Restoring

We had decided that we'd like a small project to work on. Although the Pinballs bought so far have needed some work and fixing but nothing really major. We were offered TZ as such a project as it was in bits. When it arrived it was not in as many bits as expected. The real work was to be had putting the wire loom back together. In removing the head from the body, the previous owner had just cut through the two wiring looms.

The game had been in bits for years and no one knew what state any of the electronics where in or what worked and didn't work.

Day 1 - The Arrival

Arrival in 2 parts

Adding legs, the top box and putting the transformer back in, it also had been just cut out.

Day 2 - The start of rewiring

The two looms provide all power and control between the playfield and the controllers in the back box. They add up to around 350 wires. So we had around 700 wires to prep and join together again. The power ones we decided to crimp and join using 10A bullet crimps. The control lines we decided to join using 25 way D type connectors.

Day 2 was spent preparing all the wiring ready for the connectors to arrive.

and refitting speaker grill

Day 3 - The connectors arrived

oh yes and we decided just in case .... we ordered a fire extinguisher :-)

Day 4 - Power on

Completed matching the wires to the other side of the connector, connected the bare minumum and went for a power on, with the fire extinguisher there at the ready.

Well no bags or flashes of light and the processor indicator lights were flashing as expected - good news. Continued with the rest of the work, working our way thru all the power up error reports, replacing dead fuses, checking wiring faults and PCB connector issues. The "easy work" is done now for the fun.

Yep, thats G working his way thru the diagnostics, looking puzzled and probably a bit dazed - note the bump on my head, I had just smacked my head into the casing

and finally no 6 is ready for play.....

and the fire extinguisher wasn't even needed :-)

Life for TZ did not stop there, we continued to work on her, adding the Piano Mod, we got the "Pro Piano" from eBay USA. The gumball machine mod, the Clock LED Light Mod. G got the white LEDs and resistors from RS Components in the UK and simply modified our original clock board. We will put some picture of our game with these mods up soon.

TZ gets lots of modifications and there are lots of good web sites for them here iswhat is probabaly the best and this one has the LED details.

And to finish her off we added new legs

We had a matrix display fault develop in early 2003 which caused a line right across the middle to go out. We used the spare display we had from the stripped Whitewater to get TZ back up and running, but now the far right column on our Whitewater has gone so we need to get two new displays to repair Whitwater and give us back a spare.