How To Add A Remote Battery Holder To Your Pinball Machine

One of the biggest problems with vintage solid-state pinball games is damage to the circuit boards from leaking batteries. Here I show you how to install a remote battery pack so the batteries are away from the sensitive circuit boards, eliminating the possibility of them leaking electrolyte and causing corrosion and other damage to the pinball machine’s electronics.

This type of remote battery pack will work with almost all major pinball systems. The main thing to note is some games by default used rechargeable batteries (many Gottlieb and Bally systems) while others used non-rechargeables (WPC). If you use a remote battery pack on games that by default used rechargeable batteries, install a blocking diode in the path of the battery pack to keep the batteries from having power supplied back to them. Doing this with non-rechargeable batteries can result in bad things like batteries exploding.

Installing it in the game..

and lets test it..

10 thoughts on “How To Add A Remote Battery Holder To Your Pinball Machine

    • I wouldn’t say there’s a wrong or right side. I prefer to put jumpers on the underside of the board. I didn’t remove the original battery pack so the most non-destructive way to do it for me is to solder the wires from the underside. Obviously you want to make sure there’s no chance anything will short out against the backbox.

      • No, not that. Watching the video, you see that you had trouble finding which way was up. When you were finished soldering the wires and flipped the board over to the front, the look on yor face was priceless! 😉

        I understand that attaching your leads to the underside is fine if you don’t remove the original holder, what I was stating was that your lead the wires to the wrong side of the board, since it was upside down…I think, just my opinion, that you meant for them to run to the left of the cabinet, to attach the new holder.

  1. Oooh, yea.. I noticed that. Then again I wasn’t sure if I was going to mount the battery pack on the inside of the backbox, or sit it on the floor inside, but I probably wasn’t fully-thinking about that. Typical. I am too busy trying to make a concise video and not have a hundred, “ums” and “ohs” in my speech that I sometimes don’t take a moment to think about what I’m doing. This is the problem when there is no script and no editing. I’m thinking, “ok, I’m going to put a remote battery holder on, so let’s turn the camera on and do it!” In reality, I’d prefer to stop the camera several more times and prep things better. But since I don’t edit the video, I try to minimize how many times I pause the recording – every time I do that’s another separate YouTube video. Another reason for no editing is I’m recording in HD, and editing 1080p video is probably super time-consuming, so this way I have full HD tutorials, even if they are rough. But yea, the direction in which I wanted to run the leads… I probably could have thought about that better… LOL

    • You know, after reading through this, I never said it. GREAT VIDEO! There are a lot of people out there that you answered questions for! AWESOME work!!!

  2. Pingback: bally black rose battery leak on mpu board fix | Pinball Help

  3. Thanks for the advice, although when I first hooked it up one of my new batterys exploded after about 1-2 min of having the machine, so I put rechargables in and they were too hot to touch after 10 mins, so on the positive side of the wire going to the board I chopped in a diode, first time the wrong way another batterie popped, 2nd attempt with the diode right way around it has worked great, thanks for the advice, and I have refered friends to your page cheers Vince

  4. Awesome video! This is exactly what I need to do to my Creature of the Black Lagoon pinball machine. Any tips on what type of solder to use?

    • Just basic solder will work. Don’t need anything special. However if you use any flux, do not use “plumber’s flux” because it can damage electric components.

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