Gottlieb Black Hole recondition thread

YEAH! After hours last night and this morning.. I tried everything.. took every bulb out, vacuumed the sockets, even desoldering & resoldering strings of gi's, couldn't find the short. On a hunch I followed the wires in the schematics from the Fuse holder F6 to the relay switches on the bottom left of the playfield. I took them out, clean & adjusted them, they looked Ok and we're gapped pretty good but must have not been making good contact. After that, the lights came on like a friggin' Christmas tree! Breaker didn't pop. We are a go! All systems functioning. Now to put everything back together, clean it up, new rubber, I've got a new set of plastics for it, the fun part!
 

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Looks good, nice find on the GI. Now, there are a lot of debates on LEDs. Personally, I used them sparingly. I usually use them for the inserts but not the GI. I've seen some machines that look like a clown puked Fruity Pebbles all over it or you're blinded by the shear overwhelming brightness of a 100 Ultra Brite LEDs, like staring into the sun. I don't want to have to wear sunglasses to play pinball. But, one thing I did, was to do the 5v mod to the lower playfield surround lights. Then placed alternating blue and white super bright LEDs. Makes seeing the lower playfield much better IMHO.
 
Thanks.. yes. While shopping it out, it became clear to me that even though I bought an LED set for it, I agree, will use them sparingly or simply not at all. Part of the reason is that I found while cleaning it up and inside the manuals, home use only documentation. It was bought from a retail distributor Betson Pacific here in CA and last serviced by them back in 1989 in CA, and have all the paperwork with owner's home address. There's no signs of operator use, no holes in the coin door. It's my belief it probably worked a few years after that and then sat for years and years with nobody having the desire to learn or the money to spend to fix it so I'd like to keep it as original as possible. The only thing I did cosmetically to it is change the yellowing cracked plastics, replaced a couple cracked dropped targets, adjusted and cleaned all the switches, solenoids, cleaned the playfield well with Naptha and applied a coat of Carnuba wax after. There really isn't any noticeable wear on the playfield at all, you'd have to really nitpick it to find a little wear under the mylar on the pops, a small area the size of a dime that the used a marker to color over and that's it. I replaced the pop bumper lights and behind the backglass with 47's instead of 44 for a little less heat and replaced the twinkling 455's behind the wheel and used original 28v 313's surrounding the lower playfield. The only thing I may do extra but not necessary is to replace the blue mask behind the backglass on two of the scoring displays as the heat got to them (they are just plastic gels stuck behind the backglass where the score openings are, no real damage to the backglass itself and maybe I'll paint a coat of satin black around the front of the head but it's not really necessary imo. The cabinet is minty otherwise. I opted to use rubber nuts instead of the acorns for now that hold the plastics in. Maybe once I play it for a while and know there's nothing left to adjust, no lights out, I may replace with a new set of the steel acorns but they are harder to take off and it's easy to take up the screws, scratch the plastics while screwing them on and off so maybe just leave the rubber one's as easier to work with. I learned a lot in this process and it was really fun to work on the game, System 80 had it's quirks but this game is loaded, the first pin to feature a see through lower playfield and the highest grossing pin ever at the time partly due to or despite the fact that it was the first game to cost fifty cents to play so there's a place in history for it & now to enjoy playing it! as it's fast, responsive and challenging now with the new rubber and wax. Let's consider this project done! I guess it's thankfully not true that 'no one escapes the Black Hole'!
 
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Here's some pix of the game from today..
 

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