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Well I am now at the point of no return, tonight I finally cut the last of the wires that I needed to and started to unscrew and unbolt all the components and switches from the old PF. I had read in a few places that I should slide all of the parts and harness in one big piece onto a piece of cardboard so I did.
As I had read , the harness did hold it's shape pretty well as can be seen in the above photo, the only messy area was up around the bumper coil holders and their respective switch assemblies but I am sure that will sort itself out when I screw them all back into place. I have to now go around and locate all the wires that I have cut and I will strip them and tin them with solder so they are easy to solder to their new spots on the new PF. Then I have to cut out all of the globe holders in the old GI string, about 20 in all, and clean them up and put them down into place in the new PF so that I can then run the new copper GI wiring back in place. I will then be able to "simply" place that harness back on the new PF, solder all the wires back into place and then start to screw everything down.
Each Pop Bumper had 2 wires running off it to complete the GI circuit so I inserted the lamp holder into each bumper and then labeled the bottom of the playfield at each bumper like in the shot above. I then labeled the appropriate wires coming off the harness so that I knew exactly where to re-solder them when the time came. Now that I had the underside of the new PF marked in all of the appropriate spots, it was time to run the copper GI lighting cable. I could only find copper braid so I used it. It worked out fine and was simple to staple into place. I firstly placed all the lamp holders in place and then ran the copper braid along the pencil lines I had drawn previously which meant that the copper wire ran straight over the top of each tab of the lamp holder, I stapled it all down into place and made sure I put staples over the lamp holder tabs so that they would hold their spot when I placed pressure on them inserting the globes later. Obviously I will make sure that no area's of the copper braid make contact with any other metal parts under the playfield like switches, target assembly brackets etc.
You may notice that I placed all of the screws into their appropriate spots on the new PF, I half screwed them into place so it was just a holding spot until the new harness came across. This was a little time consuming both at this stage and later when I had to undo them to then fit the components onto this PF however it made it helped make the swap a very simple task. BIG TIP - Use a low powered cordless screwdriver !! |
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Playfield Swap 6 Playfield Swap 7
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