If you over-tighten the bolts on modern pinball legs, you can strip both the bolts and the assembly you screw into, making it a real pain to firmly attach legs. I go over the process of replacing the inner plate to fix stripped pinball leg assemblies.
Here are two videos of me completely rebuilding the flippers and flipper assembly on a Gottlieb System 3 pinball machine (Waterworld) – many of this information will basically pertain to most flipper systems on other machines like Bally and WMS, Stern, etc. I go through the whole process of replacing all the major wear parts on the flipper assembly even including the base plate and end-of-stroke switches.
Here’s part 2 (sorry I rarely edit these videos so sometimes my camera breaks it into separate files)
Part 3
If the above is too slow, check out this time-lapse of rebuilding the flipper:
Here’s a short video showing the removal and maintenance on a drop target bank from a Gottlieb System 3 pinball machine – Waterworld.
Here’s a video I made awhile back that I don’t see linked on my main site so I thought i’d include it. It’s a short video on how to diagnose problems with score reel switches when you turn the game on and the score reels just seem to spin forever and not reset/start the game.
It seems like a no-brainer, but I’m regularly reminded of the importance of taking time to survey the playfield of pinball machines. In this video I go into why it’s important and how catching a minor issue early, can stop more annoying problems later.
In this video I pull a game off route and work on it. Discussing the unusual playfield hardware used by Sega/Stern. There was a problem with the optos in the ball trough causing problems making the game kick balls out onto the playfield unexpectedly. The game displays “too many balls” when there is the proper number installed.
I recently was tasked with fixing up a Stern World Poker Tour that had come off route. The game had a number of issues, the first of which was that certain targets would not reset. They would pop-up, but fall back down. Some research indicated this was a known issue that Stern released a service bulletin to address. But I soon found out my problem was deeper than that, and several things were wrong, including a broken bolt holding a coil stop, and the wrong plunger assembly used on one of the drop targets. In this video series, I outline how I identified and solved the problem. Here are some pictures of the work that was done to fix the broken bolt.
