Bally World Cup Soccer 1994 – Restoration – Part 1

I will do some post about pinball from now on. I did have a Who Dunnit pinball some years ago but there was not that much to do with that. Now I have a World Cup Soccer that is in need of some restoration. So I thought it might be a good idea to share this here. I have never done this kind of things before so there is a lot to learn. Pinball games is full of electronics. The previous owner did not have the energy to finalize his project so it was left in pieces. I also have three kids that plays soccer so the theme is just perfect.

First of all a list of the good and bad.

The good:

• Playfield looks amazing
• No error codes
• All leds
• New DMD
• Excellent no glare glass
• New translit
• All new rubbers, plastics and stickers

The bad:

• Playfield might be varnished in a wrong way.
• Cabinet is worn in some places
• The inside of the cabinet is not in perfect condition
• Coin door is not looking good and is missing some plastics
• Legs is painted by hand
• Drilled
• Cabinet stickers are worn
• Some minor defects on plastic ramps

So there is a lot to do. I will do some post here to show my progress. This will be my first pinball restoration. I am also hoping to add some mods and use some Raspberry or similar hardware in the pinball to add leds or something similar. I have not really decided the scope of the restoration yet but we will see. So lets get started.

Coin Door

I started to remove the coin door. There are parts missing and it won’t work with coins. However I wanted it to look nice. I cleaned the door, replaced some orange plastic details and painted it black with spray. I did use some primer as well. There is a special technique you can use to get the splatter look that many doors have. Spray soft. Make sure to take a lot of images. There is quite a lot of parts and screws. My coin mechanism does not work but I did install most parts anyway.

Playfield

The first thing I wanted to fix is the Playfield. This is what you will see when you play and you want this to look good. The previous owner have done a lot of work here. However there were some issues when using varnish. He had used one component but were not sure if this was enough. I decided to use this playfield protector. So the first step was to remove everything from the playfield. This takes time. Take many photos so you know were things are located. This was my first time doing this so it was quite a challenge.

Open the playfield and disconnect all cables. Then start removing all stuff. Add the protector. remove the top plastic protection and remount all parts. The result was amazing. It looks like it is brand new. The only thing is the plastic ramps. They are worn. But buing new ramps would cost about 400$ and it is just a little bit to expensive.

I will write some more posts soon. Maybe I will fix the cabinet. And repaint the inside as well.