Sankyo Fever Queen II 1993 Restoration フィーバー クイーン II
As some may have seen in a buying and selling thread, I miraculously got the jump on a set of four early modern pachinko machines on my local Craigslist. The seller was asking $160 and offered door to door delivery for $200 so I went for it.
The seller used to import pachinko machines in the mid - late 1990's and consign them to Bay Area toy stores (Talbots, Kiddie World, etc.) as a side business while in college. The four machines on offer were ones he kept for himself but never got around to really doing anything with. After having them in storage for 20+ years he decided to part with them. In the back of my mind I expected them to be pristine for whatever reason, although there's no way something packed away for that long would be as such. Three of the four machines were straight up what one should have expected, imported parlor pulls that had been packed into storage for a couple decades - so the grime of their parlor days + years of sitting in storage had grimed them up pretty good. Two of the machines were still wrapped as they were from way back when, and one of them had a container of 1000 or so balls stretch wrapped to the bottom as well. One of the four machines was extremely rough and it looked as if it had been exposed to the elements compared to the others. The guy was great to talk with and hear a bit of his history with pachinko.
The four machines were -
New Big Shooter
ニュービッグシューター
Fever Queen II
フィーバー クイーン II
Bout Legend 2
勝負伝説 2
Fever Powerful III
フィーバーパワフル III
The idea was to keep one or two of the machines and sell the others to make up what I paid. New Big Shooter was super clean and I really liked its earlier era design but I really didn't have the space for more than one machine (really don't have that either). I decided to keep the one out of the lot I liked most, Fever Queen II, and relist the other three. I paid it forward and listed the other three machines locally for $50, and they sold the next morning. I kept the balls that were attached to the one machine, came to around 900 or so after tossing a layer of rusted ones at the bottom of the tray, and the others cleaned / polished no problem, so I figured I did alright all things considered.
I intend to fully tear down, clean, and rebuild the Fever Queen II and go all out on its restoration - kinda like what I did with the Ultraseven pachislo I picked up a few months ago.
It's a pretty cool machine, featuring three physical slot reels as the center attraction with a playing card theme. There are a couple art packages and the plastic colors seem to be mixed and matched between them, with the paring on this machine the one I like most. The artwork reminds me of 60's pinball style. Apparently it's a popular series, with modern Fever Queen machines being produced as recently as 2016.
After a quick wipe down the first order of business was to take the shooter handle and lower tray assemblies off for full disassembly and cleaning. Of course this was all pretty filthy and every part got stripped and cleaned.
Once getting the lower tray disassembled I was surprised to find not just the usual grime and nicotine staining, but ASH - tons and tons of ash. Nearly two handfuls of ash had become trapped within the plastics. There was also an unusual amount of cigarette tar on everything. I've rebuilt pachinko, arcade games, consoles, slot machines... but I've never encountered anything like that.
Simply crazy. Everything got a full wash and scrub. Upper tray wasn't much better, and I have no idea why Sankyo thought the best place to locate the speaker was RIGHT ABOVE the ashtray, with an open speaker grille. The speaker was filthy as well, as was the volume adjustment board. The speaker became about 100x louder after having all the grime and tar cleaned off it.
Couple days later I stripped off the chrome and light bars. Got the rust and grime cleaned out as much as possible but the chrome itself is in really nice shape, no pitting or other wear, so it didn't need any extra work on the surface.
Light bars also got fully disassembled and cleaned inside and out.
With that the front of the machine was done, it all cleaned up really well and I'm glad to have all that ash and grime gone!
Couple days later I decided to get to work on the inside of the machine and stripped it down to just the wood. I went through and made sure the cabinet was structurally sound and that all the fasteners were tight.
First order of business was to clean the internal frame, all the blue parts. Again, pretty crazy how much ash had built up on the plastics but it all cleaned up pretty nice - and as before, glad to have all that ash and grime gone!
Here's a before and after...
Next time for the back of the frame, keeper of grime! I tore it down completely, every part cleaned, any part that could go into the sink to be scrubbed with dish liquid was given that treatment. If I were to go hardcore I guess I could have bent new rods and so forth but everything cleaned up well enough eventually.
This frame uses a constantly running motor to trigger winning balls to trip the jackpot releases, along with a couple cams and other assemblies. This too was given full disassembly and servicing. I also cleaned all the old grease out of the gearbox and replaced it with high grade RC gear grease. If you pop the gearbox open, be very careful not to lose the two tiny spacers that are on two of the gear shafts.
And the back of the frame as clean as I'll ever get it, reassembled front and back...
I won't have a chance to tear into the cell for a couple weeks, but it'll get the full rebuild as well. Everything with the exception of pulling all the nails. Getting the machine back together again, I played it just a bit and noticed I also have a couple segments out in the LED display inside the attacker, something to look into once I get time to restore the cell.
After the cell gets rebuilt, the restoration should be complete.
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