Main playfield, bottomside

This was the part that I was most daunted by, and ironically it was almost totally uneventful.  Re-assembly underneath the main playfield.  It's a combination of Williams assembly technique, with my careful documentation and labeling, that made this so easy.  Everything pretty much drops right into place.

There are a couple of important things to remember though if you do this.  One is to pre-drill all the screwholes,  otherwise you WILL start splintering the surface of the playfield.  But extremely careful, otherwise you might pop the drill out through the surface of the playfield.  Set your drill depth properly,  either by adjusting how much of the bit extends out of the chuck, or get a depth stop gauge.   Don't try to eyeball it, it's real easy to goof and go too deep. And if you drill too deeply, you just ruined a $500 to $1,000 playfield. 

That brings me to the next thing that I find to be critical here.  Use the right tools!  Spend the extra money on a good nut-driver for all the hex head screws.  Use a good phillips head screwdriver to prevent stripping the heads.  If you ever have a moment that you're thinking "I wish I had...." and it's not an expensive tool,  stop and go get one.   Don't ruin an expensive and time consuming project because you don't want to spend $3.00 for the right sized drill bit. 

Like disassembling, reassembling is essentially just layers of stuff.  First layer is the GI lighting that I showed in an earlier post.  This is also the perfect time to install any T-nuts that you need,  linkages for the kickout holes, flipper assemblies,  and here I've also installed the ball trough and the base plate for its switches. Actually, I have a lot of the switch wireforms installed here, as they are separate from the actual leaf switches.   I have the soldering iron out for soldering in the sockets for the GI lights as well as some of the shorter wire lengths for it.



Then the switch harness and switches were installed.  Almost all the switches are very intuitive as to where they go, a few needed the photos and labels just to figure out the exact placement.  I forgot to mention earlier, all the major mechanical assemblies were cleaned up prior to re-install.  The really bad ones took a trip in the bead blaster to really clean them up.  I know they aren't perfect, I could have gone crazy and sent them all out to be stripped and re-plated.  I didn't really consider it necessary though, I just wanted them to be significantly cleaner than they already were.  If you need new sleeves or any parts, this is a great time to do it, while everything is easily accessible.  I didn't notice anything that needed replacement at the moment.  It did need some good cleanup work on the drop targets though, as I mentioned in the previous post.



Then came the lamp harness.  This one was much more involved than the switch harness, mostly because of the big bracket assemblies for the sword lights.  Right now I still have all the incandescent lamps in place, they will be getting LED's eventually,  but I just didn't want to wait.  Replacing the lamps isn't too hard thankfully, and I doubt it will even get powered up with the current lamps in place.  Didn't need much else other than a cleaning and to be re-installed. 



Then came the solenoid harness.  These needed a lot of re-soldering for the coils.  Some nasty, crappy, questionable workmanship in them.  Particularly the coil wiring for the flippers.  I should have re-done that when I rebuilt the flippers a few months back, but I didn't because of how hard it was to get at them.  But with the playfield out of the machine and easy to access, it's no problem at all.  Just a quickie solder removal with the Hakko 808,  clean up the wire ends, and resolder.  All the wiring hold-downs went back on now too.  



This all took a fraction of the time I expected it too.  All the work with the labels and zip ties really paid off during this stage. Having access to a bead blaster was also a huge time and labor saving advantage.  I could have really gone nuts and replaced all the lamp sockets, coil sleeves, and leaf switches here too.  But that's a lot of money and a huge amount of labor,  especially considering that they are all working just fine.   If any problems come up in the future, I'll replace what needs to be replaced, but it's just silly to randomly replace everything without a need.