You ever run across one of those pinball deals that turns out to be so sweet, you are afraid you’re going to get mugged getting the game into your vehicle? This is one of those deals. A really amazing find that I didn’t expect..
Sometimes you make a pinball deal because the price is great, but you’re not sure if you can restore the game or even if you should. But if you’re patient, everything falls into place. This is one of those stories.
The other day as I was working on my Bally Mystic, I decided to upgrade the lighting in the backbox to LED and document what I consider to be a “tasteful” way to migrate from traditional incandescents to LED lighting. Some people complain about this but I think if you do it right, it’s a dramatic improvement, and in some ways is hard to tell from older style lighting. Let’s take a look!
Sometimes going after a pinball machine takes you on a weird and wacky experience. Here’s my story of running into a really weird character who did a number on me.
This is a story of one of those really rewarding moments when a rare game shows up, and also you have it given to you. Being in the right place at the right time pays off!
As soon as I thought I had the game operational, I waxed the playfield and got ready to put it back together only to find out one of the flippers was out. This was a rather tricky issue that took a little bit to figure out — not your typical flipper problem, so I thought I’d do a video of it and go through the process of diagnosing why a flipper might not work (on a Bally-35 early solid state game).
I was going through some old videos that had been uploaded to YouTube that for some reason were not made public and found this one. It’s a short video on how to go through the diagnostics on these 80s era Bally pinball machines and track down switch matrix issues. I don’t go into how the matrix works in this particular video, but I do demonstrate how a stuck switch can cause odd behavior. In this case, the tilt triggers when a certain target is hit.
