This pictorial is demonstrated on a 1995 Bally Indianapolis 500 and 1992 Creature From The Black Lagoon pinball machines.

However, this technique and procedure is common to all of them made in the last 30 years, with some non important differences. We'll demonstrate how to replace old, parts, rebuild with new parts, fine tuen them and what's going on.

IMPORTANT! Please use due care and precaution while following this pictorial. Use at your own risk. If you do not have any repair or refurbishing experience and/or knowledge, do not work on pinball machine circuit boards, power supply, transformer, connectors or anything inside at all and step away from the machine!

This webpage is for informational purposes only. TXPinball will not be held liable or responsible for any damage that occurs to your pinball machine or any bodily injury or any kind of damage by use or misuse of this technique. If you have no idea what you're doing, step away from the pinball machine! Drop that soldering iron in its holder! This advice is worth EXACTLY what you paid for it. Now, onto the pictorial...

Guess there are many ways to go about this and many ways to do these things. This is ours.

There is NOTHING lamer (save crappy/weak/broken flipper assemblies) when playing a supposedly refurbished or "shopped" pinball machine than weak, crappy pop bumpers, doing 1 or 2 bumps while the ball lazily snakes around them. Totaly lame! TXPinball rebuilds and fine-tunes EVERY pop bumper on EVERY machine we sell.

Closeup picture of the top part of the pop bumper with the transparent pop bumper cap removed. Arrows are pointing the the holes where the cap screws go.

This is a flasher bulb, #906 in the bulb holder inside the pop bumper body. This is rather an exception to the rule, since nearly all others, 99% of the games out there have just the regular #555 bulbs. Flasher #906 bulbs are too big to fit under a regular pop bumper cap, but this game has them modified in a typical Dennis Nordman fashion (the designer of Indianapolis 500).

Okay, so we took the bulb out, you can see the closeup of the holder. Let's unscrew the pop bumper body now. It is held by 2 screws directly screwed into the playfield.

Taking the ring and rod assembly out. Once the bottom assembly is off, just pull it up and it will go off.

Here is dirty and crappy looking, ring and rod. It is going into the vibrating tumbler to get the shine and luster back.

This is better, after 24 hours of tumbling together with other parts we get it back, clean, shiny and reflective.

Pay attention to this. You cannot take the pop bumper body out (even after you unscrewed the 2 aforementioned screws. Why not? Cause the bulb holder is still connected/soldered underneath the playfield. So, let's snip the bulb holder wires off.

Other side snipped off, too.

Now, pull up the whole thing.

Here it is, out of the game. Usualy every game has 3 bumpers (a few have more, but not many, 3 is the norm for 99% of the games).

As expected, dirty as hell and probably never cleaned since 1995, the year Bally/Williams made this game. Crappy Mylar around there too.

All 3 of them out. If you are putting new parts in, discard this filthy stuff. If you are just rebuilding, wash them or clean them.

Closeup shot of dirty pop bumper area.

Now, we are working hard. Mylar is off, everything is cleaned, buffed and waxed, ready for new stuff.

Remember how we said flashers are too big to fit inside pop bumper assemblies but this game is an exception? That's cause they modified the bumper caps, they made them hollow like a donut and added a plastic cone at the top, so there is space for a flasher. All other (99.9% of the games) just use regular caps as shown on the bottom.

The other game that has non-regular pop bumper caps is Cirqus Voltaire, it has these tea cup saucer looking caps we see here at the bottom with Indy 500 caps with cones on top. Pretty much almost every other game has normal caps.

Pop bumper caps are available from Pinball Life at great prices (click here to buy some), especially if buying in quantity.

What's this? That's a new light bulb sockets that Pinball Life sells. Click here to buy some.

Here is what new bulb socket looks like on the left and the old one we cut off on the right. Whichever you choose (I personaly go with the new stuff), you will need to route it through the new bumper body and solder it back directly to the wires we sniped them off from. We'll show that later.

Here we see the old pop bumper base. Filthy little thing, click here to buy a new one from Pinball Life.

Here we have new pop bumper bodies, nice and shiny white. Pop bumper bodies inevitably yellow over time, so we just replace them with new ones. Click here to get some from Pinball Life.

We buy in quantities, so we have a lot of this crap for multiple machines. Every machine getting out of here has its pop bumpers taken care of.

The spring inside closeup shot. It is quite reusable, but if you want a new one too, you can get it from Pinball Life by clicking here.

Ok, let's finish it up and we'll see some videos of how pop bumpers are supposed to pop at the end of next/last part of the pictorial.

Click here to go back to Part 1 of this article.

Click here to go to forward to Part 3 of this article.

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If you have any questions, please email us and we'll try to help you. Remember to do all these steps safely and frequently check and recheck your work.

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