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.”
This is another one of those video series where I thought to myself, “If I were smart I would edit this.” But then I thought, I can’t be the ultimate pinball repair guru and I’m not really trying. If I have some kind of “angle” it’s that I’m doing a FPS (First-Person-Shooter) perspective to the hobby, collecting and restoring. And often times when you’re in an FPS, you poke your head down the wrong hall and get fragged. This is kind of how this video series starts off but it takes part 3 to realize the plot twist…
Ok I’ll get off confusing metaphors and back to pinball repair..
The problem I had was when I got this Bally Mystic, one of the targets was broken. I had ordered replacement targets. I opted for the same style as the side targets even though on many Bally Mystics, for some reason, the front targets are bullseyes and the side targets have explosion graphics on them. Go figure? Anyway, after replacing the targets I discovered that two of them would often get stuck in the “up” position and would often not retract when hit. I knew the springs on some of the targets were old and had “lost their zest” (that’s an official technical term by the way). So I thought I’d make a video on replacing the springs, showing an alternate source for some of the components as well as a trick to make an old spring kinda new. Along the way I discovered the real reason why the drop targets weren’t resetting…
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.
In taking an initial look at the latest game I picked up, this Bally “Mystic”, as always my main concern is checking to make sure there’s no significant battery damage on the game. What’s interesting is when I looked at the game, there was no battery on the MPU board. The owners insisted the game saved the high scores, but I didn’t see how? Was there a battery on the underside of the board? I had to pull the MPU out to see.
What I saw was a board that someone had repaired, that had leaking batteries on it. They simply pulled the board and replaced a few damaged components and did not put a battery back in. But they created another issue by not fully-cleaning the board, and as a result, the damage from the leaking battery, even though it was long gone, continued…
I recently picked up a Funhouse as part of a trade deal I did. This game is in pretty nice shape, but it needs a little work here and there. Rudy stopped working and someone tried to “fix” it but didn’t put things back together the right way as I later found out. Here is the video series of me pulling the game apart and trying to make things work…