NBA Fastbreak — Minor Restoration

The Machine

This Bally NBA Fastbreak (1997) came in purchased from a home owner who had kept it for over 20 years. The game was in great cosmetic condition, but had some gameplay and sound issues that needed solving.

Battery Corrosion

The game had battery corrosion, though thankfully WPC-95 machines use a plastic battery tray instead of an open frame holder, so the damage was far more contained than what you’d typically see on an older WPC game. Corrosion was cleaned and abated before anything else was touched. Again people, check your batteries regularly! These had expired over 10 years ago!

AV Board Repair

The audio/video board had been previously recapped — badly, and with incorrect parts. Whoever did the work used capacitors way too tall that were actually interfering with the backbox flipper mech! On top of that, they ripped off the topside pads off while doing so, causing a voltage rail to be missing for the backbox speaker amp. The previous tech “fixed” it by wiring the backbox speakers into to the cabinet wiring, and the game sounded awful. After running two jumper wires on the bottomside of the board to bypass the broken pads, replacing the caps with correct parts, and rewiring the speakers correctly, the game no longer sounded like it was underwater.

Shop Job, LED Swap, Backbox Repair

With the boards sorted, the game got a shop — playfield teardown, cleaning, and inspection. One of the wire guides was completely missing its rubber protector, which had to be special ordered as apparently it’s only used on this game. All lamps were swapped to Comet 2SMD LEDs before reassembly at the customer’s request. This game looked clean underneath at first glance with the lamp boards installed, but you can see how dirty the inserts were underneath them, causing a massive brightness drop.

The backbox of this game is interactive, with a flipper and ball inside, and the plastics were all broken after many years of use. All plastics were replaced with new parts, and the transparent translite was cleaned thoroughly.

Result

After gameplay testing, some minor flipper adjustments, and a few switches changed out, this game was ready to go.

NBA Fastbreak remains an extremely popular location game, so a location customer was happy to have this one come through my shop at the perfect time that he could snag up.