The Art of Pinball Machine Maintenance

Keep your playfield clean

Any dust between the ball and the playfield will act as a grinding agent damaging the finish of the playfield of your pinball machine. Apart from common or garden variety dust, all moving parts give off a fine metal dust as they wear.

A slightly damp cloth must be used to keep the playfield of your pinball machine dust free. I use the Novus polish range on my playfields to clean and maintain the finish. Plastic polishes for the automotive industry work well on pinball machines that have a "Diamond Plate" or similar coating on their playfields. These coatings are mostly urethane or polyurethane based which essentially makes them plastics.

On older pinball machines you have to be very careful, I mean "extremely bloody cautious" about what you can use to maintain and protect the playfield. Most of those paints or inks will weaken and separate from the plywood substrate when they are exposed to moisture or solvents. Do your homework and test everything first. For the best advice refer to Shaggy and Norm.

Keep the cabinet and back box dust free

On old electromechanical pinball machines there are two things out to kill your machine. Wear and dust. Dust can cause switch contacts to isolate or short (in the case of metallic particles) when they shouldn't. A worn out switch will make the relay logic fail and cause your machine to act up. The more dust you have, the faster things will wear out.

Contact Cleaner

Do not use contact cleaner. High volage switches will spark, creating heat and causing the contact cleaner to crystallise. You'll soon see a white residue on your switch contacts that doesn't conduct electricity.

Oil

If there's one thing worse than dust, it's dust collecting on a film of oil. One of the first thing I do to revive a machine is to strip the flipper assemblies to remove the grime in the coil sleeve. This goop is caused by a light spray of WD40, Q20 or similar product. If your flippers are sluggish its probably a dirty EOS switch. The coil sleeves are made of nylon which has a very low coefficient of friction with the steel of the plunger. They're designed to run dry.

Replace your balls

Anywhere you have metal on metal contact like the thumper rings, saucers, ramp flaps, chutes and ball guides you'll be scratching and denting your balls. A dull ball should be replaced. The normal size ball has a diameter of 1-1/16" (26.9875mm).

Replace your rubber

Rubber rings have to be replaced as soon as they start showing cracks when they're stretched. They start to crumble and those crumbs will cause havoc. If they're still young and soft your ball will bounce over them causing impact damage. If they're old and hard they will cause scratches. A death of a thousand cuts can come quickly to the unwary.

Unprotected posts will not only mark your balls but the post itself will start to bend. It's actually ripping itself from the playfield, not bending, meaning your pinball machine is taking major, hard to fix damage.

Replace the mylar to stop the ball from bouncing over cracks and folds.

Replace the batteries

Solid state pinball machines have batteries to remember settings, logs and high scores. Replace the batteries in the back box to stop them from leaking acid onto your expensive and hard to find boards.

If at all possible, make yourself an external, plug in battery holder with a "one way only" connector like you get for connecting battery packs for radio controlled stuff.

Lamps

Your pinball machine is crammed with little heaters called bulbs who all conspire to dry out your rubber, warp your plastic and attract dust. They create even more heat when they are dusty. (Less infra red energy to escape through the playfield glass, among other reasons).

Do not remove your tilt mechanism

A pinball machine is designed to be shaken. It's part of the game. The tilt mechanism is there to stop you and yours from breaking the legs off, ruining your floor or blatantly cheating. Adjust for maximum satisfaction.

Play your machine

Give your pinball machine a "birthday" and make a point of changing the batteries and inviting some friends over to celebrate another year of free pinball. Electro mechanicals benefit from playing due to the wiping action designed into the switches to keep them clean.

Where to buy spares and machines

Here's a link to Marco Specialties where I've sourced everything I've needed so far. They also sell brand new Sterns. New machines sell for around (US)$5000 and shipping to South Africa is (after checking with Marco) around $750.00.