Here’s a short video I did as I was working on a Fish Tales game about to be put on location. I go over a number of things I’m doing to make the game operate more reliably and some general tricks for reducing wear and tear on the game.
Depending upon who you ask, you may get different arguments for or against switching out your old incandescent pinball bulbs for newer LEDs. I don’t think this is an either-or proposition. I think you can do both! In this video series, I go into why you might want to update your lighting system and why, as well as talk about proper sue of lights based on their color temperature.
In this installment, I’m working on a Flash Gordon pinball machine. There’s a common plastic part that breaks that is very difficult or expensive to replace. I go over how to replace this part by fabricating your own plastic lane guide using common parts from local hardware stores.
In Part 2, I take things a step further by adding a metal reinforcement plate to keep the guide from breaking in the future, and I show off some amazing playfield paint touch up work and use lacquer to seal the touch-ups:
In today’s episode, I go over some standard, recommended modifications to the Bally-35 series solenoid driver board. There are over 60 popular pinball games that use this hardware setup and these quick modifications will help make the game run better and more-reliably. They involve adding three jumpers to the board. Whenever I have a chance to work on one of these boards, I do these mods.
Here are some front and back pictures of both Bally and Stern Solenoid driver boards. The black wires are the mods. The other colored wires are done by operators having to do with the coil lockout relay.
I was having an issue with a Bally “Supersonic” pinball machine randomly resetting/rebooting. The problem was traced to irregular power coming off the driver board. In this video series I go over a necessary process to bring these old boards back “up to spec” as well as a few improvements that make the game overall more reliable.
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…
Here’s some good advice on how to paint and touch up your game.
| Color Wanted: | Start with: | Add a little: |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Yellow | Blue |
| Orange | Yellow | Red |
| Brown | Red | Black |
| Maroon | Red | Black & Magenta |
| Cream | White | Yellow |
| Tan | White | Brown |
| Ivory | White | Yellow & Brown |
| Gray | White | Black |
| French | Gray | White Yellow & Black |
| Olive | Green | Yellow Black & White |
| Pink | White | Red |
| Flesh | White | Red & Yellow |
| Coral | White | Orange |
| Purple | Magenta | Blue |
| Gold | Yellow | Brown |
| Lime Green | Yellow | Green & White |
More hints: