Alpha Bravo Pinball

Next up in my queue of games to work on was Taxi. Although playing well, cosmetically it was dirty and worn – definitely due for an overhaul! I started breaking down the game in preparation for the installation of a new playfield, ramps and plastics. See below how dirt is ground in to the surface and how the text of inserts is worn out.

After getting the top side completely disassembled, I took the playfield out of the game and on to a makeshift workbench (aka folding table) to start on the bottom. Everything has to come off! And at the same time I put the new playfield on the rotisserie. Prior to this, however, I had spent some time putting a few games on their backs to free up space in the garage. It’s so much easier to work on a project with the space to lay everything out. Here’s a view of the main work area with the old playfield upside down, new playfield on the rotisserie, and workbench just off to the right.

At this point on the old playfield it’s a matter of unscrewing every bracket, switch, and lamp. On the new playfield I started with pop bumper nails, t-nuts, rails, then GI wiring. Once everything is unscrewed from the old playfield, the whole wiring harness gets transferred off and over to a piece of cardboard for the move over to the new playfield:

Games of this era use unshielded bare wire stapled in to the playfield for GI, and you can see I still have one strand left on the old playfield in the photo above. It’s a lot easier to remove once everything else is off the playfield. I transferred that over to the new playfield and patched areas as needed – one advantage of bare wire is you can see broken strands, and given the amount of current going through the wires it’s important to not have partial breaks in the strands. Once installed, I then tested the circuit and made sure every lamp socket was rock solid. So much easier to replace any as needed now rather than on a fully assembled game!

After this it’s pretty much smooth sailing, focusing first on the bottom side and getting the wiring harness transferred over, and then getting every switch, lamp and bracket screwed back in. Once the back side is done, I can finally get to the most fun part of the whole job which is putting new parts on the top side. Here’s a photo mid-way through the top, focusing mostly on posts and ball guides at the rear of the game up to that point:

Note how I have the old playfield (which is now completely bare) nearby as it is really handy to use as a reference for positioning of parts on the new playfield. Although the new playfield has dimples indicating the position of screws and posts, I have found they should be taken with a grain of salt and parts often won’t fit correctly if the holes are drilled blindly on the dimples.

You know you’re near the end when it’s time to test fit the ramps! On Taxi, both of the main ramps and the spin-out (shooter) ramp need to be installed at the same time in order to get the wires snaked correctly through to the bottom side.

These ramps and the spinout are all new reproductions – shiny! One thing that can be tricky about these is that they are made from thicker plastic. It makes them more durable, but it means fitment can be off from the original. On Taxi the biggest problem I had was the Dracula catapult wireform – it fit fine on the original ramp, but my reproduction ramp one of the prongs of the wireform would end up deflecting the ball on the ramp when it shouldn’t. Unfortunately there wasn’t much wiggle room at all with the positioning of either the ramp or the wireform, so after careful consideration I concluded the best approach was cutting away a small section of this wireform. I didn’t get a photo of the “before” unfortunately, but on the below photo you can see the “after” – the metal wireform circled in red was cut down by about 3/8″ in order to not interfere with the ball on the ramp.

Other than that re-assembly went smoothly with everything coming together as on the original game. The game looks transformed with the new playfield and plastics!

With everything re-connected, I flipped the switch “on” for the first time and it fired right up! It really pays to take your time on the bottom side re-build to make sure there are no shorts. Here are a few photos with the game powered on.

I’m quite happy with how this project came out. There’s still some play testing and tweaking of mechs needed, plus it turns out pop bumpers work better when you install the ring-and-rod assemblies on them, but other than that this project is done!

I undertook a new project recently to upgrade my game room to carpet. One of the main reasons, in addition to the great look, was to cut down on the noise – carpet does a much better job of absorbing noise than hardwood.

So, what carpet to get? I didn’t want to use just “plain” carpet – much too boring! I found a manufacturer, Joy Carpets, that specializes in just the right styles for game rooms – their “Neon Lights” line. The next question I had to answer was exactly what to get an how to lay it down on the floor. I wanted the wall-to-wall look, but without nailing it down to the floor which would damage the nice hardwood underneath. The manufacturer put me in touch with a local distributor, French Brothers Flooring America, which was able to custom-order me a rug made with that carpet but sized exactly to my dimensions! I measured up the room, took off an inch (to account for the room likely not being perfectly square, and sent off my order. A couple weeks later it had arrived (along with a grip mat to lay underneath) and I was off to pick it up.

It took me quite a while to get all the games out of the game room, of course, but I then laid it out and it was just what I was hoping for! It looks great and really gives the feeling of wall-to-wall carpet without the permanent installation. Note the ugly un-covered inch by the right wall will be behind the machines and not visible at the end of the day.

Hoping to cut down on the echoing/noise in the game room even further, I took the opportunity of the room being empty to install some foam panels on the wall. They are the cheap 1″ deep ones, certainly not professional grade, but better than nothing and not pricey.

Of course that’s not the end of this project! One of the cool things about the carpet is that the colored dots are UV (black light) reflective. I thought of installing black lights high up in the room, but I really don’t like the idea of staring into UV LEDs/tubes, so I decided instead to mount the lights underneath the games, but pointed down at the carpet. I bought an 8 foot long piece of pine trim at Lowe’s to fabricate light strips – I made five total, one for each game. Each strip has two black light LED strips each plus wiring long enough to reach the back of the machines.

I then fabricated a daisy-chaining wiring harness to connect all five strips to one power supply. Here are all the strips being tested on the wiring harness for the first time:

Finally, I attached the light strips under the games. I didn’t want to make any permanent modifications to the games, of course, and want to be able to easily transfer the lights to a new game if I sell one and get another, so I used 3M damage-free hanging strips to attach these to the games, as well as wire hangers (not seen here) to run the wires to the back of the games.

The light bars are designed to have one strip of LEDs pointed straight down, and the other pointed down towards your feet at a 45 degree angle.

They work great and light up the carpet fabulously! So in the end, not only does the room look amazing, it’s quite a bit quieter too and the games sound better with less echoing!