effective solution (which I use on all of my machines) is to cut out pieces of thin sheet metal with a shears and tape them onto the inside of the legs to act as a thin stand off and bearing surface for the legs and cab. This works super well, is cheap, you never loose them because they are always attached to the legs and they are out of site so they don’t draw attention to themselves.
@Randr and @Borgdog, this is the first “modern machine” that I’ve every worked on. Is there anything else I should do to the machine while I have it apart that I haven’t done as of yet?You need to login in order to like this post: click here
clean, wax, bulbs, rubbers.. sounds like you got the basics covered, can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but then I don’t own anything with ramps (not that I can think of anything to do to them either).
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I’ve always wanted to flame polish ramps but I tried once and did not go well! I agree with bord sounds like you got it covered. If you flame polish ramps do a video!
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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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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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For the white rubbers the manual calls for: I use Titan Silicon Competition Bands in Solar Ride, and I ordered those in clear translucent. They don’t seem to hold any debris, are easier to clean, they seem to last (especially in home use only situations), they allow more GI light out from under the plastics, and they don’t look striking the way white can against a playfield with any patina.
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.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 guess the obvious would be change the balls as well.
I agree with Lynn the translucent rubbers from Titan are great at letting light out. I used them everywhere in my Jurassic park, and on the slings of my data east star wars. They look great on them. One thing to watch out for with Led’s is the strobing GI that Data East loves to do. With Led’s and everything blinking for a multi ball it made me nauseated. You can unplug that to allow the GI to always remain on.
I almost bought both RandB at the same time as I bought my JP, however the seller valued the Rocky higher than JP
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Thanks for the responses!
@Randr, the flame polishing looks pretty cool but I think the risk outweighs the benefit in my case.Those translucent rubbers sound cool! The manual doesn’t say what color the rubbers should be so I tried the trick that I learned from Steve at PBR. I was once looking for a certain type of flipper for an old EM and told him what I saw online and read on Pinside as what should be used. He stopped me in mid-sentence is his brusque East Coast style and looked online at an original flyer for the game to see what the table should have on it. Brilliant idea! The RaB flyer is shot from far away but I see black rubbers on the slings so I’m going to assume the rest of the table had black as well. I should mention that there were two black rubbers still on the table in hard to get to places which makes me feel more confident in my choice, the rest were much newer white rubbers.
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I’m afraid to talk to Steve. I just e-mail…in the proper form of course. I think I even faxed them my last order??
Soooo….wondering about Grand Tour.
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Titan does make the rubbers in black, so they would have you covered.
https://www.titanpinball.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=52
They also have a handy “assembled kit” page, where you can find customer assembled kits to order. Here’s the entry for the game. Note there’s three kits, one of which includes what would be an operator change.
https://www.titanpinball.com/kits/index.php/browse/byGame/123
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.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 JR and don’t forget your customer number when you order from PBR, I find that softens him up a little bit. He once told me that he has scared off a few customers but his knowledge base is so good that I find myself going back to order from him pretty frequently just because he has saved me from several ordering mistakes…
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!! Thanks for reminding me to make sure I had an invoice in my files. …with my customer #! Steve’s PBR site is a required learning experience for those who have old Gottlieb’s. They bailed me out early on in my project with a resistor situation.
So…about Grand Tour…did that get scanned? VPX version?
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I didn’t tear it down far enough for a scanner but I did shoot photos of the PF and plastics so yes some day…
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Hooray, the table is completely cleaned and put back together again and there are no leftover parts! I saw a post on Pinside where someone lit up Bullwinkle’s eyes on the topper and I thought that was a cool idea so I took apart a cheap Walmart flashlight and used the 8 high power LEDs to make a projector for the topper. I 3D printed a focus tube and attached it to a 3D printed housing. The assembly was mounted on to of the head so that it projects light onto the back of Bullwinkle’s eyes. I ran a quick disconnect set of leads into the head and tapped off of a 5v and ground terminal on the power board. Here’s the unit mounted on the head with a metal foil lining to the focus tube.
And Presto, here’s the result.
All of the parts were re-installed onto the playfield, thank heaven for digital cameras to take lots of photos of the jigsaw puzzle of ramps and plastics! Here’s a detail of the cleaned and waxed playfield.
I bought over 150 LED’s for the table and I’m still short about 2 dozen. I put all of the LEDs that are in really hard to get to places in and left easy to get to back box incandescents in place until I put in another order. It’s impressive how bright these LEDs are for the amount of current that they draw, the game is visibly much brighter than before. I did not put any colored LEDs in but rather used the silicone bulb covers to add the original colored lighting back into the game.
I’m still waiting on a high power resistor to get here for the final modification of the table. The backbox has three clear plastic parts that pop up during the Hat Trick portion of game play. This is the part where all three hats on the left side are lit and a ball is shot up into the “Hat Trick” area. All the GI lights go out, the curtain on the head is lit and Bullwinkle says “Nothing up my sleeve, Presto!” and either a Lion, Rhino or Rocky gets pulled out of the hat.
There are two different voltages that go to the three coils, 50V for the Lion and Rhino because they are bigger and heavier and 32v to Rocky. One common mod for the table is to rewire the Rhino to 32V because the 50v coil is too strong and slams the rhino into the top guide rail so strongly that it retracts part way down and all you see is the top 3/4 of the rhino. The same thing happens for Rocky so I did some testing with various 2W power resistors and if I put about 2 ohms of resistance in series with the 4 ohm coil I can get Rocky to deploy just about perfectly. I ordered a wire wound 100W power resistor to put into the game since the coil draws about 8 amps at 32v DC so the 2 ohm resistor will have about a 10 volt drop across it at 8 Amps for a total of 80 Watts. This is wattage rating is super overkill because the coil only fires for about a second and a half and only about once every 10 games and the power resistor is built to take this for days on end. I’m playing it safe because I’d rather not have any chance of the head going up in flames because of this mod…
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Love that mod!! Very cool. And wow, that’s a lot of bulbs. But no parts left over? You must not drink beer while working ;) Must look amazing.
Haven’t played the VP version much but I’ll give Pez’s new version some games and try to get to that hat trick. You have to be having a blast!! Thanks for sharing.
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Looks great @scottacus. And thank you for sharing your work with these machines of yours. I really enjoy reading these restoration posts from you guys. I must admit. I’m kind of happy not to own a machine myself. I just would not be able to maintain it properly like you guys.
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