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Arcade Crusade: Pinball Flipper Rebuild Guide

The Pinball Network·video·45m 24s·analyzed·Apr 13, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.022

TL;DR

Complete flipper rebuild guide covering parts, assembly, soldering, and gapping techniques.

Summary

An instructional video demonstrating how to rebuild pinball flippers, using a Williams Whitewater upper flipper as the example. The video covers parts replacement, soldering techniques, assembly procedures, and proper gapping adjustments. It emphasizes the importance of using quality replacement parts and addresses game-specific considerations like spring type selection.

Key Claims

  • Whitewater upper flipper uses a conical spring instead of the WPC standard spring-and-arm bracket due to interference with the lower playfield ball guide

    high confidence · Direct technical explanation with visual demonstration of the constraint

  • Flipper rebuild kits do not include replacement flipper bushings, requiring separate purchase

    high confidence · Stated explicitly: 'no flipper rebuild kits come with a new flipper bushing'

  • End of stroke switch gap should be approximately 1/8 inch (0.8 millimeters)

    high confidence · Direct specification given during gapping adjustment demonstration

  • WPC games use normally-open end of stroke switches, while System 11 and earlier games use normally-closed switches

    high confidence · Technical distinction explained during switch gap adjustment

  • Flipper coil should be mounted with tabs oriented away from the coil stop to prevent tab breakage

    high confidence · Explicit safety instruction given: 'Always mount your coil with the mounting tabs away from the coil stop'

Notable Quotes

  • “Take as many pictures as you need before you take this thing apart... make sure you take pictures of how those went on, how your arm mounted.”

    Host (Arcade Crusade creator) @ Early assembly section — Practical maintenance advice emphasizing documentation before disassembly

  • “No flipper rebuild kits come with a new flipper bushing my recommendation is always replace this there's no reason not to replace this”

    Host @ Bushing removal section — Best practice guidance on parts not included in standard kits

  • “The conical springs are worse. They wear on your linkage. but given the design of the upper play field on whitewater your other choice is to... continue you can use this but you got to bend the arm”

    Host @ Spring selection discussion — Acknowledges design compromise specific to Whitewater's physical constraints

  • “Always mount your coil with the mounting tabs away from the coil stop. This end is the coil stop right here. Always mount your mounting tabs on this side because if they're on the other side, they're more prone to break off from the constant hit of the coil.”

    Host @ Coil stop assembly — Critical safety/longevity instruction for coil mounting

  • “This prevents your coil from burning up... gap of about 1/8 of an inch there”

    Host @ End of stroke gap adjustment — Explains functional purpose of precise gap adjustment

Entities

Williams WhitewatergameThe Pinball NetworkorganizationArcade CrusadeorganizationPinball LifecompanyMarco SpecialtiescompanyWPCproductSystem 11productFliptronicsproduct

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Arcade Crusade launching instructional content series for The Pinball Network focused on maintenance, repair, and basic care videos with potential for expansion based on community feedback

    high · Host explicitly states: 'This is going to be a pilot episode for the Pinball Network and hopefully what kickstarts a series of basic care, maintenance, repair videos' and requests feedback to determine if series continues

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.136

0:00
What's up Crusaders? Welcome to another episode of Arcade Crusade. Today's video is going to be a pilot episode for the Pinball Network and hopefully what kickstarts a series of basic care, maintenance, repair videos by myself and other pinball video creators. The subject of today's video is going to be rebuilding pinball flippers. Just the basics of rebuilding pinball flippers, parts you need, what you need to know, everything like that. So we are going to head over to the workbench. We'll get the camera set up. We'll get a flipper out of white water and we'll show how to rebuild it, things to look out for, things like that. So I'm going to get the camera set over at the workbench and then we are going to start working on rebuilding our first flipper. All right guys, so we are over at the workbench. I have the upper flipper pulled off of my whitewater, and I'm going to show you how to rebuild this and things to look out for. But the main thing to notice first is normally on WPC games, and especially with your rebuild kits, you're going to see that your flipper arm is going to have an arm that comes off where a spring connects and goes over to the bracket over here. Now, on the upper flipper on Whitewater, you'll notice that they're still using the conical spring that they used on System 11 games and prior to that, System 6, System 7. They use this conical spring on every flipper, and then when they move to Fliptronics, that conical spring went away, and they put the arm and the spring over here. Now, this bracket is made to have the arm and spring. the reason that whitewater does not have the arm and spring like that is that where the upper playfield sits on whitewater this flipper if it has that arm it'll smack into a ball guide on the lower part of the playfield so on whitewater when you rebuild this you can use the wpc rebuild kit just make sure you have a conical spring you could reuse your old spring but make sure you have a conical spring to rebuild it. When I took the flipper out of the play field, what you'll need to do is it's going to be mounted up on the play field like this, and your flipper bat is going to come through the top of the flipper bushing right here. And what you need to do is come to the back side of the flipper and you got to loosen this nut and this allen key combo right here. Loosen that enough so you can pull the flipper bat outside of the flipper assembly. So I already have the flipper bat off because I needed to get it off to pull it off the game which you will need to do also. You can rebuild your flippers still attached to the game. The upper play field on white water makes it pretty easy to pull it out. So not a big deal. The first thing you're going to want to do is, well, one, take a bunch of pictures. Take as many pictures as you need before you take this thing apart. If you replace the end of stroke switch, which I will be doing, you're going to need to solder a couple wires back on. So make sure you take pictures of how those went on, how your end of stroke switch mounted, how your arm mounted. The first thing you're going to do after you get the flipper out of your pawl here is you are going to loosen the coil stop. And your kit should come with two new screws for the coil stop and a new coil stop. so that is the coil stop pulled out there is our wow look at how mushroomed that is so if you look at that from the side you can actually see the concave and the coil stop from all the years of abuse anytime you see a mushroom coil stop like that um well the concave the mushroom will be on the actual flipper link itself. But anytime you see that, you know this thing's got a ton of use. So that's been pulled out, both of our screws. Now our coil can pull out and take note of there's a coil sleeve inside of here. And if your flipper was well taken care of, this will not be melted inside the coil and it should freely move and pull out just like so. So we're going to be replacing this in our flipper rebuild kit. Coil sleeves out.
4:44
Okay, so that's next. Next, we can now take out the entire linkage assembly. And there's our old spring.
4:57
And that's our entire linkage assembly pulled out. Yeah, you can see the tip of that is mushroomed, like I was saying. So you should have a nice flat top normally, and this is just completely destroyed from years of abuse just hitting that coil stop. So that's now taken off.
5:16
So that can go to the side as well. Put this back on just like so. And we can leave this for now. we can completely disconnect our end of stroke switch and we can take off our flipper bushing here so one thing to notice this this nylon what looks like plastic this is made out of nylon this is called your flipper bushing and no flipper rebuild kits come with a new flipper bushing my recommendation is always replace this there's no reason not to replace this I also order the screws these are 6 30 seconds 3 8 long screws and the lock nuts for the back I get nylon lock nuts to put on the back here I order all of that replace everything these are your flippers you don't want to be tearing these apart all the time so we will want to take off that next and let me get the correct bit for that that's good so now we are going to come to our nylon flipper bushing. When you take this off, so the reason, if you're ever going to take these off with your bracket mounted still to the play field and it mounts with eight of these quarter inch wood screws around this bracket, if you ever take this off and you try to remove this flipper bushing, there are nuts on the backside of the flipper bushing. And if you try to remove these screws those nuts are gonna fall deep into your game and you do not want to deal with that so need a that one off and we may need one size smaller Sometimes they'll get seized up and you'll have to come to the back side and loosen the nut off. So that's all three of our nuts off. We can put those to the side and we can take the rest of these screws off till this bracket gets removed.
8:09
All right, so now we got our flipper bushing off, put to the side. So now the only thing left on here is the coil bracket here, and that stays on. You don't really need to replace that, but while you're here, you might as well tighten it up, make sure it's tight. So that's back on. And then the other thing we want to take off is our end of stroke switch. So we can actually take this off and we can clean this entire bracket here and we'll get it nice and shiny back to the silver that it was, get all this solenoid dust off of it and then we can start putting this back together. So I'm just going to go ahead and remove the screws that hold on the end of stroke switch here and we'll talk about the basics of gapping and end of stroke switch and all of that. Talk about that after we do this. So we'll need this plate in order for the screws to stay together and there we go we We got a nice switch stack just falling apart on us.
9:46
Yeah, these are completely loose, so there's really no reason it should be hanging on. They're just stuck to the switch. So we need to reuse those screws. We don't have replacement screws for those.
10:04
See if I can put this switch back together now that it's completely fallen apart. There we go. all right so i am going to go wash this in the sink clean it up with some novus we will get the bracket nice and clean you can just wash this with some nice soap and water doesn't have to be too hot or anything just clean this up and then we will come back and i'll get the soldering iron warmed up we'll get the wires off this mount our new end of stroke switch transfer the wires over and then we can rebuild everything and then we can get ready to put it back on the mini play field for white water so i'm going to go clean this up and we'll pick up from there all right guys so i went ahead and i cleaned the entire bracket the best i could wiped it down some novice too there's always going to be a little coil dust you can't get rid of unless to really soak this thing, but this is good enough for me right here. And I got the new end stroke switch, and based on the picture that I took, I have mounted it the exact same way Let me zoom in for ya So the way is that the flipper arm will hit right there and make contact So I just got these hand tight just so the switch would hold for now. So we'll zoom out a little bit and I will tighten this up.
11:45
And you just want to make sure you're straight so when your flipper arm hits it you got a nice even straight contact with the arm of the flipper. So it looks pretty good right there. And I'm just going to tighten this up.
12:23
You want to make sure these are nice and tight because it's just going to take a beating from that flipper hitting it every time you flip it. So get these nice and tight.
12:41
Alright, so that's nice and tight there. Now we are ready to come at it with the soldering iron. I have the original one right there. I'm just going to actually go a little bit higher here. And what we're going to do here is we're just going to come at it with my soldering iron here and heat this solder up until we can pull this original wire off just like that. what you want to do is wrap it through the holes and whoever did this one, I don't know if this was replaced at one point, they did not wrap it. So what you can do to make sure you don't screw up is do one wire at a time. I'm not going to do that so I have a little bit more room here to work but I know this black wire goes on the bottom lug, it's the long lug here. I know that's for the black wire is the bottom lug. And then the top lug will be for my orange. So again, I'm just coming at it with some solder, get it heated up and that'll pull right off. So that is our old end of stroke switch completely beat and pulled off. So we can take that off, clean the tip of your soldering iron over here.
13:53
And now we're in a spot that we can do these one by one. So what I like to do is wrap the wire through and usually around if I can but it might be too stiff from the solder that was already on it
14:28
and if you can just get it to sit like that so you got two options when you do this you could either come through and just kind of you know wrap the wire around how you would like to and then you know you're making a good physical contact, kind of like this.
15:02
And then what you would do is just wrap this wire around here. but actually what I usually do is I just come in through the bottom here get it to hold with a little bit of pressure just on the base there and what you can do is you can just come at it with a little bit of solder just wrapped through that hole right there.
15:38
Actually, I'm at the end of my solder roll here. I have another roll, but hopefully this one does it.
15:44
You are just going to add solder to it and just make sure you completely fill the hole and get it just nice and flowed on that entire solder pad there. we got a nice even river of solder right on our black here you just want to pull on that make sure you're solid we're nice and solid we got nice even solder that's that's a good solder job there and then we are going to do the exact same on this upper one here and again just kind of get to go through that tab and just sit there with a little bit of pressure just like that right up to the casing of the wire. We'll just add a little more at the tip right there. Alright, there we go. There's our orange wire. So sometimes they won't hold as nicely as you'd like them to. You got to kind of get your hand behind it. We got a nice solid connection there. Nice solid connection on our black wire there.
17:13
And now our end of stroke switch is on. So now we can put the brand new flipper bushing on. And this is just going to go on just like this and face up. And these plates here are actually threaded. and like I said I have brand new screws for this so we don't have to use the old ones and let me zoom out a little bit so I got brand new screws for these you can just line up your bushing here and just kind of get them started hand tight and like I said these are 6 30 seconds 3A screws, Pinball Life sells them. Every time I order a flipper rebuild kit, I order a new flipper bushing, I order these screws, and I order some nylon lock nuts. And with the combination of those three things, that is, I mean, and the flipper rebuild kit, that's everything you need to rebuild your flippers so we will just continue tightening this up once you get the three of these fairly tight then you want to come with your nylon lock nuts and replace the ones we just took off so i got brand new nylon lock nuts let's put on the back side here just get these started hand tight actually it might be better if you buy the i know pinball life sells some thin ones it might even be better if you buy the thin ones instead of just getting these um because they'll hold to more of the threads and we'll see if these don't hold too well we might have to put the originals back on just come at it from both sides that's on pretty snug come to this top one here that's on real snug and then we will come to this one here
20:13
all right that's all three of them on real snug the nylon locking around it we can be confident those are not going anywhere. So that is brand new flipper bushing, new screws, new island lock nuts. We got our end of stroke switch on and soldered looking good. Um, now we can, I mean, we're, we're pretty much almost there. Um, so the one thing that I did note when I was talking about this, so first thing before we do anything, we will put the new, uh, every time you do a flip or rebuild, and actually you can do this more often than just doing flip or rebuilds, this is a new coil sleeve. So take your new coil sleeve, and it's just gonna go right inside of this coil.
20:59
All right, and there's our new coil sleeve inside of there. And now our coil can get ready to go back on. You'll just wanna push that sleeve in there. Sometimes they're a little tough to get in there based on the coil. Sometimes you got to replace the coil if they're melted, but this one should be all right for what we're doing. This one should be all right. All right, so we got the new coil sleeve in. That's not a big deal. The main thing I wanted to show you guys is,
21:31
so on whitewater, like I said, the upper play field where it's mounted, there's a lower ball guide that gets in the way. So what I'm going to do is we need to take this bracket off and we're going to use a conical spring instead. So we're going to remove this bracket where the spring normally attaches because it will not work for this. And then we are going to put this back together just with the washer. So I'm just going to get this kind of tight. It doesn't really matter right now while we're waiting for this. Get the right nut driver for it.
22:24
There we go. So I'm just tightening this up just somewhat before we get the flipper on. So that enough for what we need right now So mainly what we gonna do is the way this flipper was mounted was just like this because the when the flipper turns the end of stroke hits there. So we want to shove this through we want to shove the brand new part brand new Paul flipper link assembly through and now we're ready to put on our brand new coil stop. So this will come in your flipper rebuild kit as well. So it's going to come with the end of stroke switch. It'll come with the linkage, the pawl, and it'll come with the return spring for WPC. We are going to be using, which I completely forgot to put on, we are going to be using the conical spring. So that's going to go on to, it's just going to lock in here and then go around this side here. So actually let's put the spring on because I forgot that.
23:44
Alright, now that can go all together. We got our brand new compressed conical spring. And yes, these springs are worse than the WPC springs. The conical springs are worse. They wear on your linkage. but given the design of the upper play field on whitewater your other choice is to like continue you can use this but you got to bend the arm so you're in a position that you can actually do something with it so and there's that wpc spring that we don't need but no problem having an extra and we got brand new screws and lock washers with these so we can get these started.
24:49
You can just get these hand tight and then what you're going to do is take your screwdriver here and when whenever you're tightening the coil stop the coil stop when your flipper hits it's going to push all the way in it's going to hit the end of the coil stop every single time and your coil stop is going to take the most damage of anything and one thing i did forget to mention, always mount your coil with the mounting tabs. Always mount your coil with the mounting tabs away from the coil stop. This end is the coil stop right here. Always mount your mounting tabs on this side because if they're on the other side, they're more prone to break off from the constant hit of the coil. But one thing you want to do is when you're tightening this, you want to squeeze your coil together just like so. You'll kind of have to,
25:53
it might be easier, probably easier from the side and you just alternate. But you want to squeeze your coil together from both sides on the coil stop and tighten your coil stop up. And we're going to do the same thing here on this side. And now we're at a point where we can really crank these down so like I said squeeze together
26:25
and squeeze together really make sure we're tight here because if you have any slop in your coil stop, it's not going to play nicely. So really tighten these up. You don't want this bracket to move because it takes all the abuse in your game. So we got the coil stop completely tightened, new flipper bushing, new end of stroke switch. Everything is back together and ready to get hooked up to the upper play field. So now we can, I can grab the upper playfield and we can mount this back onto the bottom of the upper playfield. We can slide our new flipper bat through, properly gap the flipper bat, get it lined up with the ball guide, tighten it up, and then that is the entire flipper rebuild process all the way to putting it on the playfield. So I'm going to grab the upper playfield and we will put this back on. All right, so we got the upper play field on the workbench we have our brand new rebuilt flipper ready to get mounted back on the game right here's the hole for your flipper bushing that's just going to line up like so make sure your wires are completely out of the way all right so that's all the wires out of the and now we can put start putting our wood screws in and get this screw back into the bottom of the playfields here so you're only gonna be afforded so much room just with how these line up quarter inch wood screws again really just want get lined up. Got one started right there.
28:56
We might have to put a little bit of pressure on this to get it to line up as we kick it over. There we go, starting to get all of our screws to line up here. Alright so I went ahead and I got all eight wood screws in the bottom of the play field. They're completely tightened up and ready to go. So now the only thing that we have left to do is to put this flipper, and let me get my flipper gap tool,
30:01
to put this flipper on the top of the playfield. And the Marcos rebuild kits come with the gap tool. The Pinball Life ones do not. I have one left from a Marcos kit. This was a Pinball Life kit.
30:17
And we will flip the playfield back over. And that is our brand new bushing right there. And we will slide all the way through.
30:31
And what we want to do is this flipper spacer right here is just going to stay underneath right here as we tighten this thing up. But what I'm focused on right now is I just need to make sure that our flipper actually goes through.
31:02
And there we go. So now our flipper is all the way through right here through the pawl. And we can go back to the top side. I'll need to get a socket to tighten this up. Let me get the correct socket size for this.
31:37
One smaller, hopefully. And that's it. All right, so now we can come to the top side of the play field here. And this is a lot harder when you're not... Well, it's easier and harder to do it this way. Easier because you have full control of the flipper from the top here. And we can slide our gap tool in right here and just kind of leave that in place as we tighten this thing up. and the main thing we want is we want to make sure we are completely even with the ball guide there.
32:24
You just want the front of the rubber to be completely even so when the ball comes down, you're good to go. And then what you want to do is push down so then you've got a good gap, and then you are going to find your adjustment from under the play field. I'm just going to tighten this with my gap tool underneath and no like easy way to show this. Let me lift the camera up so you guys can see. I'll just go right here. But all I'm doing is I got my Marcos tool underneath the flipper so we properly set our flipper gap. That is the number one thing you really need to worry about. And then I'm just coming at the backside of our pawl here we're just tightening this up and now we can just continue to actually I'm going to loosen a little bit just to make sure that I'm pushing down on my gap tool you want to push down in your gap tool to really make sure you got your gap right So I pushing down here and we get it fairly tight and then we worry about lining it up once we tight So now still a little bit of play here and we really just want to make sure that we are just completely lined up with the edge of the ball guide right here And I'll show you guys what I'm talking about. So the ball on the upper play field, it comes down and feeds right off this ball guide right here. And we want to make sure that the edge of our flipper is completely straight with that. and right there sometimes you got to push a little bit further just to get it where you want it to be but right there it's pretty lined up so now we can come to the backside here and just try to hold it in place while you tighten it and it's just going to be trial and error until you get it completely tight and where you want it to be but i mean yeah right there is pretty lined up with where i'd want it to be feed in from that that ball guide so now we can just continue to hold it in place as we tighten the flipper up
35:46
you want this to be absolutely as tight as it can be all right so that's perfectly lined up how i would want it lined up and see if we can shove our tool back in there now that i have it pulled off there we go it's got our tool shoved back in there and now i will just come to the bottom of the play field and i'm just going to give it a few more cranks just to make sure we're nice and tight i'm just going to do this in my lap so i actually have some leverage but you really want this to be as tight as it can possibly be. And there it is, that is as tight as it can possibly be. We got a properly gapped flipper with our flipper tool and that is brand new flipper bat, tighten rubber perfectly lined up with the ball guide, perfectly gapped with our Marcos tool to gap the flipper, completely tightened on the bottom and rebuilt with all new parts, completely tightened coil stop, everything's good to go. And then the last thing we need to worry about, nice solid movement there. The last thing we need to worry about at the end of our rotation is we need to set our flipper gap for our end of stroke switch. So let me get the camera zoomed in here. So our end of stroke switch right here, you want this to be a gap of about 0.8 millimeters. And you can kind of, if you've got a flipper gap tool, you can do it. Otherwise, what I just did, these haven't been adjusted before, so a little bit of strength with your hand will do it. And I usually just eyeball this.
38:33
But if you want, I mean, what did I say, 0.8 millimeters? I meant an eighth of an inch so like I said I usually just eyeball this but you're looking at this gap right here and the way it is right there that's a good gap so that you want it to be so the end of your stroke makes contact we could actually push this back a little bit more and let me grab my leaf adjustment tool just to show you guys how that works because this is important not so much important for WPC games because WPC games are normally open switches. On System 11 games you have normally closed switches. So this matters a little bit more on System 11 games because you want your flipper gap to be the way that it should be. And we'll come in, we got an adjustment tool right here. And what this is, is it is a tool that has a 45 degree and a 90 degree and it's got, you see that serrated cut in there. What you do is you come at the side of a leaf switch with it and you can just kind of bend the contacts a little bit, if I can get around it, and you can just kind of bend it up and then bend this side until you get the gap that you want and so that the entire motion of the flipper makes nice good movement. And it doesn't take much pressure to adjust these things so just make sure you got it the way that you want it. So I'm going to just increase the gap a little bit more. And that's enough to just gap it the way that we would want to gap it. And now if we flip our flipper from the front of the play field right at the end, and actually we might want to make that gap a little bit smaller because this prevents your coil from burning up. And that's a pretty good eighth inch of a gap. Little bit down. That's pretty good. So now if I take my flipper from the front here, at the end of its stroke, it'll make contact. So the end right there, we can actually go a little bit down because I think it's a little late. And this is just kind of a trial and error thing until you're real happy with how your switch performs. But that's a good 1⁄8 of an inch gap there. And now that's right at the end. So that's right before the end, contact right at the end. Right before the end, contact right at the end. So I'm happy with that flipper gap right there. And we got the pawl completely tightened up as tight as it can go. Let me show you guys how well this thing is lined up with the ball guide Let me zoom out just a little bit, but you can already kind of see it right there That is perfectly lined up with the the ball is just going to feed perfectly We got a brand new white flipper bat light blue to match the play field Um light blue posts over here clear rubber here. I could have done light blue It might look cool if I did light blue up here just so all of it matched but I can always change that it's easy enough to get to that, but that is a full flipper rebuild on the upper flipper on whitewater and like i said this one's pretty easy to do because all the wiring can just be removed from the playfield and you can do it on the bench super easily the one thing you need to watch out for is you've got to remove that arm right here if you leave that arm on you might you i mean you can put the normal spring on if you leave the arm on but it's going to whack into the ball guy on the lower part of the playfield so you just got to use the crappy conical spring here but that is nice smooth movement around the strokes which is hitting nothing to worry about with this flipper here so nice good contact that is full flipper rebuilt on the upper playfield well guys that was a quick tutorial on how to rebuild a flipper on my williams whitewater hopefully this can help you guys out as you dive into rebuilding your flippers for the first time it's one of the things you first get into the hobby it's kind of a scary thing to do but it's pretty basic once you once you figure out everything you have to do pretty much everything that i said today applies to rebuilding flippers on almost any game of all eras the only thing that really changes is the spring and the spring tabs and then the end of stroke switch whether it's normally open or normally closed normally open on WPC and WPC 95 games and normally closed on system 11 and before it's pretty much everything I said goes for almost any flipper rebuild that you do so this should be pretty useful to anyone trying to figure out how to rebuild their flippers for the first time. This was just a quick video for the Pinball Network. Please like, comment, and subscribe on the Pinball Network as they continue to post more videos just related to podcasts, maintenance, everything like this. And hopefully if we get some good feedback on this one, we'll be doing more care videos, maintenance videos, repair videos, just really just pinball basics just so people are more confident working on their games.
45:05
So yeah, go ahead, like, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for watching, guys. Hopefully I'll see you in the next one.