Leveled Diner Inserts

Posted on May 12, 2013 by abpinball

My Diner playfield had an issue that is very common with this game – raised inserts in the middle of the playfield. Both the character inserts as well as the DINER inserts had the problem. During play, the inserts would cause the ball to jump around at high speed, and divert the ball along an unnatural path at low speed.

I first removed the insert lamps PCB and moved the flashers aside to gain access to the inserts, then heated them one at a time using my heat gun.

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Then, from the topside, I used some small pieces of poplar wood to press the inserts down by hand. I first used a rubber mallet, but evidently just pressing by hand was enough to push them down to level.

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In the photo above (click for a larger image), I am halfway through the character inserts. I have leveled the Haji and Babs inserts, but Boris and Pepe clearly are raised above the level of the playfield. After repeating the process for all these and the DINER letters, the game plays so much better now! The ball rolls smoothly over the playfield with no jumps, bumps, or deviations. Awesome! 🙂

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Repaired Diner Diverter

Posted on February 19, 2013 by abpinball

I bought a Diner machine at a great price, but it is definitely in need of some work. The first item on my agenda was the diverter up the right ramp – it was completely missing! Suffice it to say the game is not really playable without this diverter. Worse yet is the part (Williams no. B-13348) doesn’t seem to be available at any of the usual pinball parts vendors. When all else fails, sometimes you have to make your own parts! 🙂

I started with the shaft of the diverter, which thankfully was still in the game – only the ball guide part of it was missing. The ball guide was clearly riveted on, as the 0ld rivets were still there on the shaft. I took the shaft to the vertical milling machine at my local TechShop and milled out the rivets. In the photo below, the shaft is in a vise and I’m about halfway done with the milling. The white liquid you see is coolant used during milling to preserve both the life of the cutting tool and to protect the part from heat damage.

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It was pretty easy to make a new ball guide from sheet metal – I simply used cardboard to first create a mock-up, and when I was happy with the shape I traced it and cut it in sheet metal and bent it by hand. Here’s my homemade ball guide (top right) along with the original shaft with rivet holes freshly cleared out (left):

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I used pop rivets to attach the ball guide to the shaft. We’ll see if they hold up – if not, I’ll switch them to solid rivets instead. For now though, the diverter is back in the game and working great! You can see in the two photos below how it moves to control the path of the ball up the ramp.

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Alpha Bravo One Lives! Flippers wired up

Posted on June 5, 2012 by abpinball

Wow, another month with barely any progress! I have too many hobbies I think 🙂

Finally tonight I had time to wire up the flippers. I used Molex connectors so that I can easily disconnect and reconnect the flipper wiring harness from the mechs when I will inevitably move on to whiteboard version 2, 3 and so on… This makes it trivial to transplant everything over. Molex connectors are awesome! With the Molex crimping tool, the connectors are trivial to install and the process is solder-free.

That’s all that was left to being able to operate the flippers on my whiteboard for the first time! 😀

Now I can start actually building my playfield design along with the ramps… Something tells me things are going to get more and more difficult from now on… 🙂

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Preparing to wire flippers

Posted on May 8, 2012 by abpinball

I spent some time tonight getting more familiar with all of the various circuits from the Doctor Who wiring schematics pages. Suffice it to say, the manual and its schematics are priceless when you have a machine completely un-wired 🙂 Then it was on to prepare the wiring harnesses for the flippers on AB1. Thankfully I can simply re-use the harnesses from Doctor Who, at least for the flippers!

During disassembly of Doctor Who, it became pretty clear that its wiring harness was  nicely separated into different bundles by function – one bundle for lights, another for switches and a third for solenoids. Since the flipper solenoids use dedicated wires, it was pretty trivial to separate them out to re-use as-is. The End-Of-Stroke switch wires however were a different story! Even though they are dedicated wires to the circuit and not part of the switch matrix, during manufacturing they were nevertheless bundled together with zip ties with the rest of the switch matrix wires. It was still relatively painless to separate them out – just some zip-ties to cut and then replace once the wires were separated out. Here’s a photo where I am about halfway done. The EOS wiring harness is on the left, and the big jumble of green wires on the right is for the switch matrix. I can already tell the Costco zip-tie mega pack is going to come in handy on this project 🙂

Finally, I spent some time re-connecting all the cabinet wiring to the boards in the backbox. Even with the Doctor Who playfield gone, there are plenty of things to hook up here: the flipper button and other cabinet switches, transformer power, DMD and Fliptronics boards, lights for the backbox and cabinet, etc.

Next time I should be ready to actually wire up the flippers and see if I can play a ball on my blank playfield!

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