1979 Gottlieb Black Hole Pinball Restoration

Rottendog already sells a nice replacement Pop Bumper Driver board complete & ready to go for just $16.

Eye of beholder.
IMHO, Their design is inferior and not open source.
My design; includes the power and fire leds; as well as includes a resettable fuse and protection diode incase of a wiring issue. There is also a reset circuit to delay "power good" to the multibrator by 100s of mS to allow the voltages to stabilize.
 
The machine I purchased had a broken black box door where someone broke the wood to gain access via a lost key. I picked up a replacement from a fellow RGPer who was parting out a black hole. I started by removing the hardware, filling the holes with bondo, and putting a coat of sandable primer


Then followed up with another round of bondo:


Once the door was sanded to 220grit; several coats of auto black were sprayed on the door:


 
The top needs some TLC:


some 220grit on the orbital sander:


Wood glue + bondo:


And some blue paint to polish it off:
 
The flipper bats had yellowed with age; so I used a solution of Lorne's Retr0Bright to return the flipper bat to a bright white:

No... really that is an original flipper bat; looks brand new, huh? I was honestly shocked by the ability of the retrobright to work on the bat.

Then I needed to embilesh the flipper bat a little - so I created a couple of designs in coreldraw:


And decided the simpler one would look better; so I printed the design on clear water slide decal paper:


Here's a comparison of the newly modded flipper bats:


I actually printed two sets of water slide decals and layered them over each other to give a more solid black:

Bottom has two layers. Top is a single layer.

Not pictured - I put three coats of clear laquer over the flipper bats to protect the decals.
 
While I had the Retr0Brite out; I put them to work on the other white parts:


Here they are getting some Rays (UV/Sun):


They proably could have used another day in the sun; but I had a Xmas Deadline quickly approaching:


After reassembly and some final adjustments - the machine was ready for Santa. Stay Tuned.
 
‎'twas two days before Christmas and all thru Steve's house ... Not a creature was stirring except maybe a jolly old fat man ( aka Zitt ) installing his brothers' new pinball while visions of sugar plums failed to dance in his head. ( brother was asleep )

SURPRISE!
:)

Click Z pictures for high rez shots.




Even Grandma had to check it out!

LED inserts were used to lower power consumption, brighten the playfield, reduce insert damage caused by the original bulbs. GI circuits and black box remain standard bulbs.


 
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