The past few weeks have been very busy as we readied ourselves for the first tournament in our area. It seems to have gone over well and now I do a tour of my place after the dust has settled. You may see some of the games I’ve worked on in the past and a glimpse of what lies ahead in future episodes:
Now that I’ve got space to pull more of my project machines out to work on them, I’m diving into Sys80 stuff. The first order of business is to work on a “Jacks To Open” machine, which is a solid-state remake of Gottlieb’s popular wedgehead, “Jacks Open”. This game came with the battery removed (or maybe I removed it when I got it – I don’t remember honestly) but the MPU board was in good shape, but the game wouldn’t remember any settings because obviously, there was no battery-back-up.
This is a simple fix, and for these games it makes more sense to add a memory capacitor than a remote battery pack, so in this 4-part series, I go over adding the memory capacitor to the machine. Check it out:
I finally found some time to take a look at the Mars God of War I pulled out of a hurricane katrina-damaged house in New Orleans last year. The batteries on the MPU board had hosed the connectors as well as the main board and I am set to replace it with Pascal Janin’s PI80x4 board. In preparation for that, I have to re-pin some of the damaged connectors… as this video shows, things are never as easy as they seem…..
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…
Funny story how I picked this game up… I was in Dallas at TPF and basically I noticed this odd machine in the back of the exhibit hall with a “for sale” sign on it. I knew the guy selling it, called him on the phone and made a quick deal. What’s funny is he picked up the game earlier in the day after some local saw a pinball machine in his truck, pulled off the road and said, “Hey you like pinball machines? I have one at my house about a mile away, want it?” And he went over, grabbed the game, threw it into the exhibit hall for a quick flip. It’s funny how these things turn out.
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.