Tearing down the lower playfield

I have to say, though I am nowhere near done yet, this playfield swap is progressing much faster and easier than I anticipated.  Of course, that means I just jinxed myself by admitting that, but hey..... what are friends for?  In fact, It's going so well that I've fallen behind dreadfully with blog updates about it.


Here's where it stood a few days ago, after I took the playfield out.  It's just so much easier to work outside the machine.  I wish I had a rotisserie,  but I don't.  Not that I feel it's hampering me too much.   Taking things apart tends to be the easy portion of the job,  it's putting it back together where things get tricky.  But if you're careful in the dis-assembly portion, it will make re-assembly much easier.  Particularly when dealing with such a dense wiring harness and so many components.  This stuff can drive you insane if you have all the parts on your floor, with no idea where they go.   Don't let that happen!



Pinball players are like Orge's.   Meaning, they're like Onion's.  They're made of layers (see the clever reference in there? No? Rent "Shrek").   First to come off was everything on the upper playfield.  I took a lot of detail photos of this section,  and have a number of labled sandwich bags for parts coming off of different sections.  Most of them are pretty obvious where they will go back on, but not all of them.  Dirty, eh?  After this photo, I removed the upper playfield and set it aside still mostly populated.  This allows me to work in sections, less confusion of parts piles/bags getting intermingled.



Then attention went to the backside.  Pretty daunting at first, but again.... layers.  They are three distinctly separate wiring harnesses on here. Solenoids, Switches and Lamps.   Just do one at a time, and take a lot of photos, things won't be so hard after all.



Here's with the solenoid harness removed.  I left as many assemblies attached to the harness as possible, particularly coil brackets.  The flippers and drop target banks are just too big though to do this. They stay in place and are separated from the harness.



Then with the switches removed,  and only the lamp harness remaining.  At this point I started pulling the bigger assemblies off too, and setting them aside separately.



Labels, Labels, Labels.  Don't skimp on labels on everything as you take it apart.  Every single switch, solenoid or lamp got a label to tell me where it came from and what it did.  They don't have to be fancy, but they have to be accurate.  All the switch stacks also got zip-tied while they were apart.  In normal handling they should stay together fairly well, but with all the tugging and moving around of the whole harness, it's possible they can get split into their separate parts. 



While it's apart, I'm finding all sorts of lovely little workmanship underneath.  I knew most of this was there, but it's just not as easy to work on it with the playfield in the machine.  Stuff like this is going to get corrected while it's out.  Spot all the problems yet?   I know, the picture sucks.... too much depth to it for a good focus.  But that diode was cut at some point, and had some bare braided wire soldered in place of the original lead.  But also check out the wire colors.  That green/yellow wire should connect to every switch on the bank,  but instead it only goes to one switch and a yellow wire daisy chains to the others.  Solid yellow is supposed to be used only for the GI lighting.  I'll be replacing this with the correctly colored wires, and putting in a new diode.