Child's Pinball Machine Project...HELP NEEDED, PLEEEEEASE

[Jettboy]

Hello, mi amigos! Forgive my (temporary) state of newbie-ness, and pleeeeease help me out. I can promise good karma, a heart-felt "thank you!", and maybe a free print if you like surrealist fish art.

What I'm trying to do, in a nutshell, is gut a child's toy pinball machine and place it in a beautiful, hand-crafted wooden cabinet. Most of the internal circuitry will be unchanged; I'm primarily interested in the asthetic values of the project...creating a cool cabinet with terrific graphics and a hand-painted backglass, etc., but I still want it to work.

I can handle all of the woodwork, glass, paint, mechanics and maybe some of the simple wiring (splicing/soldering wire together for length, moving electronic 'triggers' around, etc.), but I'm almost completely out of my element on everything else. I'd like to add some more lights (including flashing ones), maybe graft in a set of computer speakers, maybe graft in a light-and-siren gizmo from another toy and such, but I don't even know if this sort of stuff is possible.

HELP....PLEASE! I'm about to open the toy machine up and start taking pictures of the 'guts', and making some sketches. Any advice you folks could give would be invaluable. Don't hesitate to ask for any reference stuff you need to see or know about, I have tons of photos.

[terramir]

first dun cut any wires just yet, open it up and see what makes it tick, mechanically, and see what bumpers and stuff have switches to make the sounds and stuff. if you can move those switches into the new nice looking bumpers great, then all you need to do is transfer everything and maybe lengthen the cables. Here's the catch if you want to add lights and other sounds, you will have to either add more bumpers and switches and add electronics seperately for those, in which case the score won't be updated on those (if this thing has a scoring system).
If it doesn't have a scoring system hey easy , but if it does you won't be able to add to the score with those other ones unless you dive deeply into electronics.
Doable yes, fairly simple if there is no scoring system, if there is a scoring system you could trick it into believing that some other sensor had been triggered and make that switch on the additional bumper close another as well as trigger the other thing (out need a four contact switch to seperate the original circuit from the other one, but heck that part is easy. 
As for adding speakers, heck computer speakers are perfect, use the output from whatever the toys speaker is and hook it up to the computer speakers input, however if you want to keep it simple for you you need to seperate the toys, so if another one also has sound you might want to go with seperate channels. 
Just keep the circuits seperate, and if these things require different voltages you might need to add some simple voltage regulators.
As for adding flashing lights hmmm depends, if you want those to be triggered by something you'll have to work off whatever that circuit puts out, so if it lights up a certain thing, you'll use that to drive a transistor as a switch to turn on whatever flashing light, because I doubt the board will output enough power to power additional lights etc.
my .02
terramir
PS: some pictures of the layout of the thing from inside and out and explanation of what each bumper outer trigger does now and a sketch of what you want to do and add and the layout of your new thing would be helpful.
terramir