Bingo Overhaul - Silver Sails

I've been sitting on this game too long. It belongs to bruce down in the Los Angeles area. I volunteered to overhaul it if he could get it to me. Being completely insane, he tossed it in a truck, drove up near San Francisco where I live, dropped it off, and headed back home. The best time I've made between LA and San Jose is a little over 4 hours each way, so that's a lot of driving! The game sat while I was trying to get a guy to come pick up his Royal Flush pinball. I finally shunted it aside (where it's still sitting...), and dug into bruce's machine.

Generally speaking, the 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

This is the cleanest silver sails I've ever seen (I didn't see the new-in-box one that has changed hands a few times). For the most part, wire colors are easy to determine, and there wasn't a lot of oil/dirt on the wire bundles themselves.

That was the good news...the bad news was the use of some kind of liquid oil as a lubricant. The main problem with this is it tends to evaporate and then condense where you don't want it...like on switch contacts. It's not a huge mess, but it's enough to cause buildup of crud on the switches which makes electrical contact intermittent. In the end, I wound up cleaning most of the switches in the game. The trip bank switches were ok, probably because the switch blades move a big distance, so the wiping action of the switch contacts was good enough to prevent problems. The switches with the most issues where the relays all over the back door which have a small blade travel.

Other than the general issue with oily/dirty switches, the game had the usual batch of specific problems which we'll look at over the next few pages.

wandering post
Silver Sails
a novel ball separator

The two screws on the top of the ball trough are normally holding down a metal bracket with a rollunder wire attached to it. The rollunder wire prevents people from tipping the game and trying to get balls to roll left in the trough and close switches that would turn on the ball lift motor.

Under the bracket was a surprise...a missing playfield post.

ball runway
Silver Sails
runway/arch laminate
Here's something you see periodically...someone added a laminate strip along the runway and arch. Over time, the ball tends to wear a channel in the wood. I didn't remove the strip as it had been attached pretty well. Something I haven;t seen before, though, was application of a fairly thick coat of polyurathane on the playfield surface in the runway. Left that alone too...

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