Let's clean!

So my Firepower’s playfield is, to use a technical term, fucking nasty. In addition to general dirt and grime there were these small white circles of what I assume are some kind of mold. Most people’s go-to cleaner for everyday polishing and removing fine or heavy scratches is Novus. But for just getting rid of grody shit on top of the wax, my friend recommended hitting the playfield and plastics with Fantastik to start. Any water-based cleaner is a big no-no if the playfield doesn’t have wax on it, as you don’t want the water to get into the wood or paint and start causing problems. I felt OK about it in this case for a few reasons. The playfield wasn’t in super great shape to begin with, so it’s not like I’m risking ruining something that could be very high quality. The playfield was cloudy and sticky, indicating there was some old wax on it already. So I just took the precaution of spraying the cleaner on the cloth, not the playfield, and wiping it up immediately with a dry cloth. For more than you ever want to know about cleaning a pinball playfield, check out Vid’s guide on Pinside.

 

Here’s some before pics- the playfield, a close up of a particularly dirty area, and the whole area around the pops. (Kind of hard to see a difference in the wider shots, but you can really see the mold and crap in the close up)

 

And some after pics – playfield, the same now-clean area, and the pops.

 

If you’re wondering why the machine is sitting on the ground instead of on legs, see my previous post!

It’s not perfect, but it’s already looking quite a lot better. Next step is adventures with naphtha to remove that cloudy sticky old wax!

Thwarted!

Today’s plan was to put the legs on Firepower and start cleaning it in earnest. The previous owner had stripped the threads on the front leg brackets. They were total garbage, and had to be removed. I tried to be fancy and replace them with some more solid brackets in a newer style. Some folks on the internet (you can see where this went off the rails already) claimed the new brackets would fit- but they totally didn’t. They’re just too big.

So, back to pinballlife.com and waiting for new new leg brackets to get here later this week. I’ll try to do some clean up, but with the game on the floor it’s pretty awkward to work on. Plus, I can’t try the one thing I really want to try- putting the backbox up, wiring everything up, and seeing if the machine boots. Next weekend, hopefully!

I just started reading The Inner Game of…

I just started reading The Inner Game of Tennis (https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314) this morning. Even like five pages in, I can already see how it might help my pinball game. I tend to talk to myself a lot while I play, and the talk is usually along the lines of “stupid! you fucking moron, why did you do that? you should’ve let it bounce, not flipped there.” I started thinking today if I would talk to someone I was trying to teach the same way- of course I wouldn’t. So why talk to myself that way? Why not just relax and have some fun pinball time instead of trying too hard?

Much like web dev the first question you…

Much like web dev, the first question you have to answer when writing custom pinball software is “Which platform are you going to use?” The Mission Pinball Framework seems like it’s had the most work, but it also runs at a pretty high level of abstraction. This all means it’s probably the fastest way to get the “Hello, World!” pinball equivalent- you press the flipper button and the flipper flips- working. But it also might be the least “fun” and the least amount of new learning. pyprocgame, on the other hand, does a little less handholding.

I’ll probably give in to pragmatism and start with the MPF to just make sure I didn’t fuck up the wiring, but who knows what I’ll do after that….

 

 

Let’s do this

Welcome to livecat.ch. I’ve been playing pinball competitively since 2015. I’ll write a series of posts later about my origins in pinball, what led me to competitive play, and what keeps me playing. For now, though, I just wanted to throw up a quick post explaining why I created this site, and what I plan to talk about here.

The why is easy. Without getting on too much of a soapbox, I want a place to write about pinball and any other random thing where I own my words and access to them without the intermediary of a social network or platform. So let’s roll the clock back to 2005 and start a blog!

I’m going to talk about playing pinball – where I like to play in Boston, random trip reports from my travels, and how I’m doing in competition. I’m also going to talk about restoring and modifying pinball machines. It’s something I’m just starting to dip my toe in now that I have the space for it. Back in August, I bought (intentionally!) a non-working Firepower I need to get working. I was gifted a P-ROC I plan to install in my X-Men to start playing with custom software. I’ve got some crazy project ideas (what if you replaced the tilt bob with an accelerometer you could control in game rules? what if you put a bunch of small electromagnets under the playfield and simulated wind? what if you bought a Fish Tales and reskinned it to Moby Dick creating the Great American Pinball Machine?) Expect to see some posts about all of it.