Notes from a small workshop: pinball machines, old score motors, and the patience they demand.
Three weekends of cleaning commutators with a fiberglass pen, and the score motor on the bench finally spins without sticking at the reset cam. The trick, as always with these, was not lubrication — it was removing forty years of the wrong lubricant.
The relay banks come next. I label every wire with masking tape and a pencil before touching anything; the schematics exist, but paper from 1974 forgives you nothing.
Neighbours, mostly. A solenoid at midnight is a friendship-ending sound. The garage is now insulated enough that the drop-target reset is a distant click, and I can work on a machine for an hour after the house goes quiet.
Everyone buys the kit. Half the kit is the wrong durometer for the flippers on early solid-states. I keep a jar of singles sorted by diameter and stiffness, and I have stopped pretending the jar is organised.
I restore electromechanical pinball machines in a small workshop in the Pacific Northwest. This site is a notebook: what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently. If you're working on a similar machine, write to [email protected] — I answer slowly but I answer.