Cleaning your Indiana Jones Pinball Machine

Date: March 31, 1999 (Updated September 1, 1999)

These documents describe how to completely and thoroughly 'shop out' your Indiana Jones (IJ) pinball machine. 'Shop out' is an amusement industry term which means to go through a machine and make sure its working 100% and ready to be placed on location to make money.

I am going to describe, in detail, how to completely take apart your IJ, cleaning and checking various parts, and putting it back together. I will include several tips that I've learned in my past 6 years of shopping out pins for a living. The cleaning that I will describe will be even more detailed than I do when I shop out pins for my company. You should only need to do this detailed of a cleaning once in a great while. Later, only quick playfield cleaning will be necessary depending on the amount of use your IJ gets.

This process will take time, please don't cut any corners. In the end you will have a great sense of satisfaction knowing that your IJ is in 100% condition. After this cleaning it should be 100% factory condition except for playfield wear and any broken plastics. This is how I shop out pins, if you have any problems or questions with the process, please email me.

I wrote these documents while actually shopping out my IJ. It took me several days, working a couple hours per day. Since I wrote down everything I've done while actually shopping out my IJ, these documents are meant to be a checklist for you as you shop out yours along with me. Go through every step, in the same order I've done mine. If you get stuck, email me, I'll be happy to walk you through any steps. I have a digital camera and can even take pictures of my IJ to illustrate any points that may be unclear. I'm just an ordinary guy like yourself, don't be bashful, let me know if you have any problems in your shopping out process.

UPDATE: I would like to mention, here, that I own a regular USA production Indiana Jones. If you own that was made for another country, it may be different in that it probably has a different software version and the coin door on the front of the machine is probably a different style. It's also wired for your voltage system.

UPDATE: My Indiana Jones is not a prototype model. You may own a prototype model which is a little bit different than the regular production model. Here's a list of differences that I know about…

Prototype has gold/bronze colored (metal?) siderails on the tilting mini-playfield. Production model has red plastic here.
Prototype has 'Lost Plastic' plastic along the entire back wood panel of the playfield. Production has no plastic back there. I'll include a note during the shop-out about when I think you'd want to remove this plastic and when to re-install it. There's a picture of this plastic on the Stage 1 page.
Prototype has three blinking lights on the speaker panel just underneath the dot-matrix-display. These lamps are tied in with the same jackpot lamps in the middle of the playfield. Production models have the graphic on the speaker panel plastic, but no lamps behind them, just solid wood.

That's all of the differences I can think of right now! I have heard there was a beautiful plastic designed for underneath the right ramp. If your IJ has a beautiful plastic under the right ramp, then you really have a unique piece. Most Indiana Jones' have a plain, yellow with tan 'bricks' colored piece here.

Specifically, this shop out took me around 25 hours. I put in about 3 or 4 hours per night, plus a whole day that I had off from work. If you have a digital camera, you may find it useful to take pictures of the playfield as you disassemble it. My pictures do not really show specifics, you may want to take close-up pictures of the different assemblies before you remove them.

I've written some steps fairly long. Please read an entire step before doing it. A 'step' is a sentence or group of sentences that start with a '-'. Read the entire step because I get wordy and sometimes re-word the previous sentence which may be better for you to understand.

Just off the top of my head I'm going to list the things that I've made runs to the hardware store for: 409, Windex, tough paper towels (the blue ones), Foam weather-stripping for the standup target backing and fender washers for slingshots. Tools: deep socket nut drivers (like screwdrivers except for nuts), The size for the two different size nuts on the slingshots (I can't remember the sizes off hand), and a quarter inch one which had a magnet in it so it would hold the screw while I fed it to its screw-hole. Actually the magnet of this tool was designed to 'hold' different types of screw-heads, but I never used the screw-heads, just the quarter-inch shaft. I also ended up getting some more quarter-inch hex head machine screws as used throughout the machine to screw down plastics.

Lets get started!

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