This is one of those "Who knew?" type of things.
When I was purchasing parts and equipment for the repair of the Harlem Globetrotter Pinball table, I knew I wanted to replace the groundwire. Although it was not in too bad of shape:
The poorly implemented runs bothered my sense of perfectionism (those wires should be parallel!!) and this seemed like a great time to try out a complete redo.
The old groundwire is a small one, so I purchased a big fat one. After all my Dad always said, no matter what it is, if a little one is good, then a big one is "gooder!"
The problem with wide ground wires is they don't curve very much and while it is possible to do the bed-over turn, its tough to make it look good.
Couple that with my poor soldering skills and you end up with less than beautiful results.
When I started this, I hoped to make something that would look good enough to be in a glass case, where people would ooh and ahh over how beautiful all the behind-the-scenes work was. Now I'm just hoping the lights all light up.
Here are a couple of shots showing the difficulties. Its not bad when the wide ground wire only has to make a couple of bends, but when its a zig-zag pattern it really makes it tough to do a good job!
not quite what I was hoping for in the "beautiful work" department...sigh
What started with a design and construction is at last, phase 1 of the computer desk is finished.
For reference, here is the old setup
Note the increased amount of space and the LED backlighting. In order to provide a better environment, I cleaned up a bunch of stuff and moved the printer (which we only use occasionally) to a different room.
Phase 2 will include some dropdown panels to hide some of the ugly stuff. But that comes later, for now its back to pinball repair!
Now that the computer table is almost finished - just waiting for another set of lights - I have turned my attention back to pinball.
To recap:
The Harlem Globetrotters table was in serious need of topper work.
The glass was in good condition but:
There were boards missing.
No power was going to the table.
The case had flaking lead-based paint
There were an unknown number of light bulb problems on the light board.
So to start with, I pulled out the light board (the piece of plywood that all the light bulbs are attached to) and took a look at it.
The board wasn't in too bad of shape, but it seemed like a good warm-up for the full cabinet, so I took pictures of where all the old wires were and pulled them all out as well as the lamp holders the wires were soldered to:
I threw all of the lamp holders into the tumbler:
Although they are not going to win a shinyness contest, they look much better and hopefully will work better without all the corrosion all over them.
The wood panel itself was sanded down (being careful to wear a lead-based paint rated mask,) sealed and repainted in the brightest white I could find.
Now comes the slow work of stapling and soldering the wires and the sockets back into place. I've tried to be a little more careful about 90-degree angles and keeping things parallel where I could, just to make myself happier.
The work is coming along with about half of the ground wire in place
