Since its purchase last November, the Student Prince didn't remain unattended: it first went through a series of checks, following as usual the neat tips of Pinrepair on this topic:

• Transformer ok
• Check of all coils (measuring their resistance)
• Visual check of all switches
• Cleanup of the stepper units

After an initial power up, new problems appeared:

• The Game Over Relay remained permanently energized. Problem solved by readjusting the control switch for this relay.
  

Continuing the preparations to turn the Kiss back on, some care had to be given to the electronic boards, starting with power and rectifier.

Pinrepair has proven very useful again, with a detailed section on the topic.

This evening we tried a first game with the Elektra. First observations as well: some targets do not score, and the machine apparently freezes in two specific cases:

• when the ball is captured at the top of the upper playfield, it is not ejected afterwards, but if it's freed "by hand" the game continues.
• when the game continues to the lower playfield, after the timeout the machine freezes.

I've conducted two operations on the Whoopee lately:

First, I've replaced the broken backbox female connector for which I received replacement thanks to a very nice eBay seller (7059didier). It went relatively smoothly; old solder melts nicely at a relatively low temperature, so despite the fact there there was a lot of solder on each wire, removing them was easy:

I'm waiting to get some rosin flux before soldering back the wires to the new connector, which, as a used part, already has some solder on it.

After looking around a little bit, we made a quick list of the things that will need attention on the Kiss:

This afternoon was dedicated to the Creature's Power Board. After running the tests I had a bunch of nasty surprises (see the previous post on this topic), so I had to try to clean the mess.

Roughly put, since it was obvious that the problems stemmed from any of:

• Bad components
• Bad solders
• Bad tracks

It seemed logical to clean out the whole bank, remove all components so that they could be replaced with new parts, but also so that the tracks could be tested. And of course this would make room for new, clean solders.

Today I've found another pinball machine for the project. It's a 1979 SS Bally Kiss pinball!

I took it "as is", untested, but the machine looked generally good. The playfield was reasonably used, so was the cabinet and backbox. The backglass (US version, not German, same for the playfield), though slightly "bubbled" has been properly covered with vinyl and looked really nice. No visible scratch or corrosion on the metal paint.

Let's see what we can do with this new machine!

The past 3 days have been spent removing all the previous broken by design hacks and fixing things, and running tests to identify further issues. There were surprises, good, and bad :-P

• The hologram's motor works intermittently, only when fiddling with the triac board's fuse. Looks like a dry solder, or maybe a damaged Triac board, likely considering the next item...

I've done a few things with the Whoopee now:

More purchases
First, after transporting it from the warehouse to my home a couple weeks after the purchase, I bought the machine's flyer on eBay, as well as complete sets of rubbers, light bulbs (#47, I don't want the plastics to suffer anymore), a used shooter rod, 5 bumper scoring NC switches (many thanks to the guys at PinballHQ for helping me identifying them; they were all broken, and I wanted to have spare), standard 1 1/16" balls, and backglass connectors (which were broken too, as you can see on the pictures).

I had a better look at the CFTBL now, and here's the result:

There are a few missing items:

• The lockdown bar
• One ball has gone missing
• The left slingshot plastic is from another machine, a Doctor Who, see this picture:
  

Also, all the rubbers need to be replaced, the plunger knob is damaged, and the wiring needs a thorough check (there are obvious plugs mismatches, unsoldered elements, and weird shunts and other electric hacks that look really wrong)!