Rudy's eyelids stuck open

Rudy should be allowed to sleep. With this break, Rudy's eyelids can't close. They can still be opened wide, and relaxed back to 'awake', but when he goes to sleep at Midnight, they won't close.

First step (after taking Rudy's front and back face covers off) is to remove his head from the playfield. Remove and unhook the jaw motor (see this page), unplug all the connections from his head, remove the four screws holding his head into the playfield, and he should fall out into your hands. Once that's done, it helps to take his mouth out of the picture. Unhook the two jaw-closing springs from the back of his throat, and remove the four screws that hold the wood onto the bottom of the metal frame. Slide the wood out the back of his head, and set it aside (it deserves a good cleaning later!)

Here you can see (sort of) the broken plunger, resting in the blue coil. You can also see the jaw-closing spring I mentioned in the last step, which I hadn't removed yet. The horizontal white piece is supposed to pull toward the blue coil, which releases the catch on the vertical white piece. In this view, Rudy's eyes would be closed, since the vertical piece is all the way up (out of the red coil).

Here's the set of eyelids, removed from the metal frame, along with the two plunger-and-plastic assemblies. To remove the eyelids from the box sides, first press the white clips inward through the metal, and then the eyelid pivot should pop through easily. This would be a good time to clean those eyelids, and the white eyes themselves. I'm not going to recommend any cleaning solutions - I managed to get these clean with dry paper towels and some friction.

Two views of the white clip that gets released, to allow the eyelid pivot to escape.

Just like the jaw link unhooks from the jaw motor gear sector, the eyelid unhooks from the open-closed plunger with a key through a keyhole. You have to get the vertical plunger plastic separated from the eyelids to be able to replace the horizontal plunger plastic. The broken horizontal plunger core is shown in the background - it snapped where the metal rollpin attaches the plastic to the plunger core.