Middle Earth Pinball Repair – the Beginning:

I bought this machine many years back.  The circuit board was not plugged in when I bought the machine.  From what I can tell, there are no damaged components or burns on the circuit board.  The pinball table itself is in beautiful shape.  The table and backboard paint are in really good shape.  Other than cleaning out everything below the table, making a thorough inspection of the motherboard, and installing new rubber components for the playfield, everything seems in order.  Even the plastics on the playfield look great.

This time around I’m starting out replacing the playfield rubbers.  I was able to get new rubbers through a company called Gameroom Guys.  They were affordable and I was looking forward to cleaning up the playfield with new, clean rubber parts.

It looks like the old rubbers are actual original pieces, from way back in 1978!  Quite a few of them came apart like peanut brittle when I tried to remove them, others were covered in cracks.  I had to be careful when removing the plastic covers that hid a lot of the rubber parts, as the plastics are somewhat brittle.  Here’s an after shot of the playfield.  Not a huge difference, but you can certainly see the new, clean rubber parts a lot better.