Over the last few weekends, I’ve undertaken a new pinball project – swapping the playfield in my Funhouse, Pat Lawlor’s awesome game from 1990. My game was playing well, but definitely wasn’t the prettiest Funhouse out there. The clock inserts in the center of the playfield, in particular, were particularly worn:

I have a brand new reproduction playfield from Mirco to swap in, so away we go with the teardown! Here is a shot a bit closer in after removing the ramps and some plastics:

Notice how beat up the light inserts are. Also notice the ball lock mechanism – underneath the playfiled it’s actually a flipper mech! Very clever to re-use the mech and simply design a new top side part that can release one ball at a time by rotating (like a flipper rotates). Finally I was a bit surprised to see green tape under the ramp flaps. I’ve heard this came from the factory, but it’s not something I had ever seen before. Interesting!

Like I did with Space Shuttle, every single part I removed had its hardware individually bagged and cataloged. I filled about 60 ziplock sandwich bags of hardware on the top side alone. After the topside was mostly disassembled, I removed the playfield from the game and installed it on my rotisserie.

The playfield is now ready to get flipped over to the backside. At that point, my technique is to start on the new playfield and transfer parts as much as possible directly from the old to new playfield. The first thing to go in on the new playfield are the T-nuts and pop bumper bracket screws, because these parts are much more easily installed with an otherwise blank/empty playfield.

A luxury afforded to me this time was the use of a second playfield rotisserie! I borrowed my friend Marc’s who wasn’t using his at the time. It’s definitely not a must-have for a playfield swap, but I’d call it a very nice to have! Here is the new playfield installed on the second rotisserie. So shiny!

Then both playfields get rotated to the backside, and the transfer of parts continues. After the T-nuts and pop screws, I moved on to wiring harness hangers, other mech brackets, and the light boards. As I’m doing this, every switch and light is also being unscrewed from the old playfield.

At the end of the disassembly on the bottom side, the wiring harness is the only thing left and only gravity is keeping it on the playfield 🙂 I used the same technique as before of sliding in some cardboard pieces to pick up the wiring harness and move it over to the new playfield. Everything then gets screwed back in and mechs are rebuilt. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the flipper return springs to the newer WPC fliptronics style, but everything else about the flippers is stock.

Once everything is screwed back in on the new playfield bottom side, the rotisserie once again rotates back to the topside where re-assembly can start there!

Here is where all the time taken to meticulously catalogue hardware and take photos pays off. It’s pretty fast to take things apart, but going slow and taking a lot of notes makes it way easier at this phase.

The game got all new ramps and plastics, too, but this means some work re-riveting plastics attached to metal bits (which must be re-used). Of all the parts top-side, the step ramp took by far the longest to do – lots of stuff to transfer over! And although very little soldering was needed on this project, the step ramp switch wires are run through small holes and the only way to transfer them to the new ramp was to unsolder & re-solder.

Here’s the new playfield almost complete, just a few parts to go!

The playfield then went back into the cabinet and I went over all the solenoid lugs to make sure everything was clean and nothing was bent in a way that would create a short circuit. I plugged it in and powered the game on – no smoke, hooray! A few adjustments to switches were definitely needed, but fairly quickly the game was playable again, and plays better than ever.

This was my second playfield swap and it definitely went way faster than the first. It’s all known territory at this point, so way less time was spent thinking about how to do it and time spent doing it was very productive. The project took me about three weekends plus a few week nights here and there.

More photos of the completed game can be found here.