It’s coming together. I only had to splice maybe 10 wires for the top half of the playfield. The bottom is going to be MUCH worse. Of the 17 inserts I have left to do, only 2 have wires that reach the insert. So I’m gonna have a big bundle of splice points, unfortunately. But I’m hoping to finish all the insert lamps and GI tomorrow night.

The prep work I did bundling the wires by function (e.g. “spinner”) really paid off.

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Your rails look great! Now I’m rethinking the color on mine.

I’m mostly done with the GI and the inserts. I have 4 non-working inserts, and 2 more that need new wires run from the connector. I think I’ll take a few days off now, for my sanity.

Here’s a quick video, with a little bit of audio.

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Doing some research on coils now. Viking has 6 more coils than Paragon, which was a widebody! That tells you how much action is packed into Viking. 3 of those are for the drop target resets on the 3-bank, and I’ll need to make a new connector just for those wires. It sits below the cabinet connector on the solenoid driver board, like this:

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I also need to run new 18 gauge wires for the 2 drop target resets, and the top left pop bumper. I’m not worried about getting the colors right, I’m not going for perfect fidelity here, I just want to play Viking!

I’ve got a $60 order in my Marco cart for switch wire, 10 feet of each color. I’ll see how much I can do with all my scrap 22 gauge wire before I hit the buy button.

I pulled apart the reset mech from Rolling Stones. I’ll make this a key post, here comes a bunch of info! I used my calipers for all of this. This is our reset bracket. It’s 1/16” (16 gauge) sheet metal.

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The outside measurements for the largest part are 5-3/16” x 2-5/8”.

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The side brackets that bolt into the drop target cage are 1/2” x 3-31/32” (longest end)

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The two flanges on the bottom and top are 4-15/16” x 1-1/16” each. The holes for the coil sleeve are 1/2” in diameter.

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[Continued in next post]

Here’s one reset mech, broken down:

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The coil sleeve bracket is 7/8” wide, with holes spaced 9/16”
The spring is 1-1/4” with 3-5 turns
The sleeve is 1-7/8” and 1/2” outer diameter
The plunger is 3” long, nylon is 5/16” diameter, metal is 7/16” diameter, “bell” is 13/16” diameter and 1/4” thick
The coil is a CJ-31-2000

More pics showing the assembled mechanism:

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Here’s everything we need except the nylon/metal plunger:

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/CJ-31-2000
https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/P-108-53
https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/10-298

There are many other plungers that could be cut down to work, like maybe this one:

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/30463

We’re up to $84 without the plungers or main bracket…

EDIT: I found a cheaper source for the coil and sleeve:

https://www.thepinballwizard.net/coils/coil-sleeves/coil-cn-31-2000-bally/

I’m going to try to find a local metal fabricator that can replicate this for us. I have a drill press and tap set for the screw holes. I might be able to drill the other holes too.

Oh cool, they even do the bending for you. I’m going to try to get this into CAD and see if I can get it quoted.

Well this sucks. A mini-post broke off in the playfield. I did pre-drill, I guess I just didn’t go deep enough. The other 3 mini-posts went in fine.

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Figured out that what I need to remove the snapped off screw is a 1/4” hole saw. Lucky for me, there’s a Rockler near my doctor’s office where I have an appointment tomorrow. I’ll grab one of these:

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I did get a lot done on the coils today. They’re all done except for the top saucer, one pop bumper, both drop resets, and of course the 3 trip coils that I don’t have yet.

This screw extractor is my new favorite tool (that I hope I’ll never have to use again). I’ll let the pics tell the story. I may use just a tiny dab of white paint to hide the bit of dowel that’s peeking out, but it’s mostly an invisible repair.
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I did the trough/apron stuff this morning.

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I bought 2 colors of stain: Gunstock (the lighter red one) and “Red Oak”, which is actually more brown. I’m leaning toward the Gunstock, what do ya’ll think?

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I’ll check out the backglass and see how they look with the wood there.

I made my first ball guide today with the rivet press, angle grinder and hole punch. Also ordered wires for WireBot so I can get going on the switches.

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I found some nice General Finishes gel stain in the garage that I forgot about. This is called “Java”. It’s darker than the other 2 stains, but I kind of like the contrast with the plastics. I think showing off the wood grain is the main thing. I’ll post another pic when I’ve got it all back together.

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I may have gone too dark. I’ll see what it looks like once it’s lit up. I can always sand them and start over. It does match the brown in the plastics pretty well though.

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I had hernia surgery Friday, so I’ve been a little out of it. But today I had a marathon session to do all the switch wiring. I also ran the 7 solenoid wires the harness was missing. The hardest part was leaving the all the wires loose until the very end, which triggered my OCD pretty bad. It was satisfying to finally wrap things up with about 50 zip ties.

Before the zip ties:

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After zip ties:

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I put the playfield back in to test it. There are a lot of switch issues:

B rollover light comes on immediately
B rollover triggers lower left pop bumper
Lower left pop bumper triggers lower right pop bumper
A rollover not working
Spinner not working

Looks like I have some close inspection and head-scratching ahead of me. I also discovered my in-line drop assembly was missing some critical brackets. Fortunately Marco had them for $5 each.

Switches are all fixed! New problem: game won’t boot if the playfield is plugged into the rectifier board. So I have some kind of short on the playfield, ugh.

Time to play some Metallica.

Yes! I’ve made no progress on the playfield, but I got a free cabinet (Bally Air Aces). I need to check dimensions to see if it’ll actually work, but it looks pretty much the same as my ‘80-‘81 Bally cabs. To be honest, I’ve pushed Viking to the back to the queue for now. I’m trying to finish a couple of EM restorations: C37 and Quick Draw.