Bingo Overhaul - Bikini

A guy reasonably local (about 3 hours away, which could mean anything from 3 to 300 miles, depending on traffic) contacted me asking about OK games. I took a look in the pile and decided that a Bikini was the best overall cosmetically, but it had been scavenged for a few parts. Major flaws were the front of the game, and a backglass that was around an 8. He decided to come down and look at it, and also check out other machines that I had running but not for sale. I warned him the price was $900 (recovering what I paid for it in warehouse shape - stupid me), which is about average for this game in guaranteed working condition.

In other words, I fix it up and sell it for what I paid for it. This is an improvement, as in the past I've sold them for less than I paid.

Generally speaking, the overhaul process is identical to the one followed on the Magic Ring, so rather than repeating a bunch of information, I'll just hit the highlights of what I found/fixed.

General Inspection

The game had a few parts robbed out of it which we'll look at later. It wasn't as thoroughly filthy as a lot of games from this era. A couple stepper units directly below the mixer motor had a lot of oil on them so they needed complete disassembly and cleaning, but otherwise the wire bundles were pretty clean and the wire colors could be mostly figured out. As usual, the reds fade to an orange color, and whites and yellows fade/grime up to grey.

contact paper and paint
Bikini
a cheap way to deal with arch wear

Here's a novel way to deal with the channel that balls wear into the wood around the top arch...cover the area with contact paper. I guess it works, and it also lets us see how dirty the playfield is. The cheap mustard colored paint I'm not sure about. Maybe underneath it is wood filler.

In any case, I removed the contact paper.

Note the interesting black line across the "for amusement only" sign? This was caused by the game being tipped on end for storage while the balls were above the playfield. The roll around over the sign and transfer their grime to the paper and wood. It cleaned off pretty well.

The bigger problem with balls above the playfield is they tend to bounce around a lot, and can ding the playfield surface. I was not happy about some craters down by the #23 hole, but there's not a lot that can be done. One of these days I'll experiment on a scrap playfield to see if the pits can be raised with heat and moisture without damaging the ink.

cruddy rivets
Bikini
bridging rivets with crud
As usual, the contact plates had old lubricant and dirt that needed to be cleaned off. This blurry picture shows the ultimate problem...connecting two rivets together with grease. This wouldn't usually hurt anything, but this grease had metal shavings in it. There was continuity across the two rivets.
half a blade
Bikini
The little highlighted circle shows an interesting problem...the switch blade in the back is broken off so it's not being moved by the fibre actuator. Since blades don't really break in the middle, I assume someone clipped the blade in half. Replacing the blade was easy enough.

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