1988 Williams
"Cyclone"
Repair and Maintenance Log
Jeffrey Zweizig Jeff Zweizig Jeffrey Zweizig Jeff Zweizig
05/05/06: Acquired game from the outdoor flea market area at the Allentown Pinball Wizards Convention. 05/21/06: Replaced power cord. Ground prong had been removed from existing cord. 06/02/06: Checked and replaced incorrect display fuses. 06/23/06: Replaced burned bulbs in head. New pair of matched locks. Rebuilt flippers including the newer style pawl with outside return spring. Replaced right-side FL-11629 flipper coil with correct FL-11630 coil. Replaced flipper bats with correct color. Fixed left lane change switch (cold diode solder joint).  
Right-side flipper rebuild before and after. The correct 11630 coil is mounted with the terminals away from the coil stop. Also note the newer style outside return spring.  
New flipper bats before and after. When the bat and ring color are correct the flippers become the clown's fingers. 
A little Mean Green goes a long way. 06/25/06: Measured playfield glass - 43" x 21" x 3/16". Replaced more playfield bulbs. 06/26/06: Two of the four screw holes holding the right slingshot coil bracket to the playfield were stripped. Used the wood glue and toothpick method to fix. Cleaned under playfield ball troughs. Spook House trough mounting needed more wood glue and toothpicks. 
Metal trough for the Boomerang and plastic trough for the Spook House. Boomerang kicker and bracket are removed and off to the side at upper right. 
Spook House trough is in bad shape. It looks to have been broken in half and repaired with mesh and epoxy. I added an old lamp bracket to help support the ramp where the ball drops down from the Spook House. The lamp bracket replaces a plastic mounting tab that is broke and long gone. The trough may be ugly, but seems to work fine. 07/01/06: Installed NOS Spook House ramp. 
It would seem that timing is everything. I called Pinball Resource to order some supplies and took a shot in the dark at a Spook House ramp. They had one! Compare this picture to the previous two. No more epoxy and lamp brackets holding the ramp together. 07/02/06 - 07/08/06: Shopped game. Playfield was stripped, cleaned and waxed. Old black rubber was replaced with correct white rubber. All GI bulbs were replaced with #47 bulbs. New Ferris Wheel belt. New ball. New slingshot plastics from Marco Specialties. New reproduction Cyclone ramp from Pinball, Inc. Cyclone ramp decals from Pinball, Inc. and/or Classic-Arcades. As this is my first game I didn't have the nerve to strip the whole playfield at once so I just did one section at a time. Cyclone is one of the few games to use red plastic posts on the left side of the playfield and blue posts on the right. Someone took this idea a step further and replaced the top right rollover guide parts with blue, but they were the wrong style parts. Fortunately the two original red posts were found in the bottom of the cabinet. The red posts were restored and three new red rollover guides were added. The playfield itself was a bit of a disappointment. There are several layers of Mylar. Some layers were applied without first cleaning the playfield. In the few places where there is no Mylar, the paint is yellowed and cracked. Instead of trying to restore the playfield I just cleaned it up as best I could. Since the paint is mostly intact and largely protected by Mylar, I believe this playfield would be a good candidate for stripping, restoring and clear coating, but that's a project for another day... 
Here's the upper playfield as I work my way from right to left. New white rubber marks the areas I've already been through. 
Under skirt shot. This was the filthiest area of the game. 
Almost done. Ready to put the ramps back in. 
I finished up my first pinball shopping with a new Cyclone ramp. One of the reasons I bought this game is because the existing ramps were in reasonable condition. But when I discovered the availability of a shiny new reproduction Cyclone ramp, I couldn't resist. 07/08/06: Ferris Wheel ramp fix. As I played my Cyclone I noticed a problem with the Ferris Wheel ramp. Occasionally the ball would hit the leading edge of the ramp and bounce back into the Ferris Wheel for a second ride. This problem was only sporadic. The Ferris Wheel ramp worked way more often than not, but the malfunction was disruptive to the game and got to be annoying. A little research revealed that others had had the same problem with their Cyclone, but no practical solutions were forthcoming. So I fabricated a bracket to better fill the gap between the Ferris Wheel and the Ferris Wheel ramp. 
This under playfield shot shows the factory metal strap that prevents the ball from falling into the cabinet. But this is just a safety net, not a fix. The ball should not ride around the bottom of the Ferris Wheel to begin with. 
My project started with a metal "L" bracket that was just slightly narrower than the Ferris Wheel ramp support bracket. I found this bracket in the lumber department at Home Depot. 
I cut the short side of the bracket to be just a little shorter that the height of the Ferris Wheel ramp support bracket. The long side was cut off almost entirely. 
Next I drilled and tapped a pair of mounting holes into the Ferris Wheel support bracket and mounted my custom bracket. 
Here's the finished arrangement. The custom bracket fills the gap between the Ferris Wheel and the Ferris Wheel ramp such that the ball cannot hit the edge of the ramp and bounce back into the Ferris Wheel. Fitting the bracket does require some patience. The gap should be closed, but not so tight that the bracket would scratch the Ferris Wheel decals. I test fit the ramp and re-filed the custom bracket several times before I got it just right. 02/11/07: Added remote battery backup. Instead of permanently soldering some sort of remote battery setup to the CPU board I made some battery place-holders out of 1/2 inch dowel stick. I like modifications that don't require any physical altercation of the machine. I saw this dowel stick idea in several places around the Internet. The new battery pack was from Great Plains Electronics. Since this company is a supplier of pinball electronic components, I was disappointed to find that the battery pack has an integral ON/OFF switch. The whole point of battery backup is to not cut power. I think the switch makes the pack less reliable then it otherwise could be. I set the switch to the ON position and covered the switch lever with a blob of silicon caulk. 
This picture shows how the positive battery wire is mounted to the end of the dowel stick with a screw and crimp terminal. The screw head becomes the positive terminal of the "battery". Don't forget to account for the height of the screw head when figuring the length of the dowel stick. Note the blob of silicon over the battery pack switch. Also shown is a plastic tool I got from Home Depot. The tool is for pulling large inline fuses, but is also great for pulling AA batteries. 
Here are the dowel sticks in place. Note that the board shows how each battery must be oriented, but does not show the location of +4.5 volts. Before removing the old batteries I used my volt meter to determine the position of +4.5 volts. I believe the orientation shown here would be correct for any System-11 board, but a System-9 board would be "up-side-down". 10/07/07: Here's an idea I read about on the Internet... I replaced all the Mystery Wheel lights with colored bulbs corresponding to the colors on the translite. These colored #555 bulbs are available at most pinball suppliers. You'll need red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.  
Thanks to my complete lack of photography skills and equipment, you'll just have to take my word that this is a nifty, worth-while modification. 06/27/08: Now with LEDs.  
Thanks to my complete lack of photography skills and equipment, you'll just have to take my word that this is a nifty, worth-while modification. |