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Nervous, apprehensive, worried and absolutely shitting myself was the way to describe how I was feeling about the task I had chosen to take on this time, I have mentioned already that I am not real comfortable with the electronics of a pinball machine and here I was about to attempt a playfield swap that would, on the surface, appear to involve a lot of mucking around with the coils, switches, target assemblies, GI illumination and about eleventy billion cables that laid underneath this Time Warp playfield. Anyway, I look at it this way.........if I screw it up , then everything is eventually fixable anyway AND I may learn something along the way if I do actually do this correctly. So I will document how I went about this task, you will eventually learn if I did this correctly or not by reading all of the following pages, if it all works out OK, then you can follow my lead, however I must state that I am NO expert in this area, so I will also document if I feel I did anything wrong.
I will probably spread this playfield swap over half a dozen pages simply to try and show as many pictures as I possibly can ( web space permitting) . I have done a lot of question asking on RGP and I do actually have a "plan" of sorts that I have thought about for months before actually stripping this playfield. I am not at all worried about the top of the playfield as I have done those many times before on my other playfield restores ( although I have never removed the bumpers before ). You can see a few shots on this page of the original playfield stripped of most the parts and a shot of the New Old Stock Time Warp playfield that I managed to get my hands on in 2004 from Kirk Weaver in the USA.
These are the main worn area's that I have been pointing out, maybe I could have cleaned it and patched it but it had gone through the red, green and black area's and the thing really was filthy and I think whoever cut the mylar sheet for this must have had 2 dozen beers before he got to work on this piece as it was jagged all over the place as can be seen at the bottom of this shot about an inch under the 3X. Most of the mylar edges were like that ALL over the machine. If this playfield did not have the wear spots near the flippers and the return lanes I would probably not have bothered with a full PF swap as, believe it or not, the images of this filthy old playfield that you see here probably would have come up near new by using my normal cleaning methods I have done on all of my other playfields so far. At the bottom of this page I will list the order in which I plan to do things, based on the limited info I have found on the net and the MANY answers I received from the helpful people on the RGP site.
And this is it, the NOS playfield that I picked up for US $75.00.
Hopefully soon it will be populated with all the cleaned parts ( and some new parts ) from the old TW playfield. I was lucky that this NOS playfield has pre punched holes on the top and undersides to help work out where things go, I am unsure if they are all like that. Anyway, read on to see what I plan to do and how I go about it. Due to a lack of info on the net on this subject I will try and cover it in as much detail as I possibly can.
Some of this will seem blatantly obvious but I want to cover everything, I will show pictures of most of these points on the following pages as the swap progresses, this is simply a summary. * Strip the top of the old Playfield. * Bag EVERYTHING in it's own bag from certain area's of the top of the Playfield. * Cut and label the wires going through to the kick-out coil under the apron. * Cut wires to Pop Bumper lamp holders and mark both the playfields, mark the old one where you cut the wire from and label under the new Playfield where the point is that the wire will end up being re-soldered to, then remove the Pop bumpers and bag them as well. * Label all other switches that stick up through the playfield like the slingshots, stand up targets and drop bank target switches, once labeled you can remove the screws and let the switches fall and sit under the old playfield and you should put the screws that held the switch brackets in place into their holes in the new Playfield as a holding spot for them. * Label just about EVERYTHING on the underside of the Playfield, including all the rollover switches, coils, coils switches and lamp holders and any wires that I have to cut to re-solder later. * Label those EXACT same blank spots on the underside of the new Playfield so that you know exactly where your labeled switch, lamp holder etc is to sit when it is moved to it's new home. * Cable tie the main harness in many more places than what it is currently cable tied to give it more "body" when you eventually move it all. * Remove and clean any playfield parts that are not part of the main wiring harness and that my need to be in place on the new Playfield before the wiring harness comes across. These include the drain and return lane switch activators, the eject hole plastic disc that the ball sits in and the flipper bushing shafts and screws. * I am probably going to colour code certain screws with a dot of coloured paint on the screw and then a matching dot of paint in the new Playfields pre punched screw hole, as an example - I will mark all the screws that hold the target assemblies in place with a green dot of paint and then put a green dot of paint in the screw holes for them on the underside of the new Playfield and then use other colours for other main parts of the underside of the playfield. * Somehow remove all those hundreds of staples that hold the GI lighting in place to the underside of the playfield without damaging it - this is the part I am REALLY worried about doing, removing it safely and THEN getting it all stapled down on the underside of the new Playfield without breaking it and making sure it doesn't touch ANYTHING else that is metal as that would probably lead to grounding issues. I am considering drawing a line on the new Playfield that runs where the light string runs so I have a map to tie it down to. * Re-staple all the GI wiring down into place and then re-solder all the places that I had to cut it from the main wiring harness * Move the entire harness including target assemblies, all switches and all that damn wiring and bulbs onto a piece of cardboard, hopefully retaining the main basic shape of the harness as we move it, then placing that piece of cardboard above the upturned new Playfield and sliding it out while everything starts to land on the new playfield in close proximity to where it belongs ( like that's gonna happen ! ). Anyway, that's the plan, read on using the links below to go to my next page in order.
Playfield Swap 2 Playfield Swap 3 Playfield Swap 4 Playfield Swap 5 Playfield Swap 6
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