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 First I decided to focus on all the metal parts.  Here's a few pictures of the legs in their original state.  Not horrible on the fronts (if you zoom you can see the grime better) but definitely needing a polish.

The inside of the legs were a little more unsightly:

Here's a portion of what I used to clean things up.  Some steel wool, brush wheels, some sand paper for the bad parts on the inside and a dremel rotary tool to sand more off.

Then I used this bench grinder as a polisher, along with wax, for all of the metal playfield parts (not so much for the legs).

Here are the legs all shined up!

I also replaced the nasty old looking feet and added some rubber covers to the bottoms.

Here's all those plastic bags I mentioned!  Every little metal piece was cleaned and polished.   I even bought a tumbler and shook up all of the smaller parts to remove rust and dirt.

After all the metal pieces were polished, I decided to focus on the back box for a bit.  Here's the backbox with the two old boards removed.  The sound board was still fine.

After reading online I followed some instructions to add some additional fuses to the power rectifiers.  This should help eliminate some of the risk of board damage going forward.

Then I had to re-wire/re-crimp several melted connectors.  Initially, I just used the same style of connector that the machine came with.

Then I labeled every last set of connectors.   Each has a unique blocked out pin on the bottom, so you can't really connect them the wrong way. Still, it's just so much easier to be able to quickly read the labels and connect without investigating.

This pool table frame (soon to be finished as well) proved to be most useful through all of this.  I could easily set out all the parts on one end, and use the other end to put the playfields on for easier maintenance.  I could even get on the ground and still see the playfield top as well.

I quickly enlisted my little pinball repair helper.  Here we are laying on the ground looking up at the playfield laying on the table.

She really liked looking up and seeing through the different score inserts.

I added some additional cable management and replaced the fuse on the main power supply.

It's crazy how much fuses have changed over the years.   The top photo shows the old school fuses with really hefty looking coils on the inside:

Then here's the new fuse style, more clean and slick looking imo:

Here you can see a black hole where one of the light sockets burnt up and then broke off:

So I soldered in a new light socket.

I then replaced ALL light bulbs on the machine.   I lost count but it's well over 100 individual light bulbs.   Here's the main scoring column of lights for example.

My little helper replaced several light bulbs herself!

Just a starting look at the cabinet at this point.

On each light bulb I used dielectric silicone compound to help maintain a solid connection.

Next I did a quick review of all the switches on the playfield bottoms.  Some of them were obviously bent way out of whack and needed tuning.

I also tried to clean up all of the white (or other color) gunk on the mechanics.  You can see the type of white stuff on the screws below that I cleaned off everywhere I saw it.

Here's one of the main culprits of the boards melting.  This solenoid must have locked on for one of the drop target assemblies. The plastic sleeve on the inside of this coil was entirely melted in place, and you can see that it got so hot it even made quite the black burn marks behind it:

So I got myself a new solenoid

All soldered on.  Still needs a new plastic sleeve (tube) in the middle

And here it is all back in place.

Next I found that one of the drop target assemblies was missing one of it's "teeth".  So this means that particular knight target would never get reset once knocked down and would stay down forever.

I had some problems locating a replacement for this particular piece above, so I decided to do some fabrication on my own to attempt to fix it.  First I found a new piece of metal to use as the "tooth" piece to replace.

And here you can see it cut up, shaped and put in place.  Not a half bad "bush fix".

I found that once back in place, this new piece made the drop targets a bit out of line:

I took it apart and removed the washer that was in the middle, and instead used my new piece to make up the difference in space.

Finally, I bent the new tooth up a bit so that it aligned pretty perfectly with the rest of the teeth.  That seems to be working well now so far!

Next up was to clean up the 12 different drop targets. Below they're all dirty.

Here you can see them all cleaned up!

Next I wanted to attach the knight decals to each of the drop targets.  These were on most machines, but were not present on Eli's machine.   I found two options, one was all new self adhesive decals on the left, and then the originally included decals on the right (which no longer had any sticky backing).    I felt that the reproductions were too off in color, so I decided to go with the original ones.  Which is too bad because with the sticky backing the new ones would have been super easy to use!

So first I put a mylar protective coating over the top of each individual sticker.

All lined up and ready to be cut out.

Next I found this transferrable adhesive backing tape.  I stuck that on the back and cut out each one.

And finally you can see them all cleaned up and assembled with their stickers attached.

Next I decided to work on the flippers a bit.  I replaced all of the bushings under each flipper.

The lower playfield flippers must have been one of the last things that were repaired on this machine.  It looks like they replaced one coil, as the yellow one is newer.  They must have also underwent a flipper rebuild with all new parts.   These are a newer improved style of flipper assemblies, with large bolts holding the arms together.    I also replaced all of the springs.

On the upper playfield here, you can see the old style of flipper assemblies still.  The newer ones have a giant bolt that goes in the circled area below.   Also in the circled area, there was a pin that was missing (one of the reasons they replaced it with a bolt).  The flipper still worked somewhat, but with that pin missing, the one upper flipper was loosey goosey and was certainly working without full power for quite some time.

The coil on the same flipper was also bloated and slightly melted.  When I tried to remove the old sleeve from inside of it, it was entirely melted in place and just chipped apart into little pieces every time I tried to get it out.

I added a entirely new coil on the one side and entirely rebuilt the upper flippers with the new style flipper assemblies as well.  Also while I was at it, I replaced the two EOS switches with new ones as well.   All good now!

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