Playfield swap has begun.

And the long difficult road of a playfield swap has begun on my beloved Black Knight machine.  I spent a couple of hours today dismantling the old playfield,  which involved a lot of time taking photographs and carefully bagging the hardware in such a manner that it will be easy to install it all again later.  I'm not really going to waste your and my time with the disassembly phase, except perhaps an occasional dramatic photo, but what I will be showing in decent detail is the parts cleanup and re-assembly of it all.

I started this on the new playfield by laying the bare wiring for the GI lights.  I could have probably transferred over the old wire, but it's cheap stuff and just easier to buy new.   I chose to go with an 18 gauge braided copper.  Compared to the original it is the same size,  but a different color and not as flexible.  I'm not sure if the original was a different material, aluminum wiring was still popular at the time, but the old stuff is definitely more flexible.  Perhaps it was annealed and plated?  Either way, I layed the new down as close as I could to the original.

You can see some of the differences between the original Williams playfield and the new one from CPR in this photo too.  With the CPR playfield holes for the inserts are much larger and the cuts much cleaner.  It's particularly noticeable in the depression for the magnet coil.  I followed as closely as I could to match the wiring pattern on a spare playfield that I have on hand,  but it's not exact.  The lack of flexibility in the new wire definitely hampered me here.

The tools for this are pretty simple and inexpensive, not a tough job at all.  Other than the wire, all you need is a wire cutter and a stapler.  Just take your time, and you shouldn't have any problems.  You'll notice though I don't have any lamp sockets here yet.  They're on order as of today, I'll be replacing all the GI sockets with brand new.  They have been particularly problematic for me on this machine, while the matrix lamps haven't given me many problems at all.   Since these are the more difficult ones to replace too, it just makes sense to swap all new ones in.   I already run LED lights for all these,  so I'll just swap over the existing LED's.

And here is the whole lower playfield with the wiring in place.  I don't have much room to work with, so I'm doing this on top of the machine,  with some bubble wrap to protect the playfield. 

While I had the stapler out, I took care of something else that's always bugged me.  There are two controlled lamps behind the backglass that didn't have light shields around them.  A local pinhead recently parted out a machine and had a couple light shields to spare, so they ended up on my machine.  Again, easy stuff, just staple them right on.