This is a common problem that happens with old electro-mechanical pinball machines. One minute it’s playing fine, then the next there’s a loud buzz and/or the scoring runs continuously or doesn’t score properly. What’s the deal with that? I’m going to show you one of the most common causes.
Switch stacks are the primary parts of electro-mechanical pinball machines, triggering game activity. I go over in this video, how they work, the different types of switch configurations, and how to clean and maintain them so they work reliably.
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It was a nice day, so I decided to take a pinball backplane, bottom board and bring it outside and dissect the basic components there and discuss how they work.
Ok, that’s a mouthful huh? This is a continuation of a previous series of videos I’ve done on fixing deep ruleset issues in EM games, and now that we’ve found what’s wrong, let’s fix it!
First, here’s a video on how to replace the latch relay – there’s another post where I demonstrate how to remove the backplane from the game so it’s easier to work on.
And in this next video, if you don’t have a replacement part, I show how with a little ingenuity and a #4 tap, you can fabricate your own roller for the articulating arm.
Now that it’s fixed… let’s see how the game plays!
Sometimes when you have to do more extensive work to relays in an old electro-mechanical game, you can’t bend over the cabinet. You need to get all those assemblies on a bench to service. I go over how you can remove the insides of a game so you can more easily access the components.
The next video in this series goes into repairing a broken latch relay.
Here’s an overview of a few basic repairs I made to a game that has been working for awhile, then started to malfunction and then sat for awhile. After some time going over all the game problems I do a summary of what I noticed and fixed.
This is a “first look” and an overview of what I need to do to get this interesting old pinball machine working again.
