Restoration of a Fish Tales
Restoration of FishTales
Ok, so I had a few people ask if I’d chronicle the work I’ve done on my fishtales. It’s late at night, I don’t want to write my arcade tracking prog anymore, so here goes..
1) The Arrival. After long discussion with the Op/Former owner of this pin, I have it showing up with NAVL.
The Game come on it’s legs (a big no-no) But, there is a chance that this pin would fall apart without those bolts.
This pin had also conciderable water damage to it’s head. This is not surprising as it came from Rhode Island. I probably would have bartered down on price for this pin if I knew the damage. But that’s spilt milk ;)
2) Playfield shop: The Pin as it was had a huge piece of operator applied mylar on it. This needed to come up before I went much further. I removed the bumpbers and then went to town on the mylar. I tried a few different approaches to this, but ended up going with the upside down compressed air solution. It worked surprisingly well.
You can see the mylar in both of these photos.
Up comes the Mylar. That’s a mighty big piece..
Now, the compressed air is good for removing the mylar, but it leaves behind a nice and sticky residue. Time for Goo Gone
This Stuff takes some work to get up.
I then started to play around with some “Mr Clean” Magic Eraser I had bought. Here’s some before and after photos.
Jury is still out on this one.
Off comes the apron
I have bought a playfield rotiserrie. Thus, my days of restoring in the cab are done!
Time to continue to dissassemble the playfield. If you don’t have a digital camera you will need to take very careful notes. As it is, I just took lots of photos.
Up come the bumpers
Up come the habitrails (metal rails that the pinball rides on)
The following photos are just parts of the playfield being stripped.
Next, the boat that sits as part of the Ramp needs to come up.
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Since this playfield was filthy, and I wanted to get a good nice shine to the game, I even took off the pop bumpers (First time). When you do this, it would be wise to mark the light sockets you snip so that you know where to place them when it comes time to reassemble the playfield.
Ok, now it’s time to get out the Novus (plastics cleaner) and start applying some elbow grease to get the dirt off of this playfield. In the meantime, I took all of the plastics from the game, put them in my dishwasher (skip the drying portion of the dishwasher, or you’ll have melted plastics). The plastics came out looking all shiny and new! I also took out the back plastic so that I could get to, and replace the lights back there (#44 I believe) This game has some rust in it, so I will have to look at fixing that soon.
So now, I start smearing wax all over it.
Notice how it’s getting all nice and shiny! Now it comes time to start assembling the beast. I found that installing the metal is the easiest. These metal rails I cleaned with some Never Dull polisher. This makes the metal rails very, very shiny. Caveat, make sure the polishing compound is wiped off before you place the metal back on the playfield, or you could ruin part of the playfield.
I also cleaned the underside of the playfield. Right now, I’m just using windex, and alcohol to clean the bottom of the inserts. Bought a big pack of swabs to do this.
Oh, you need to replace the fuses on these machines pretty much accross the board. This game had fuses so rusted, old, that they fell apart in my hands.
Now it’s time to start putting the bumpers and the rubbers back onto the playfield.
Next, I re-soldered the light fixtures back in. This was complicated because I had to piece together which went where.
Ahh, slowly it comes all together.
The outside of the pin had some pretty bad gunk (read: chewing gum) on the outside, and it was just dirty. According to the Op, this pin sat in a Pizza restaurant, and I could believe it. So I took some Simple Green to it, and cleaned away. Got must off the Grime off.
As the work was winding down, it was time to rebuild the flippers. When a new game comes in, it’s wise to rebuild the flippers. These are the most trashed parts of a game, and need to be replaced regularly.
Welp, the playfield is back in one piece (minus the few screws I always have left over). Looks nice eh?
I’m not really finished with this pin though. When it shipped, the cabinet was very loose, and the bottom was coming out. Well, with the bottom coming out, that has caused ground problems, and the game won’t play most of the time. Right now I am planning on clamping the game together. Actually my plans are to
1) Get new decals for the cabinet
2) Sand off cabinet Decals
3) Put on new decals.
4) Get new insert Decals
5) Replace Insert Decals.
6) Tighten up Cabinet.
I am also in the midst of Shopping out a TZ, and a Dr. Who. I also have some friends who are helping me create a “Pinball Dolly” To move these beasts around. I’ll have more on that soon.
Please, if I’ve left something out, or made a mistake, let me know!
