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| Williams "Black Knight" pinball restoration. | |
| Restoring and swapping in a different coin door. | |
| Part of my home gameroom plans is to get
all of my machines restored to using quarters or tokens, for a more authentic
arcade feel. As you've already seen on my Galaga page, I take particular pride
in doing these door restorations completely, and making them look their best.
On later EM and early Solid State machines from Williams they used a very
prominant coin door assembly made of brushed stainless steel. While I love the look, they do have one major drawback in that they use a cumbersome and difficult to adjust leaf switch mechanism for the coin switches. Thankfully, Williams agreed with me that there had to be a better way. So rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll just use a better wheel. |
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| As I don't like having a lot of
downtime, I opted to pick up a second coin door to restore. This way I can take
my time and do it right, without having a gaping hole in the front of my
pinball machine. However, I did my research and opted to track down a door from
a Space Shuttle pinball, rather than just grabbing any stainless Williams door
that I came across. It took a while, but I finally did find one that met my criteria. As you can see, it's quite dirty and need of restoration, but it has all the things that I was looking for. From this picture you may notice, under the grime, that there are no major dings, dents or other forms of serious damage. Looks like a regular Williams coin door, right? So why one from Space Shuttle? |
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The backside shows the big reason I
needed one from that particular game. Spot the change that Williams
did? Space Shuttle wasn't a System 7 game, it was a System 9. One of the major changes that Williams did during this era was to start converting over from leaf switches to microswitches. But they also started changing to a different style coin door. Space Shuttle was a unique hybrid in that it retained the older style stainless coin door, but had newer switch brackets and other components that allowed for it to use microswitches instead of leaf switches. Now, I don't know if any other games came with this style door or not, but I did know that Space Shuttle did. So, that's what I tracked down. |
| What are my plans for this one? Tear it
down, clean it up, make it look nice and swap it into my Black Knight. While
the switch types may be different, the wiring isn't, so this will be an easy
swap once done. However, I also plan on removing the mechanism for the coin lockout coil. They had their purpose back in the EM machine days, where it would be easy to get confusd and put coins into a turned off machine, but solid state games don't need this feature. Think of it this way... if it was so necessary, than why was Space Shuttle the last Williams game to have this mechanism in it? None of the other System 9 games had it, nor did any System 11, WPC or Pinball 2000 design. |
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To Be Continued!