Making progress - Blackwater 100

VECTOR
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Thanks Jason!

Learned how to clean, polish, and wax the playfield parts plus adjust some leaf switches on my Blackwater 100 tonight.

Last time I touched it I installed about 50 LED bulbs… Tonight, a handful of LED bulbs were installed along with some new rubber components after disassembling the front upper playfield. The ball trough was tested and a board alignment issue addressed before adjusting the switches on the bumpers and reassembling it.

Next up - removing the rear upper playfield for cleaning/polishing, installation of LED bulbs, and installing new rubbers. After that, LEDs in the head unit and testing functionality.

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you are welcome just let me know next time you want to go again

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Got it all torn down, cleaned, back together, and a fuse replaced on the playfield for a few solenoids. The LED bulbs are finicky on their sockets I had to wiggle several to get them to light up. What a PITA. Also, 2 of the flippers are chattering - the left one on the forward and back upper playfields. I have to look up how to fix that.

I still have about a dozen plus bulbs that aren’t lighting up. I swapped in some standard bulbs that were good and it’s not a socket issue. I looked and looked but didn’t find any bad wires on the playfield but it’s like tracing a strand of spaghetti throughout a dish.of noodles and sauce :frowning:

It’s on free play and is working though. I just have to figure out why so many bulbs aren’t lighting up and why 2 flippers are chattering.

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Coil replaced and plunger shaft was cleaned and a ridge around the bottom removed. After that I cleaned and replaced the torn up Suzuki logo stickers on the drop targets and played a few games. :slight_smile:

I still need to figure out the issue with the various dead lights and replace the other white rubber rings. I’m not sure why the ring kit only had half of what was needed for the game. That was frustrating!

If you play it you’ll want to be careful at the start. There’s a starting gate that the ball lines up at after you use the plunger. Watch the lights and wait for it to go from red to yellow to green then hit the bottom right flipper button. That will drop the gate and give you bonus points - the closer that you hit it after the light turns green the more you get, up to 99,000 points. If you hit too early or too late you get no bonus points.

Just beware - it’s a fast game and the ball is hard to keep in play.

Also - the plastics are unobtanium and there is no glass over the playfield at the moment so please do not mess with the plastics.

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I noticed I forgot to mention the 2nd flipper that was chattering - the apron flipper. That one simply needed the switches cleaned and adjusted.

Oh, and if you’re good enough, you can get 100,000 bonus points on the gate drop - and once I got 250,000 bonus points. :slight_smile:

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Was up yesterday evening and night and did a lot of work on it. On the way I stopped off at Taco Hut and picked up an assortment of street tacos and shared them with @Ebony_Jackson who said she never had them before. :slight_smile:

I wanted to repair some broken parts on the plastics (which are unobtanium, but that’s a different story) so I started off by taking the upper and side plastics off then pulling the upper playfield off the machine.

In this pic you can see the duct tape on the ramp on the left and all of the dirt around the upper kick hole. The whole playfield is covered in plastic so I took it off and cleaned and waxed the underside of the plastic and the playfield. It looks MUCH better than this pic now…

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This pic shows one of the holes to fix. Fortunately, the plastic pieces were in the bottom of the cabinet, but, it needed some reinforcements behind it so I had to fabricate those.

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This one shows a cracked area that didn’t break all the way. I had to clean it, use some accelerant on it, then glue it back together. It needed reinforcement too.

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With the duct tape off you can see the big section of missing plastic. Luckily the pieces for this were almost fully in the bottom of the cab. It was missing just a small sliver at the bend in the plastics. These pieces were glued back in, but it too needed reinforcing.

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This piece is on the upper ramp section that sits on top of the upper playfield. It has a hole in it too, but I don’t have all the plastic pieces to repair it. It has a piece of very thick clear tape over it thanks to the previous owner. It’s going to stay like this for now.

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@Shawn_Christian went with Ebony to Home Debit pick up a new tool box for Vector and while he was there, he picked up some plastic sheeting for me. This is the raw material I used to build the reinforcements for the high stress area of the plastics.

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I used one of the 10x10 art squares sitting in Vector, a square, a chisel from the machine shop, and a piece of duct work from the foundry area (PERFECT circumference!) along with a bit of work with a band saw, coping saw, and a Dremel, to fabricate and bend the plastic into the proper shape. This took some time and patience, but the results looked great!

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This is the test fit after I got all the bends done and the edge cut to keep it from sticking out beyond the edge of the playfield. Normally I’d like to bend it over that edge and use a couple of screws for strength, but that edge sits up against the back of the pinball cabinet so there’s no room.

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To be continued…

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The second piece was a bit harder to fabricate because of a playfield light that was in the way. That took some additional carving with the Dremel to get it just right. This pic shows both pieces in place. They are screwed to the playfield and a bunch of RTV sits between the plastics and the reinforcements. I chose RTV because I thought having a little “give” would be good.

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The Ramp repair wasn’t as hard as the others to fabricate since there were no complex bends and curves involved. I did have to drill a hole to allow for the flipper guide to stick through the upper playfield. Those peksy flippers are kind of important. This took a lot of RTV to fill everything in.

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The hardest part about all of this was reassembling and cleaning everything. While I had the playfield apart I found yet another incandescent bulb that I replaced with an LED. I also replaced all the rest of the white rubbers with black ones. The playfield is now fully blacked out and looking great! Too bad the rubber kits don’t come with all the pieces needed to do a complete re-ringing of the playfield.

After that I had to clean up all my messes, put all the tools away, and that wasn’t very easy. The Dremel was found on the table so I had to try and figure out where to put it. Also, someone left several tools out in Vector so I put all those back then swept up my messes.

I went home at about 2am. Whew!

Today after my wife and I went estate sale shopping we stopped by and tested it out by playing a few games! It worked great! One of the LEDs stopped working but would work when bumped. I have to figure out how to get those stupid things to make better contact with the sockets, but at least everything is now working.

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Niiiiicce!! Went to Taco Hut the very next day and grabbed a torta, life changing.

“Nothing Was the Same” - Drake