space shuttle

    Some friends and I made an unwise decision to purchase a broken pinball machine. After paying far more than its value, we brought it home only to discover that the machine had actually been on fire... possibly multiple times. This page documents some pictures in our (nearly successful!) effort to restore it to working condition. I may add more details later, but for now just pictures will suffice.

Here is our victim, loaded into the back of our rented minivan.


A first look at the machine after we got it home. The CPU board is removed here and you can see a burn mark!


The playfield is in really poor condition.


A closer look at the burn mark. What happened? Did the owners notice when the machine caught fire?


Given the state of the rest of the machine the power supply board looks quite clean.


Most of the lights were dead---this is the machine in its powered on state. Only the general illumination lamps came on; absolutely no indication of the CPU doing anything useful at all.


However, the machine did have one important use despite its poor condition---a place for naps.


Most of the backboard LEDs were dead, and we later found that 3 of the 5 score displays were also dead, which we replaced with a Pinscore device.


The replaced LEDs look a lot better (although at the point this was taken, it did nothing more than just turn these lights on...).


The backboard glass is the only thing on the entire machine that was in good condition.


As we started debugging the CPU board, this was a typical thing that we encountered---completely destroyed through holes, bad traces, you name it.


Luckily for us, we were equipped with a period-appropriate logic analyzer, which was immensely useful in debugging the fact that the clock line didn't actually connect to half the chips, a bunch of the data lines were just plain busted, and finding more than 10 bad chips that needed replacement.


(This is a video; click to watch.) The game behaved strangely, when we could get it to turn on. It wasn't clear what state the game was in.


With the new Pinscore unit installed, we get numbers displayed. But there is still some debugging to do of the display; it is not all displaying correctly...


After many weekends of debugging the CPU board we finally got it to properly play a game. Here is a picture of that game---the only game the machine has played in probably very many years.


(This is a video; click to watch.) Here is a video of that first game.


(This is a video; click to watch.) The speech board actually worked as-is---no debugging needed. Once we got the main CPU board's speaker system working, that is. Also, note the huge number of bodge wires on the CPU board. It looks even worse on the backside. I will have to get a better picture at some point.


The point of a pinball machine is not to have fun playing it, so, satisfied that it could work correctly, we immediately started disassembling the playfield for restoration.


This shows just how awful the playfield condition was up by the jet bumpers. Many of the rubbers were broken also, and basically every plastic playfield piece was either warped, cracked, or broken.


Here's a picture of the underside of the table during disassembly. Note that the solenoids are already removed---and there is no picture of where they went before. Those missing pictures would come back to haunt us later...


Soon, everything was removed from the playfield, allowing us to sand and prepare for installation of an overlay.


After sanding with an orbital sander, we polished each of the inserts up to 2000 grit.


At 2000 grit, the inserts look (and feel) very shiny.


Another shot of the sanded playfield.


To install the overlay, we first taped it to the playfield after aligning it.


After installation (which took about 15 minutes) the playfield now looks usable again. Our job here wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good.


After partial playfield reassembly. Lots of things to still put together, but all the plastics are new, all the rubbers are new, the playfield is new, and some of the standup targets are new also.


You can see our misalignment of the overlay here.


Unfortunately we think something is shorting on the CPU board (not surprising really) and causes the machine to not boot properly. It still at least lights up for now though, which is nice, and it looks a lot better than it used to.