1981 Williams Solar Fire SS

This Solar Fire was mostly working when I picked it up. A couple of lamps out, a few switches that didn't register 100% of the time, and one that didn't register at all. Compared to projects I usually buy, this was great! I set it up in my garage and played it for a few weeks and got to know it while I was finishing up the restoration on Flight 2000. I couldn't wait to start tearing this apart to clean and rebuild.

Like restoring a classic car, it may look great on the surface but once you get the body off of the frame, you usually find all sorts of stuff that need to be, or should be, corrected while you're there and before you put on a new coat of paint. There was obvious damage to the cabinet and backbox (including a loose neck that a previous owner secured with a bracket!) but less obvious issues cropped up as I started gutting the pin.

The playfield underside was cracked where the trough coil bracket was mounted. I at first thought it was just loose and needed tightening, but it was loose because the wood underneath it was cracked and breaking away. My guess is that someone lifted the playfield by using the coil bracket as a handle, or used the coil bracket as a resting block on the receiver bar, or the playfield fell from the service position and the coil bracket smacked into the receiver bar. No matter - repaired that with bondo and re-drilled in the coil bracket mounting holes.

Almost half of the playfield inserts did not polish up very well no matter how much I sanded - most transparent ones had significant crazing. I wound up replacing around 20 inserts with new ones, both on the lower and upper playfields. On the upper playfield, the 5-bank drop targets had opaque white inserts that were badly yellowed, and while some pictures of Solar Fire examples I found on the internet also had opaque white, most of them were clear starburst so that's what I went with. And I'm glad I did - clear starburst in that spot looks awesome.

The wire harness on Solar Fire is extremely dense. Williams packed A LOT of stuff in this standard-sized playfield. Hundreds of solder connections to remove, tag, and re-do but it'll all be worth it so that the harness can be handled without turning your hands black with dirt and grime (not to mention being able to recognize the wire colors again).