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Skee Ball Restoration and Improvement

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Entropy42:
After seeing the threads from Ixliam and ThatPurpleStuff, I've been wanting to make my own Skee Ball machine.  I wasn't real interested in the woodworking and ramp creation aspects of the project, so I tried to find a Skee Ball machine locally that I could fix up. 
Eventually, I found a pair close enough to pick up, 1 in good shape, the other not so much, neither of them working.

I paid too much for them ($600 for the pair), but finding a 14' Skee Ball machine in MI is relatively rare as far as I can tell.  Still, a far cry from the $75 Skee Ball machines I see people here talking about buying.  I figured I'd put the prices up here for other future Skee Ballers as a point of reference.

Anyway, I got them home and had to figure out some way of getting them into the basement.  The ramps on these machines are 10' long, so they couldn't make the turn to start going down my basement stairs.  We ended up opening a window in the basement and putting them in through the window.  30 minutes and some red paint on my walls later, I had all the parts for both machines in my basement.

After taking stock of what I had, I figured out everything that was missing, both nets/frames, 15 balls, one service door, 1 net clip, 2 of the circuit boards, and a whole lot of bulbs.  So I had a couple days of buyer's remorse, and then put up a WTB post here and got started on restoring the lesser of the 2 machines.  The machines weren't made by Skee Ball, but appear to be very similar in design.  They have the "Winner" marquee.

The only other machine I can find that looks like them is a 6' model rented out by (Four Seasons Amusements).  From the stickers on the PCBs, they are from 1983 at the earliest.  Given that the machines are over 25 years old, they have held up pretty well.  Finding true replacement parts for them though, probably not gonna happen.

This machine had clearly seen better days though, and was originally constructed using glue and 1" staples.  Someone had come along afterwards and driven screws into it to add a bit of stability, but it was still a mess.  Aside from one problem area, the side panels on the cab were still in pretty good shape.

(more pictures at the bottom)

So I took out all the electronics (more on that later), all the screws, all the horizontal wood pieces, and then all the staples.  The machines were made with 3/4" plywood, so I went off to Lowes and bought a 4x8" sheet of 23/32" sanded pine plywood to make replacement parts.  Turns out the stuff I bought is about 1/16-1/8" thinner than the original, but that shouldn't be a big deal for what I'm doing (plywood comes in such weird thicknesses anyway). 

Cutting everything up was pretty straightforward.  Only tricky parts were getting the 15 degree angle on the front of the top piece, and routing out the edge of this piece.  I only have a circular saw, so I made a little guide for it, set the blade at 15 degrees, and then just ran it along the edge of the piece to put the angle I needed on it.

Routing out the space for the T-molding was tricky, since it needed to be routed perpendicular to the face, which was 15 degrees off with respect to the rest of the piece.  I have a 1/16" slot cutting bit, so still should be no problem in a surface-mount router.  Don't have one of those that fits the 1/2" shank bit that I have  :angry:, so ended up just doing the cut with a table saw and a thin blade.

Is there a way to have my inline pictures be small, but clickable to expand the way the attached pictures are?  The picture sizes I have right now are a little overkill.

Entropy42:
Another part of the cab section that needed some love was the side panels where the target board background attaches.  As seen in one of the pictures above, most of the staples had pulled out and it was held together by one screw (which was also pulling through the face of the cabinet.  
To fix this up, I cleaned it out and filled it up with wood glue, then just held it together with some clamps to keep the wood glue from getting out.  As it soaked into the wood and dried, I would just apply more to it.  This area doesn't have to really hold any screws, and just needs to be a strong, smooth surface.


Although the original was painted red, I wanted to make the surface a lot nicer and not just slap another layer of red paint on it, so I tried stripping the paint off with Jasco paint stripper.  This was really not worthwhile.  First thing I tried was the paint stripper on the sides of the ramp section.  I bought a spray can of the stuff, not knowing how much I would need (answer: way more than a spray can).  It definitely loosened up the paint, but it still required a lot of hard work scraping the paint away.  It made the paint somewhat putty-like, but I had to put a lot of force into separating it from the wood.  For a lot of it, I was using a small planer to remove it, because my scraper blades weren't strong enough.  I ended up going over the whole thing with 80 grit sandpaper on a belt sander anyway.


I figured maybe I didn't put it on thick enough, so I went back and bought a whole can of it, for use on the cab section.  This was actually worse.  
It says to pour it out into a metal container.  I couldn't find one around my house, so I used a glazed flower pot instead.  This was a bad idea.  I think that pot was actually just painted and poly'ed.  Either that or paint stripper just eats through glaze.  Regardless, about halfway through applying it to the sides of the cab, I noticed it had stripped all the white out of my pot, leaving only the orange clay bottom.  I didn't really care about the pot, so I just kept going.
When I went to start scraping the paint off though, I found it had done almost nothing.  Even with a lot of pressure, the paint was just not separating from the wood at all.  Discouraged, I just gave up on the paint stripper and removed all the paint with the belt sander again.  Maybe the paint stripper used up all its stripping power while it was removing the paint in my flowpot, so I was just spreading inert goo onto the cab.  I'm not sure, but it was definitely not a good time.

The cab section of my Skee Ball is held up with a little wheeled cart, rather than the screw-in legs of real Skee Ball.  Unfortunately mine was missing 2 of its cross-braces and 1 wheel.  Thankfully I have another cart that was already working and assembled, so I could just measure that for the dimensions of the missing pieces.

After this was all reassembled, I drilled out some pilot holes and put everything back together, ensuring all my screws were driven in far enough to be covered up.  Covered up all the old screw holes, staple holes and gouges, as well as my new screwheads, with wood putty, sanded with 80 and 220 grit sandpaper, then did 2 coats of primer with 320 sanding in between.

The results of that are attached.

ds015882:
Nice Start

Entropy42:
This project is not quite as abandoned as it seems, I just haven't had the time to update with progress.  Taking tons of pictures at every step was slowing me down.  In the end, I got both machines built back up enough and put back together. 

I made a wood insert to fit where the ticket dispenser used to be, and put in 4 buttons to control the game modes. 

Originally, I hid the buttons under the steel cover, so that you couldn't see the buttons.  This looked better, but was really obnoxious when trying to play games.  The left side cover is about 18" long, so you'd have to bend over, lift this huge arm up with your left hand and then hit the buttons with your right hand.  Needless to say, it was awkward.  So for now, I've just removed the cover and the buttons are always exposed.  My current plan is to either make button holes in the steel cover and just mount the buttons there, or switch over and mount the buttons under the right side cover (coin holder), which is a lot smaller and more manageable to lift. 

My target areas are far from done, as I still need to build a frame for both of them, install a set of 100 rings I have, and relabel some of the holes. 

I'm halfway done building one of the frames.  Used 1/2" aluminum u-channel, cut and bent to make the necessary bends.  So far I'm not thrilled with it, and I'm not sure its going to be sturdy enough.  I didn't use PVC because I didn't like how much give it had, but I don't think the u-channel frame is going to be much stiffer.  I originally looked at using 1/2" steel conduit, but couldn't find the right types of connectors and was worried that it would crimp if I tried to bend it.

To control the beast, I installed a laptop where the electronics used to live.

I removed the LCD screen from the laptops casing, which gave me enough cable slack to turn the LCD around (so its effectively mounted to the underside of the laptop.  To hold the display I just have a piece of .5" plywood with a screen sized opening cut in it.  Then I routed out a .25" lip around the viewable area.  This is just wide enough for the LCD to sit on, so the back of the LCD is flush with the back of the wood panel.  A few wood panels act as clips for the LCD and spacers to keep the laptop body from touching it.  I then just screwed the laptop into the wood (upside down).  Hopefully I can get some better pictures of all of this. 

Connected it up to a KeyWiz to sent button/switch presses, and wrote some custom software in C#/WPF to run it all.  I'll throw some screenshots of the software up in the next post, where I'll probably talk mostly about the software.  Just in case I don't get around to writing about the software soon though, interested parties can find it on Google Code.  Its pretty ugly looking, especially compared to ThatPurpleStuff's Flash software, but for now I'm just focusing on getting all the game modes working (they do).

thatpurplestuff:
Awesome man!  Great to see a fellow Skeeballer making strides!

When you add the 100 rings are you planning on modifying the scoring mechanisms as well (I'm assuming your machine does the scoring method of adding +10 for every switch the ball hits as it goes down the ramp underneath the rings)?  From my experience making it so each hole triggers independently is great in terms of making more diverse game modes, but it did make it slightly more of a pain in the butt to maintain accurate trigger firing.  If you do plan on making the holes independent, I should be done with a preliminary version of my software within the next month or so if you want to try it out... been really busy adding new game modes and refining existing games.  Regardless, I would definitely love to see your software in action!

Also really curious to see what you come up with for your net solution (frame, net, etc) because that's the last part of my build that I'm still not 100% happy with.  Glad to see you're still working on the project!

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