slowly but surely, getting there

Ok so today I talked to a former co-worker (since I'm unemployed), and was talking about how I'm working on my pinball still. He suggested I try to keep it dark and look for sparks on the cylinder on the base of the pinball case. I did see one towards the top momentarily, so I decided to take all the switches in that area off one by one, and file the contacts. Sure enough, after I did that, it starts up EVERYTIME. The only annoying thing is that it ALWAYS starts a 4 player game, and the credits don't work (stuck on freeplay). Of course being a homegame this isn't the worst thing in the world (so long as it works), but I'm thinking I might just need to change some setting.

Anyway, I also took apart the coil on the left side, and nearly got it soldered back in, but phonecalls interrupted (and I don't want to spend an entire day on it because I have other stuff to do). The bad side is that the coil I got to replace it is wired differently (3 contacts all in a row, as apposed to the old one which has the contacts seperated on different layers of the bobbin). The good part is that it seems that the previous owner replaced the right one somewhat recently, because the contacts matches the coils I have (hence why the right flipper works better), so I should be able to trace wires and duplicate it on the left side.

If all goes well, I could seriously have a working pinball soon. I still want to go through and replace all the dead bulbs. Have been seeing a lot of guys replace their incandescent bulbs with LED's. Granted I can buy incandescent replacement bulbs for about 40 cents a piece, it's a hassle to replace some of them when they burn out (and I don't think they give off great light). A lot of purists will argue that point, but this is my pin and if don't like it too bad. Anyway, lowest price I could find is $1.50 each, and they have white and colors, so I got mostly white and a few green (to try out since my theme is gator):
http://www.centsibleamusements.com/pinball-led-44-47.aspx