The Addams Family Pinball

As reported in an earlier post (https://taf.gozzled.com/?p=1814) one fault originally with the pinball machine was that the strobe wasn’t working. As is common on an AFM, the legs of the Trigger Coil (which are very thin) had broken off. Instead of repairing this coil I bought a new one from a local electronics store (Conrad) and fitted it. And while I was as it, I replaced the strobe bulb also, which came from the same store. I didn’t know if this was necessary or not, but as the bulbs have a limited lifetime, I thought it couldn’t do any harm:

Completed strobe board and bulb

Fitting the ramps proved to be a challenge today. Whereas the wire ramp, cow ramp and lobster ramp all went on smoothly, the middle ramp proved to be problematic.

There are actually three fixing points for the middle ramp: Firstly the two screws at the entrance to the ramp underneath the ramp flap, a mounting point towards the rear of the ramp, where it sits on top of a pillar and finally the far right where the right wire ramp attaches to the middle ramp. There’s also a cut out in the base of the middle ramp, where it sits over a screw. Well try as I might, I couldn’t get it all to fit. So I started making some adjustments:

Firstly I had to countersink the holes in the plastic where the screws holding the ramp to the playfield under the flap go. To not do this would have meant the screws sticking out thereby holding the flap up. I also had to enlarge the holes in the ramp flap in order to screw the screws into the existing holes:

Enlarged holes in middle ramp flap

In order to get the ramp to avoid the screw, I had to make a new screw hole for the pillar, so that the cut out in the base of the ramp went over the screw. Once I’d finished that though, I couldn’t get the ramp screws back in. So I enlarged the cut out on the base of the ramp so that the ramp could sit over the screw at the back. Having completed this, I noticed that the original screw hole for the post was in the right position, meaning that I had made a second screw hole for the post for nothing!

It turns out, however, that this new hole was in just the right position to hold the rear right flasher cable to the ramp with a cable tie, thereby tidying up the run of the cable. So all’s well that ends well!

Middle ramp in its final resting position

Having successfully used sandpaper to make my lockbar shine (see here) I decided I’d like to do the same with each and every ball-guide on the playfield, which I duly did. However this time I took it down to 1000 grit, just to get that extra “shine”. It took forever. However it would have taken a lot longer, had I decided to take it to a mirror shine (I still wanted the “brushed” look but in a shiny version, if that makes sense.) The results were fantastic. Looking at the ball guides closely, you can see the brush effect, but at an angle, they look mirrored. Fantastic.

Top playfield in progress with the gleaming ball guides in position.

So I went to start attaching the parts to the top of the playfield today and noticed, to my horror, that the automotive clearcoat used was not as hard as I was expecting. Under a couple of the posts I had already attached, the clearcoat had started to wrinkle up:

Clearcoat which has been squashed out from underneath the post

There is nothing I can do about this (apart from loosening the posts to prevent the wrinkling from getting any worse) and also to make sure any other posts aren’t secured as tightly.