Hello All:
I will be starting a restoration on a 1977 Bally eight Ball.
I have been collecting for a lot of years and recently thanks to sites like this I have been able to bring many of my machines back from the dead and looking better than when I purchased them.

I do not play pinball well, but I enjoy the workings and how all the parts come together and that for me seems to be why I like restoration work the most about the hobby. Because of this, I have restored several of my machines as well as a few for friends.

About 2 years ago, I was approached by our local school district's foundation for a donation to their annual charity auction. At that time, I suggested that I would restore a machine for them to auction off.

I told the foundation that if they would purchase a machine and pay for some parts, I would do all the work and find folks to help donate additional items to make it a worthwhile item to sell. They agreed and we choose a nice "family" EM machine (Williams Triple Strike) to restore.

Long story short, the machine was a big hit and sold well. I was asked again this year to "do my magic" and give them another machine to sell.
I had just picked up a Bally Eight Ball and asked the foundation if it would be a good candidate. They were excited and so now begins this project.

I will try to post as much as I can and remember to take lots of before and after pictures. I tend to take lots of work pics, but forget to do many "as it was" pictures.

So before I start here are some pictures of the "Triple Strike" that I did 2 years ago. Postings on the "Eight Ball" to follow.

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Well Let's get started on this machine. First thing I do is to give the machine a good looking over to start a parts order. Starting with the legs and working up, I can quickly see that I want to purchase new legs and nylon feet. The leg bolts are all the same and just need polished.20150528_163152.jpg
I will have to get a new playfield glass and the coin door is intact and not dented.20150528_163142.jpg 20150528_163215.jpg20150528_163130.jpgChecking inside, I found the manual and schematics. Good luck having those. I searched the bottom for loose parts and found little. There were some boxes of small parts which are not for the game.

The playfield is next and has me worried a little as the plastics looked scratched and are warped. Grabbing some cleaner (Mean Green) and a towel, I wipe off one of the plastics and surprise! just dirty plastics. I checked the rubbers and know that new are in the future. The spinner is a little beat, but I can fix that. The playfield surface paint is just a little rough and spots and I will see how my air brushing goes.

Here are some quick pics and then I will come back to my quick once over.

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Moving to the inside of the cabinet, I test all the coils on the playfield and in the cabinet for bad units. I check the obvious burnt ones as well as any that look good. I found all the chime coils were bad and one pop bumper coil. 20150718_155410.jpg 20150716_064256.jpg 20150718_155422.jpgI tested the flipper coils and even though they tested fine, I am going to replace them with new ones.

Here are the new coils and I replaced them all before going with more testing.20150718_155600.jpg

Moving to the backbox, I used Clay's repair guide from years back to check the rectifier board and tested all voltages. I also used the owner's manual to make sure all the fuses were the correct values. I plan on doing the voltage mod to the rectifier board, but for now since the voltages check out, I will proceed.

All the other boards (MPU board, Solenoid Driver/Voltage Regulator board, Lamp Driver board) in the backbox were either really corroded or questionable, So I made the decision that since the machine might be going to someone who may not know anything about pinball repair, that I should give them the most reliable unit I can.

I emailed Alltek Systems as I have purchased their boards in the past and have found them very reliable. I asked for a donation to help keep the cost down on the game. Dave from Alltek was very happy to see what he could do for me. Two weeks later, I received a package from Alltek. Boy was I surprised to see all the boards that I needed to make this machine jump up and go.

Using Dave's instructions, I rechecked the voltages before installing all the boards. I installed the Ultimate Solenoid Driver Board first and going back to the instructions rechecked the voltages with the LED lights on the driver board.20150718_170123.jpg All checked out well and so I moved on to the MPU.

The Ultimate MPU board got installed next and well as the Ultimate Lamp Driver board 20150718_170417.jpg

Going back to the Alltek instructions, I set the dip switches and checked all the connections before firing up the game.
Here is the end result

With the Alltek boards and by double checking the voltages and replacing bad coils, I was able to get the game to fire up and work. I then was able to find that the flippers were "loktited" in and had no movement. Good thing I ordered flipper rebuilt kits, coils and new flippers.

I also found that some of the player displays were in need of repair. Most look minor, but some have burn spots, so I may just replace them all out with new LED displays. I can repair the others and use for spares in my machines.

So, at this stage of the game, I have the machine running and have ordered all the parts I will need (up to this point). I have also ordered paint for the cabinet as well as Stencils from Pinball Pimp.

I am now ready to take this machine apart and work on the main components and then reassembly.

I decided that the playfield was going to take the longest since I was going to have to do some paint touchups and clear coating. Here are a few quick before shots just to give you an idea of the machine condition. Not bad, just a few minor wear spots and just a dirty playfield with even dirtier plastics.

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As I remove parts, I photograph and document parts and location. All parts are placed in labeled zip up bags and set aside.

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After all the parts are removed, I refer back to VID1900 post on playfield restoration on Pinside. Look for Vid's Guide to Ultimate Playfield Restoration. Once on the thread, I normally sort the thread by Pinside user and that way I can filter and see only posts by VID1900.
I have read the entire thread, but this helps me get to the meat of the provided information.

In preparation for 1st time clearing, I first remove all the mylar from the PF. Since this is an older machine, I use the heat method to remove the mylar. I did quickly try the freeze approach but had no results. I use a heat gun on low and quickly fan back and forth over the mylar. I then use a plastic razor blade and pry under the heated mylar. 20150726_103638.jpg

As soon as I get enough to grab on to, I cut the mylar to give me a pulling handle. I then heat and gently pull on the mylar till it is removed.20150726_104018.jpg

I then use the flour and alcohol method to remove the left over glue. I rub the flour into the glue, pat it down to embed it, then use my fingers dipped in alcohol to wet the flour. I then use my fingers to rub the mixture into crumbs that can be removed. I do this several times till the glue is gone. Sometimes I will use the plastic razor blade to do a final cleanup on the mylar glue. 20150726_104025.jpg

After that , I wipe down all the mylar spots with alcohol and maybe sometimes a little Goo Gone to make sure all the residue is gone.20150726_111539.jpg

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Now with all the glue gone and all the parts removed, I moved on to using Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and alcohol to try and remove ball swirls.20150802_101047.jpg

After that I cleaned up all holes with either sandpaper or my dremel to remove any wax in those areas. After taping up holes and then scanning the entire playfield, I am ready to prep this for my first light coat of clear.20150802_101053.jpg

I am lucky to have a friend who owns an auto body shop in town. I get my clear from him to do my prep fills and then I take my playfields to him for my first 2 light coats of clear and my finals coats as well. He does very nice work and always listens to my nit picky suggestions whenever I pick up a playfield. He is quite excited when I get one done, cause I let him play the game after it is restored.

Here is the playfield with the inserts filled with clear. Off to the body shop for light clearcoating.
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Well I took the playfield to the auto body Friday morning and it was ready for pickup Sunday morning. My guy did a couple of light coats and put it under the lamps to cure. Here it is on my porch.20150816_102325.jpg20150816_102338.jpg20150816_102332.jpg

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While I was waiting for the auto body place to get the playfield clear coated, I opened up Photoshop on my PC and started cleaning up the Playfield scans I did earlier. I have photoshop down to a routine that it only took me a day or two to finish all the touchups on the parts I wanted to make decals for. Here are some pics of before and after on my touch-ups.
131415.png Scan of 3 balls in the bottom center of the playfield.
131415.jpg "FIXED" scan of the same 3 balls.
bounus.png Original scan of Super Bonus
center layers.jpg "FIXED"

Now with the playfield back in my workroom, I need to sand it level. You see earlier I had put some clear into the cupped inserts and filled any nicks with clear as well. I always over fill so that i can sand them down to meet the light coats that the auto body sprayed. Sanding also allows me to see any more "low" spots or areas that maybe I didn't fill up quite well.
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Here is a shot of a nick that I filled with clear before the playfield got 2 coats. It is higher than the clear my guy applied. A quick run over with 800 grit sandpaper shows the raised area.
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After a little sanding and it is almost level with the rest of the clear.
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Thanks for the kind words.

I have been away from the playfield, but hope to get back on it soon. Trying to enjoy the rest of this summer before it turns to fall weather.

My hope is to get the cabinet sanded outside in the next couple weeks, so that all the dirty hazardous work is done and out of the way.

Slim64 said:

Whose stencils do you plan to use?

For the cabinet artwork, I have purchased a set of stencils from Pinball Pimp. Jeff was kind enough to sell me a set at a discounted price. I have never used his stencils before, but they look to be of good quality.

In the past I have used Twisted Pins and before then I created my own.

For the Triple Strike, I asked Twisted Pins to create a custom set for me and they were happy to accommodate me.

I used a friend who has a paint booth to paint the Triple Strike, but my friend had never done stencils before and he ran into issues.
This time I will do the spray painting myself.

I did a Playboy with stencils I got off ebay and had no issues.

Hope that helps.
Mike

Well Folks spend the last 3 days sanding clearcoat and adding more clearcoat to inserts. No pics as this is boring.

Sorry Guys...Still filling inserts and sanding. Getting close to done and then I will post pics of my air brushing and decal work.

Well It's been a month since I posted anything. I got all the inserts leveled and am about to start airbrushing. I seem to have hit a snag as I need to repaint the entire green field on the playfield. I need to turn my scans of the playfield into images that I can sent to a local shop in town to create stencils that I can place over areas that I don't want green. It seems very daunting and I can't decide to paint over some lettering and then use decals to replace them.
I am also deciding if I want to purchase a cutter plotter to do the stencils myself. The local shop in town is new to this and if something is not right, I have to send it back to them to fix. A lot of work for both of us.
I have enough cash to get a 15" US Cutter unit with stepper motor but I have heard that it will cut lettering down to 1/4 inch and If I got a servo unit, I can get the lettering cut to 1/8 inch.
The servo unit is way out of my price range, so now I am stuck. I think I will end up biting the bullet and get the steeper unit. But on the other hand.....

Here is a pic of the playfield with all the inserts leveled and now ready for paint. If you zoom in, you can see how the ball swirls have darkened the green. playfield.jpg

While waiting on myself to pull the trigger on a cutter, I decided to work on the shooter lane. Here it is before.20150920_161154.jpg
And here it is after painting and drying it.20150920_174828.jpg
I am not happy with the point or the two sides. I retaped it and redid it. I will post a pic shortly.

Now back to me deciding on to purchase a cutter or not.

Things can start moving forward again. I bought a Cutter Plotter from US Cutter after reviewing a lot of posts on using stencils and what machine is best for what job.

I decided on the USCutter SC Series 25" Vinyl Cutter w/ Sure Cuts A Lot Pro Design & Cut Software. It was a refurb and it was worth the price.SC631-SCALPRO.jpg

The Learning curve for the software and operation of the machine was about medium in difficulty just because there was so much to wade through and I wanted to just jump in and cut something. Several practice cuts on paper and I was ready.

I also ordered a roll of GreenStar Layflat Classic Transfer Tape - Medium tack and ORAMASK 813 Paint Mask Stencil. I am glad I ordered a small amount as I think I will change to ORAMASK 811 and a clear tape as it is hard to see the playfield through the paper tape.
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Since I am really now just concerned about the green on the playfield I am living with the paper tape and it's see through limitations.
I mist the playfield and then mist the tape and stencils. I lay it down into position as best as I can. 20151012_150530.jpg

When I pull up a section, I have some wiggle room to readjust the stencils to fix correctly. After I am happy with placement, I blot up excess water with a soft towel and smooth the stencils if needed. I let that section dry and go print another section of the playfield.
I had purchased the cutter with the intent of printing the whole playfield at one time, but now I can see that I would just frustrate myself and waste expensive material if I tried to tackle something that big right up front.20151012_150536.jpg

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Took a quick break to go to Pinball Expo. Loved seeing all the new stuff and first time stop at Pinball Life Party. Wish I had more time to meet Zitt and a couple of others that I have talked to on Pinside. I had to do a quick 1 hour tour of the vendor and game area, so I missed Star Trek Mirror from Zitt. Really wanted to see that. I got pulled away to meet my son's new girlfriend (nice gal) and then I had to come home early on Saturday.

At home, I plowed back into the stencils and made some headway. I also honed my skills a little better and things moved quickly.20151017_171200.jpg

I was going to do decals for the lettering and maybe have to use "what's my font?", but the cutter seems to handle the lettering well and I have lots of patience, that I applied stencils over the letters as well. We will see how it does after airbrushing.

Tiny little guys
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Now to place them just right
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In place
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Done
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BJM-Maxx said:

I am curious, are you painting the green around the letters? You have stencils for the letters, would it not be easier to do the green and then replacing the letters using your stencil in reverse?

I am trying something new (for me at least). I want to see if I can airbrush and preserve all the details that I can. The proper way to do this would be to paint over the letters and apply a water slide decal. I may end up doing this, if it looks like crap.

At the end of my stencil placement. Here is a final pic with paper covering in preparation for paint.
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Now for me matching paint to start this event, I am not too good at paint matching. I have tried the "wifey Please match this color for me" to no avail. She says I normally just color match it anyways after I complain that she is not quite on target.

After some web searching I found that the airbrush paint company I use "Golden Fluid Acrylics" has on their website a paint matching app which uses uploaded images to match colors.

I brought in a picture with a good area of non damaged color and looked at the results. The first click on an area on the pic show a pretty good match. I tried a couple more spots and got similar results. I decided to go with the first match and will be able to adjust the lightness or darkness from there. So off to Dick Blick and buy the paint.

Zitt said:

Sorry you didn't get to play the Mirror Universe.... you'll just have to come to TPF to play it in March.

Thinking I might just do that. Would be a good example to compare with Expo. And I can tell the wife trip would be a good birthday gift for me.

Zitt said:

packie, In general - TPF is nothing like Expo.
Don't come expecting "industry centric" seminars. They're are seminars... just no $60 price tag.
Do come expecting to play lots of machines - the free play area is huge. Grows every year.
Do come expecting to socialize... people are generally approachable and very willing to talk shop.

Sounds like the kind of event I was hoping would be offered here. Dates are now locked into my calendar.
So now I have Texas and Milwaukee for good gaming fun!

Using the Golden Paints Image matcher found on their website (http://www.goldenpaints.com/mixer), I was able to get a great match on the first try. I used pipettes for each color and measured the amounts of paint into my airbrush bottle. I mixed the paint by hand and loaded the airbrush. A little testing and I was on my way to painting. 20151107_151513.jpg
Wow This is a lot of airbrushing to cover this!20151107_151511.jpg20151107_151515.jpg

Done! My finger is sore and my air compressor needs a nap. Time to heat lock in the paint.20151107_151504.jpg

I decided to heat lock the paint before I removed the stencils. I was hoping that the stencils would not super stick from the heat as the material I am using has a stronger tack than what most others are using. I need to switch but not right now.

After heat locking, I started on the outside of the playfield and started to remove my stencils. My first mistake was using a pointed end xacto blade to remove the stencils. The point would nick the clearcoat and the blade just did not pull up enough stencil to grab.

I switched to a flat paddle shaped xacto blade which worked great. I was able to slide the blade under the stencil and then lift the blade which allowed me to pull on the stencil. Slow but sure the stencils come off and I think we have a winner. I was really impressed with the UScutter on the letters that it cut out as they came out great looking. I am still planning on using waterslide decals on most of them, it was more of an experiment.
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I just had to find some before pics to show my progress.

Before
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After
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After
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Well things are moving again. I took the playfield to my guy to clearcoat it. I wanted to do this to lock the green before I shot the white paint and applied the decals. I will do both in one step as the decals will not be applied to anything that I airbrush white. After the Playfield is clearcoated that last time, I can smooth out the finish and start rebuilding the Playfield top. My only problem will be that I need the clearcoat to rest for 30 days to harden before the final smoothing and before I can rebuild it. Good thing is that durning the month of down time I can get the cabinet ready. Goal is to have it all completed by Jan 1st. It will then go on display in our student center at the high school. Hope is that folks will see it during home basketball games and will buy araffle ticket to win it.

Here are couple pics of the playfield after clear was applied over the green.
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Ok all back to the playfield after a short period to let the clear set up. I sanded the surface with 1000 grit wet sandpaper and started to tape off areas.20151206_091602.jpg

I applied white paint and I did a bozo no no and sprayed it a little too thick without heat setting layers. I was able to fix my mistakes, but I have to remember to take it slow.20151206_091612.jpg

Here we have a pic close up of the white with stencil material and paper removed. 20151206_092607.jpg

Here is a pic of the entire playfield, I am thinking i should have toned down the white. I am hoping the decals will brighten the rest of the playfield. 20151206_094850.jpg

Damn ! Do you think I should start again? I was hoping most of the white will be covered by plastics.

Well seems I have run into a "Mike is too picky" problem. I made decals for all the areas I want to repair. Some I did with white water slide decals and some on clear paper. Since some of the areas need white for the letterings, I made the decals on white paper. Problem is that I can't seem to cut them close enough to hide the white trim. Some of decals I cut into the black keylines. Problem with that is that the toner crumbles and now the edges look choppy. If I use the clear decals on non white ink areas the colors are not vivid enough.

I know that the best way would be to airbrush white over the area where the decal is going and use clear decals over them. This would require more time and I would have to clear over the white before laying down the decals. I also checked dry transfer decals and the cost is way way too much.

On a good note, I checked pinside and there are some folks who may be able to help me. I have contacted some of them and I hope to hear back soon. If anyone has any ideas for me, please let me know.
Thanks
Mike