In this episode of PinballHelp’s Pinball Philosophy, I tackle a universal issue with all pinball games: sucker shots – those shots people love to shoot, that are high risk. Thinking about ball movement and angles will help you understand what to shoot for, and sometimes, what to avoid, to be a better pinball player.
Are you running into issues where the flipper in your pinball machine occasionally or regularly gets stuck? Here’s a quick trick to identify where the cause may be. The first step is to figure out if it’s an electrical or mechanical problem.
Ok, that’s a mouthful huh? This is a continuation of a previous series of videos I’ve done on fixing deep ruleset issues in EM games, and now that we’ve found what’s wrong, let’s fix it!
First, here’s a video on how to replace the latch relay – there’s another post where I demonstrate how to remove the backplane from the game so it’s easier to work on.
And in this next video, if you don’t have a replacement part, I show how with a little ingenuity and a #4 tap, you can fabricate your own roller for the articulating arm.
Now that it’s fixed… let’s see how the game plays!
Sometimes when you have to do more extensive work to relays in an old electro-mechanical game, you can’t bend over the cabinet. You need to get all those assemblies on a bench to service. I go over how you can remove the insides of a game so you can more easily access the components.
The next video in this series goes into repairing a broken latch relay.
Lately I’ve been putting some of my games up for sale, and I get a lot of people who have never owned pinball machines contacting me. They have a romantic idea of setting up a game room for their kids and remember pinball machines fondly and want to have one at home. Sounds great right? I agree it can be very rewarding… but you have to know what you’re potentially getting yourself into. A pinball machine is not like a regular modern amusement device. Let’s go over the pros, cons and pitfalls of owning pinball machines, and while you think your kids will enjoy it, are you sure? Let’s dive in and talk about it!
The other day I was working on a game and traced the problem back to a blown bridge rectifier, so I thought it might be nice to produce a short little video on how to test/check bridge rectifiers in pinball machines, as well as a little info on what they do.
