Upper playfield wiring

I should have had this entry done a couple of days ago, but something came up to bite me in the ass.  I let my mess get ahead of me, and couldn't find a pair of critical parts, which delayed me until they were located.  But that has thankfully been rectified, and work progressed nicely from that point.

Like the lower playfield, the upper is layers of sub-harnesses and components.  Strip them off, clean them up, re-install in the reverse order.  Make corrections as needed.  Here is that first layer of individual assemblies, such as the flippers and upper ball trough.  There isn't any bare braiding here for the GI lights,  there isn't much in the way of GI lights at all to be precise.  T-nuts are installed,  and as odd as it sounds, the pop bumper assembly is installed on the topside of the playfield too.

This is a closeup of the pop bumper parts that protrude under the playfield.  The short screws are the solenoid bracket moutns, the long screws are part of the actuator rin, the legs that are bent out to the side are for the light socket, and the center black pin is the skirt.  All of these are needed by the time I'm done with the three harnesses.

Then comes the switch harness.  Or most of it anyway,  the switch for the pop bumper is laying loose here, due to the complexity of that switch stack, which is part of the switch and solenoid harnesses.  Either way, far less here than the lower playfield.

This area got a bit complex due to the parts density, it's the upper ball trough.  I also figured that folks would be interested in seeing the factory conversion for the microswitch set.  I did make a slight change here though.  The conversion set used yellow for everything that needed a jumper wire,  but yellow should be for the GI lights, so I swapped it for the correct green/blue striped wire.  This kit is so much easier to adjust.

Second harness is the lamp harness.  Not much at all compared to the lower playfield lamp harness. Only a dozen lamps here. 

Then the solenoid harness gets added in.  This amps up the difficulty level, due to that pop bumper.  It's a very tricky assembly to assemble, and even tougher to adjust.  This is where I got stuck for a few days,  I couldn't find one of the parts for the drop target assemblies, and had to wait until I found it.

Then comes the moment of truth,  re-attaching the two playfield halves.  It's a big moment here, as now I can drop the whole playfield back into the machine.  This clears up a huge amount of stuff clogging up my whole gameroom,  plus it means I can move to re-assembling the playfield finally. It felt really good to get to this point,  it's all gravy from here on. 

So ends the most complicated and daunting portion of this playfield swap.  It went a lot faster and easier than I expected.  Like I mentioned in the lower playfield entry,  taking your time to photograph and label everything makes life a lot easier.  Then you can just take it one switch at a time, one lamp at a time, and one solenoid at a time.  Next thing you know, you're done. 

The single most annoying part of all this? The pop bumper. It's a dense little assembly that is tough to access, and tougher to adjust.  I can only imagine how annoying it can be on a machine with a 3 bumper setup.... or Firepower with 4 of them.  You really get a good feel for how complicated and time intensive these machines must have been to assemble in a factory setting.  A rotisserie would have made life a lot easier, but I'm on a budget and don't have the space for it either.

Next step, assembling the upper playfield.  I'm actually almost done with it already, compared to this it's been taking almost no time at all.