When a broken switch isn’t a broken switch?

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Sometimes what you think is wrong isn’t what’s really wrong. This is why our eyes and our mind are the best tools we can use to repair machines. In this video, I take a look at what appears to be a broken switch in the shooter lane of a Data East Guns and Roses pinball machine. The switch appears to be flaky and intermittent and manual testing of the switch seems to indicate that it won’t work properly and needs to be replaced, but all is not as it seems…

Making a pinball board test rig using a PC power supply

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Here’s a quick video that shows how to take an old PC power supply you may have laying around and use it to power up pinball boards for testing. I use the Bally-35 MPU board as an example of how we can set this up to do board work on the MPU while it’s outside of the actual pinball machine. This is great for testing things while you’re refurbishing a board that’s been giving you problems.

First Look: 1968 Gottlieb Target Pool – looking over a new game before turning it on

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This is a first look at a 1968 Gottlieb wedgehead electro-mechanical pinball machine “Target Pool”. I unloaded it and what you see is what I see in real time as I take a look at the machine and what needs to be done with it. This video goes over a few things that I typically do before I even try to turn a game on.

The Great Switch Matrix Wild Goose Chase!

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Here are six videos of an 8 part series of clips I shot this past week while working on restoring a Bally Theatre of Magic game.

What’s interesting about this series is you can really follow along with me as I fumble around trying to figure out what’s wrong. This is an all too common path many enthusiasts take which often leads them back to the beginning of the trail and emphasizes a number of common troubleshooting principals.

At this point, I have a working game except for two minor glitches with switches: An opto in the ball trough is not working, and it’s causing the game to kick balls into the shooter lane when powered up, and the EOS switches on the flippers are not being registered by the MPU. The solution to both of these issues was finally found and may or may not be what you expect. Watch the series to find out!

Tips and Tricks for touching up damaged/worn pinball playfield graphics

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I recently picked up a very nice condition game but it had an odd damaged section in the middle. Obviously this needs to be fixed and in this series, my lovely assistant Brandi, helps me with playfield touch-ups and gives us some tips and tricks.

Here’s a picture of what the game looked like before:

kos pf damage

First Look: Bally Kings of Steel Pinball – bringing a dead MPU back to life

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This is a nice video series I’ve been working on for the last 2-3 weeks involving a very nice-condition, 1984 Bally “Kings of Steel” pinball machine – you just don’t see this game very often. I think I’ve actually never played one before so I was psyched to pick up the game. Unfortunately, like most of the time, it didn’t work — this game would not boot up and had some obvious issues. Here is a video playlist of my work thus far getting the MPU board back in action. This is a particularly good sequence going over how to trace issues on the MPU board, and in this case, it wasn’t a typical battery-leaking-damage situation. Something else was wrong as you’ll see..