I’m slowly catching up on the maintenance of various games and working my way down the EM row. One thing I wanted to do was switch one of the games from 5-ball to 3-ball. I feel some of these games are a little long on 5-ball and since they’re on free-play and there’s dozens of other games around, a shorter game time is recommended. In the video below I go over how to make changes to game settings on EMs like this…
In some cases, playfield lights, like bonus and other lights that may be out are the result of poor contact on the bonus stepper unit. In this video I show why replacing a light bulb may not fix a light-out problem and where to look to remedy the situation, on a Gottlieb electro-mechanical pinball game “King Kool.”
Today I finally got a chance to set up a game I purchased last year and brought back from Houston. A 1976 Williams “Space Mission” EM game, the theme centers around the Apollo-Soyuz link-up in 1975. This game exhibited a somewhat common problem, of the ball not advancing and being stuck on “ball one” over and over, so the game would never end. In this series of videos, I illustrate what causes this and how to fix it.
A recent discussion came up on one of the online forums about the Pinball Hall of Fame and I was prompted to dig up some footage I shot in 2009 so here it is.
For those of you who don’t know, the Pinball Hall of Fame is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, just off the main strip, run by an eccentric but brilliant and generous guy named Tim Arnold who is a long-time operator and has one of the most impressive collections of vintage pinball machines in the world.
The PHOF houses at any given moment, several hundred vintage pinball machines, including some extremely rare games you will not likely find anywhere else. Here’s a series of videos where I walked the rows of the place in 2009 not long after it moved into a new building. Enjoy!
How many rare and unusual games can you spot?
I had a chance to spend some time with a 70s era Gottlieb EM machine I recently picked up. This game came to me in non-working condition, mostly complete. For the complete video series with the early “first look” footage see this article.
In this series I spend most of my time diagnosing issues that are relating to the score reels. I also take some time cleaning various contacts and relays which end up solving a variety of problems from games that never end to problems properly scoring shots and bonuses. I hope you enjoy as I dive into this game getting it back to playing condition and learning along the way.
Nowadays, it’s hard to find any pinball machine made before 1980 that don’t have certain issues with the plastic inserts in the playfield, shrinking and becoming concave and affecting gameplay. Almost all electro-mechanical games suffer from this, as the forces of time, heat and other factors have caused the plastic inserts to change shape. In this series of videos I go over a process of fixing this to make your playfield level and play like new. In this case working with a Gottlieb Jet Spin (aka “Super Spin”)
First step is safely removing the inserts:
Now that they’re out, let’s go over what’s involved in getting them smoothed over:
While the inserts are out, now is the time to touch up parts of the playfield and the black rings around the inserts:
Now we are ready to put the inserts back in the playfield:
And here’s a look at the end result:
And here we go with another acquisition. This was a game I initially turned down, but then the owner dropped his price into the area where it was worth the hassle for me to get. At first I wasn’t that excited about it, but like most Gottliebs, they are more fun and interesting that it appears at first glance. Here’s a “first look” fresh from a some guy’s house. The game was not working properly when I picked it up so it’s going to need some work to get running.
Since this is a “First Look” on this machine, I’m embedding a playlist which will be continually updated with all the work I do on this machine. You can watch the first few, or keep watching to see more work done on the machine (at least as far as I’ve filmed and published so far).
Thanks for watching!
– Mike