Big Ben Pinball upgrade (cir 2008)

Archival Article from Pineconeattack.back in 2008.  It's about upgrading to LEDs on my Williams Big Ben Pinball machine. This table was stolen from me back in 2010 and I just got it back this week. So I'll probably be posting pinball videos in the near future, after a 15 year hiatus due to theft. 

My current obsession, beside Metal Gear Solid 4, has been pinball. I’ve been yearning to purchase another table and to head back to the Pinball Hall of Fame and play some of the best pinball machines that, for the foreseeable future, I will never be able to afford. BUT I do have my trusty old Big Ben, the only problem is that I’m getting tired of the flickering lights and other minor annoyances like burn out light bulbs, so in an effort to spruce up my pinball table, I decided to go the LED route and colorize my table.

While some pinball purist may scoff at the idea of installing LED in an electromechanical (EM) pinball table, I was more looking forward to the chance of digging into the table and figure out how my pinball table works. See what makes it tick.

The one thing that I learn about pinball tables are that they are expensive as hell to purchase, and they can get time consuming to improve the manufacture cost cutting components. There’s a consistent battle between power usage and cheap plastic connectors disintegrate from the heat of the power draw. More power the table use, more heat is generated and more damage can potentially occur like flaking back glass art or destroy cheaply made connectors. So to lower power consumption you can switch to lower wattage bulb which are dimmer and generate less heat or the more expensive compromise which is upgrading to LEDs. You can get a variety of colors all the while be brighter, generate little to no heat and keep the power draw to a minimum.

This convenience all comes at a cost. LED upgrades are not cheap. For one single LED, it cost me $1.50. That’s not bad right? Well once you begin to add up the large quantity of light bulbs that are in a machine, well the cost begins to add up and for one LED I buy, I could have bought 1 ½ boxes of standard light bulbs, which comes in a box of 10 for $1.00.

My Big Ben is in good shape. The field was cleaned and all the rubber bumpers were replaced by Sean with Game Repair (now closed,) but I wanted to do something more to my machine. I wanted to make my pinball machine truly mine. So I bit the bullet and purchased about $45 worth of LEDs late last week and yesterday they finally arrived. So taking time away from Metal Gear Solid 4, I began to convert the bulbs.

I don’t plan on replacing every single bulb on the table (yet), what I mainly wanted to do was replace the bulbs that were responsible to lighting up the field and bring more of a focus to my targets. The white LEDS were used for general illumination while I purchased blue LEDs to bring attention to the B-I-G & B-E-N targets. The last and final bulb that I replaced was the double bonus lens. That’s the only lens that’s green. All in all, I am more or less please with the changes.

I’m not sure if I like the BIG BEN targets being blue but I’m giving them a few more days before I decide to make any changes, mainly because they are a freaking pain in the ass to get to. The wife loves the new look but now I’m in a position where the back glass looks weird because of the contrast in brightness between it and the field.

What do you guys think? Should I continue on with the conversion of just change everything back while keeping a target here and there colored? I’m a little concern that the table now looks a little too sterile. I seemed to have removed the warm glow the table use to have. Like I said, I’ll give this a few more days.

[Update:  Okay I really dig this upgrade.  The flickering lights have been remedied and the pinball field looks really nice, after an adjustment period.  If you are looking into this upgrade check out Pinball Life for your LEDs. They’re located in Chicago and it took less than a week to receive my bulb via snail mail to Las Vegas.  So no worries.]
–Nathan