So my website design company finally moved out of our teeny office space into a much larger (and cooler) office. In the office was a perfect little nook for a couple games. Since it is mostly for novelty and not necessarily collectability, I decided to bring up Strato-Flite as the first of two games to reside there.

She’s not 100% just yet, but she’s doing a lot better than when I first turned her on.Strato-flite was one of the pinball machines that I got out of the 2008 warehouse raid. I ended up deciding to take this one first because it was one of the few pinballs that did *anything* when I was able to turn it on briefly. When I got it to the office and flipped her on, the score reels just kept turning and turning. After some consultation of my trusty “This Old Pinball” DVD #1, I was able to start in a direction towards fixing it.

Turns out there were several bad contact switches that needed to be filed and/or adjusted. I know this to be the case because I was able to first get ALL of the reels spinning to turn into only SOME of the reels spinning. I was then able to work on each individual reel until I was able to get it to stop spinning during startup and stay at the zero position. I was slowly able to weed those problems out until I got to one final spinning score reel. Once I adjusted the end of stroke switch, the game finished cycling through its startup sequence and launched a ball into the shooter lane.

I wish that all my problems were solved, but that would be wishful thinking. Only one of thethree  pop bumpers is working, and neither of the flippers is working. Currently, the left flipper makes a noise and stays stuck in the up position. The right flipper doesn’t even acknowledge being pressed and gets no action whatsoever. I am going to go ahead and purchase two new flipper coils and two new pop bumper coils along with a flipper rebuild kit from Steve Young at Pinball Resource.

Although the Strato-Flite pinball isn’t playable just yet, I couldn’t resist going ahead and giving the poor thing a bath of Novus. I cleaned and shined the plastics with Novus 1 and cleaned and polished the playfield with Novus 2. What an improvement after getting rid of 20+ years of dust and grime. There seemed to only be a few touch up spots, but I will need to do a bunch of leveling of plastic inserts as some were sunk down pretty deep. One new rubber ring set and about twenty new light bulbs, and the game looks beautiful. Can’t wait to play a full game on this beauty.

I’ll be sure to post more about the progress of Strato-Flite and hopefully some video once I get the game to 100%

Tags: EM, Pinball, Repair, Strato-flite, williams