Fabricating your own pinball plastics and lane guides

Posted on 2012-02-03 by admin

As work continues on the restoration of the Bally Mr. & Mrs. Pac Man machine, I have run into a problem. I got the machine working, but after playing a few games I noticed the ball getting stuck next to the lower left flipper. The problem is, this game used a piece of plastic as part of the rail guide that had one end chipped off, forming a crevice the ball would constantly get stuck on. This is not a printed plastic and this game doesn’t have a whole lot of available spare parts for purchase at various places, so my main option is to fabricate my own lane guide…

After a quick trip to the hardware store to pick up the parts, I show off one of the cool tools in my workshop…

After cutting out the plexi piece, let’s see how it looks…

Work continues on the Bally Mr. & Mrs Pac Man Pinball Game

Posted on 2012-02-01 by admin

In the continued saga of bringing this 1980s game back to life, I begin to go over the electronics and figure out why the game wouldn’t boot up. Normally you fire up these Bally machines and count the number of times the LED on the MPU board blinks, but in this case, the game didn’t even get far enough to begin to start up the MPU. Fuse F3 kept blowing and the game wouldn’t power up at all…

An examination of the schematics showed an area on the power rectifier board where it was likely some components were damaged and needed to be replace. Luckily, these were not very obscure items so I could pick them up easily.

Stay tuned for the next installment where I go into addressing an issue with a broken plastic rail guide that probably can’t easily be replaced, so I have to fabricate my own!

First Look: Bally Mr. & Mrs. Pac Man Pinball

Posted on 2012-01-29 by admin

Fresh out of the truck is another acquisition. This came from a guy whose wife wanted it out of the house. The machine had been sitting for many years and would not work. Here’s a first look at a classic 1980s Bally solid-state pinball machine: Mr. & Mrs Pac Man.

Mr. and Mrs Pac-Man was built in 1982, with approximately 10,600 made. The designer of this game is the same guy, George Christian who did one of Bally’s most successful and critically-acclaimed titles, “Eight Ball Deluxe” (as well as the original Eight Ball game). The art is also by another renown artists in the field, Pat McMahon, who also did the artwork for Tales of the Arabian Nights.

In this video I show you what I see as I go through this newly-acquired machine. You never know what you’ll find inside these cabinets, interesting hacks, foreign objects, broken stuff, etc. I just moved the game into my workshop and am doing what I call an “audit” of it. Seeing if I notice anything in or out of place and generally getting an idea of how much work may be needed to get this game back in shape. Join me!

Here’s a look inside the cabinet: