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.
Nowadays, it’s hard to find any pinball machine made before 1980 that don’t have certain issues with the plastic inserts in the playfield, shrinking and becoming concave and affecting gameplay. Almost all electro-mechanical games suffer from this, as the forces of time, heat and other factors have caused the plastic inserts to change shape. In this series of videos I go over a process of fixing this to make your playfield level and play like new. In this case working with a Gottlieb Jet Spin (aka “Super Spin”)
First step is safely removing the inserts:
Now that they’re out, let’s go over what’s involved in getting them smoothed over:
While the inserts are out, now is the time to touch up parts of the playfield and the black rings around the inserts:
Now we are ready to put the inserts back in the playfield:
And here’s a look at the end result:
And here we go with another acquisition. This was a game I initially turned down, but then the owner dropped his price into the area where it was worth the hassle for me to get. At first I wasn’t that excited about it, but like most Gottliebs, they are more fun and interesting that it appears at first glance. Here’s a “first look” fresh from a some guy’s house. The game was not working properly when I picked it up so it’s going to need some work to get running.
Since this is a “First Look” on this machine, I’m embedding a playlist which will be continually updated with all the work I do on this machine. You can watch the first few, or keep watching to see more work done on the machine (at least as far as I’ve filmed and published so far).
Thanks for watching!
– Mike