Connecticut: Over 18 hours of refurb and optimization work went into this 1988 TAXI by Williams. Designed by Mark Richie, art by none other than the famous (or inFAMOUS) Python Anghelo. Approximately 18 hours worth of refurbishing work and optimization work went into this Taxi for a frequent-flyer customer in Connecticut. I’d done some work on it in the field for him, and he wanted to bring it over and do a little more extensive work. So I spent a whole bunch of time doing a bunch of creative modifications and fixes to it. I’ll describe in detail in the video, but it was really nice playing Taxi now; nice-looking and nice-playing.
The original complaint he had was the original pop-bumpers were all messed up; they weren’t working right, they were kind of loosey-goosey, all worn out to the wood. And the mounting was all worn out as well, so pretty bad the way around. You can see the “before” in the video. And this is how it came out…some really nice work here. My wife Maureen is my touch-up artist, and she did a really nice job in there. We also added some EVO red lighting, rebuilt the pop-bumpers with some some clear skirts and it came out real
nice.
The Pinball Repair list for this game:
We cleaned and used Magic Eraser on the Playfield
Buffed the entire Playfield
Touched up the heavily worn-out pop-bumper area
Cleaned & replaced certain rubbers that needed it
Rebuilt 3 pop-bumper assemblies with red translucent as well as white bumper bodies
Modded-out with the EVO bright caps
Repaired worn-out mounting holes like we talked about.
Repaired left out-lane switch– this was not working, and because the previous owner mis-wired the middle three bank of drop
targets, and that caused the drop target to interfere with the switching over here; the switch matrix confused it.
It never worked, so rewired that and fixed that.
Aligned all 3 pop bumper spoons and shooter rod; we put a new shooter rod in here because the one there was kind of crappy, and kind of hurt your hand. So got rid of that, aligned it much better. You have to really straight shot on this thing– powerful to get up there and do that spin-out thing right there, it’s pretty cool!
Tightened down loose Playfield hinge bolts, as they were all loose ready to fall out
Repaired back-glass lock mechanism that basically, they couldn’t lock that back glass
We worked the display mounting and added blackout film for each display for a lot cleaner look
These are LED displays, but looked really crappy, there was no contrast. So we put blackout film there to make it a lot better– it looks
nice and blacked-out where it’s supposed to be.
We adjusted the Gorbie lane switch, and we also fixed their left top-kicking Gorbie coil. That wasn’t working at all; it had a bad switch and had a frayed, broken off coil lead.
We also added a modded-out taxi car for the Top Lane. We kind of wedged it with a little bit of double-sided tape and some other foam and so forth, so he’s in pretty good. We had to actually grind off the bottom of the chassis a little bit so the ball could fit through there, but he looks good there, looks like he belongs there. It’s actually a John Wick taxi cab, believe it or not, that we found. It fits perfectly there, the right size.
Also left left ramp Dracula feed was all wrong too, had to rework the metal guides there because every time you throw a ball up there,
it would jiggle around, come back out, or just wouldn’t have a nice, clean feed up and down out of that left ramp
Rebuilt the flippers, adding two new upgraded flipper bats with better ribbing support. Those are upgraded flippers compared to the el cheapo you can get out there as well.
And repaired three kicker switches that are notorious in these Williams late ’80s games. The pop rivets get all loose, so I take those out and put in a nut-and-bolt situation; tighten them up, they’ll work well forever.
And to finish it off, a new front door door lock and some LEDs in there as well.
So with that said, let’s see what taxi has to offer us here as as for gameplay…
