Airport E.M. Pinball Repair - Bad Light Sockets, New Switch Rollovers, Pop Bumpers, Even Flippers!

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening we are down to the end of this gotlib airport repair uh we still have to put together a few things on the Playfield new Pott bumpers and new flippers and some cosmetic stuff we still need to clean the score reels on the back glass and then we need to troubleshoot it and finally we need to do something about those flippers that they've hacked in um now if you watched the previous video we worked on the Playfield and got it all finished up now you may be thinking hey on the previous video at the end there were pop bumpers and flippers on the Playfield how did that happen it's because I haven't shot the end of the previous video yet but I wanted to uh I wanted to start this video so that I could show you how the pot bumpers and stuff go on the other video was getting pretty long so um yeah first thing we're going to do we're going to start putting the pot bumpers back together now this customer has got some little myar platters that he wants us to put on here and then the new stuff so you can see how it turns out this came out pretty good you can see some of the brush strokes and stuff in places the thing was in pretty rough shape whenever we got it I was thinking that it wasn't going to end up looking perfect but I think it definitely looks playable and presentable so uh let me get the myar Rings the new pot bumper bodies and all of that stuff that we've the new skirts uh and the new caps all that that we've got for it and let's start putting all of that stuff back on the Playfield where it goes that'll help bring it all together all right so I put the little myar sheets down they're made just for that I've got the pot bumper all put back together with new parts whenever you get these a lot of times these will have a little point the point goes up it basically if the ball hits it it'll help it not get stuck right on the top I believe is the purpose of that and and I usually put it together in one big piece like that now on the bottom of course we still had to hook everything up and there's just two screws that hold it all in I showed on the couple videos again ago how we took these apart all right so now that we've got it down in there put the two screws in with my bent screwdriver it's not purposefully bent somebody used it to pry a coin door open with look folks we got to do what we got to do sometimes now I'm not advocating prying coin doors open but sometimes you're left with the little alternative you can tighten these too tight and it'll crack the pop bumper body so don't do that come come on people don't do that all right so those look pretty good now you can see that all of these little rings are at different heights that's because of what they have to grab underneath they're just not lined up with what they need to be touching on the bottom so uh we'll mess with that next okay folks I've put the four pop bumpers back together what you have to do first is solder the wires back on the um the lamp socket that goes up through it now this one you had to bring the wire up through the bottom that's just how they had it wired and on this one one's down there and one Loops through up here right and I'm always careful you don't want that lamp socket touching the actual metal bracket because then you have lamp voltage on the metal bracket and then depending on if this waer screws up on this you may end up with whenever you hit this switch coil voltage also on the bracket so there's a potential here to to short the coil voltage to the lamp voltage which would not be good that'd be Boombastic you don't want that um so I got those on there and then you have to uh just put these three screws in to hold the thing back in place and then there are two little kept nuts or n liners nuts whatever that hold the thing on okay now on this particular one down there we had a switch missing and I was able to make a new one and put in there got that back how it goes this thing's got a lot of just Little minor things that need addressed right so I'm going to show you how you want to adjust these things there are two sets of switches and this is true on most of the EM so it's not just the golb games so that first switch there that you see gets closed if you hit the skirt see how the little yellow finger is pushing through the playf so you want it open and you want it to close when you roll up on the skirt from any angle and see how the little small switch that it's hitting it's moving a little bit that's how you want it you want it to move that that means that you're getting a good wiping connection whenever it touches it it should actually move it a little bit and that makes the contacts wipe against each other and it's selfcleaning so if you play it a little bit the thing will stay clean and then the second switch is this one and it's it's actually closed already right and so what you want is when this pulls in it should open that switch and the same thing see how when it goes back it's hitting the switch and moving it just a little bit it's moving the small blade a little bit that's perfect you might even want it a little more than that but that's good enough um and the purpose of that is when you hit this switch with the ball it turns on the pop bumper relay which provides power to the coil whatever coil and the coil pulls down and this pop bumper relay stays on the purpose of that is so you get a nice good bite right if they didn't have this switch let's say they just had this one the ball rolls up on it well what if you just barely roll up on it well then this is going to come on for just a second and it's going to be very anemic and it's not really going to give you a good boom right but but because it has this switch this switch locks on this relay so this relay will not turn off until that switch um opens so that ensures that it pulls all the way in until it opens and then once it opens it kills the pot bumper uh relay right and they do that they do those locking setups on all kinds of stuff in the machine Okay so we've got them back the next thing I'm going to do is uh we're going to replace the switches believe it or not so the little rollover switches were really rusted on this machine and so the customer requested that we replace all of those and it's really not that big of a deal there's one two three four um five 6 7 8 9 10 11 there's only 11 of them and the reason that he that he requested that is because they're it's they're all rusted and they stick up through the Playfield so as the ball hits them it's going to chip the ball a little bit rust the ball maybe it's just you don't want Rusty stuff on the Playfield if you can help it and you can help that so let me show you what I was able to get and we'll start swapping them out so they actually make these new we got these from the pinball resource and that's the part that sticks up through the Playfield this screws on the bottom of the Playfield and as you roll over it it makes this little bar here go up and touch the switch kind of hard to see but you get that idea it's an exact copy of the part that's in there however you have to be careful there's actually several different ones so there's some that are turned one way which is all of these and then there are some that are the mirror reverse of that which is actually this one why they went through all the trouble to do that I don't know but they did and uh the pinball resource actually sells just this wire form of the one side but the other side they just had the uh full one but these are like $150 or something and these are like $3 or something like that it's very inexpensive and then this one is a slightly different one with which is used for the um like the little out hole one that we I was showing you up at the top where it kicks it out into the lane and then this one I guess is the same thing and so we just got what we need to swap them out and get all new shiny switches sticking up through the Playfield okay I'm replacing this one let me show you something you got to watch out for on any of these switches so that's a brand new one I just put in now it's not going to be adjusted exactly like the one that you had but look at this so we've got the play field tilted up now look how um see how I can it can move a little bit before it hits that switch so what that means is when you turn the play field up back down gravity is going to make it do this right so although it may not be touching right now as soon as we put the play field down it's probably going to make that that top switch there connect you know so we need to adjust that switch that first blade that way a little bit to provide a little spring tension to keep that switch up out of the Playfield so let me adjust it and I'll show you what I mean okay so I've adjusted it a little bit to where now the blade is touching it now the the so whenever we set the Playfield down the weight of this little piece of metal that sticks through the Playfield the switch part is not significant so just that blade touching it is going to be enough to hold it up you know where you get a uniform distance out of the Playfield too and if the the noise that it's making they all do that if they're you just don't hear it when you're playing it um so yeah so you got to readjust each one after you replace that okay so I got all of the little switches swapped I don't know what the top looks like yet because we're still working on the bottom uh next up I have replaced the flipper bushings these don't always need replaced and the ones I took off didn't even look that worn but I got the flipper rebuild kit for the gentleman and they came with that so I went ahead and re replace them next up we're going to replace the sleeve inside these coils and we're going to replace this coil stop that screws on the back here it looks like there's a screw missing from this one too so um I don't know if that comes with the kit or we just had to find one but uh so that's next so I'm just going to take these coil stops off and replace the sleeve inside there the coils themselves usually if they're working they're fine they don't usually get weak um they either work or they don't work it's just a big long wire you know so it's either broke or it's not broke Joey I need Joey he would be here he could tell us if it's broke or not so here are the flipper bats that were in there they're pretty rough but luckily you can get brand new ones look at this look at this have you ever seen anything so cool so the little screw that goes in there these were getting pretty Rusty so I got new ones of those too look at that they even sell the screw can you believe this is almost unbelievable let me show you another little trick I do sometimes while I'm thinking about it okay so see how this is the left one if you're reusing the original one notice the little indention where the set screw has been so what's going to happen when you put that back in when you tighten up the set screw let's say that it it has been like this the whole time and you think it's a little bit off so you want it to be like that when you tighten up the set screw it's going to hone itself back into the original spot and it's going to make the thing sit like it's always set so the way to fix that is if whenever you swap whenever you put new shoes on these flip the side pun intended and now the set screws line up in fresh meat and it'll stay wherever you put it something to think [Applause] about so the coil stops they did include new screws so we've got all four of our screws now and I replaced the two little coil stops put the new sleeves in new plungers new links got the uh original paws on and I mounted the flippers back in we'll look at them whenever we turn it the Playfield back down some of these had a little washer on them and that little clip if they're too tight though the washer will bind and make it where the freaking thing is touching this too hard and so it doesn't move very well you want it to be able to for the spring to be able to pull it back up really good like that that's great that's how it ought to be right so I left the washers off we only had one of them anyway it'll work just fine like it the purpose of the washer so that this doesn't eat this all up but there's enough play here that I think it's fine okay so next up we're going to replace these into stroke switches because they came with the kit as well so I'm going to take each of those off and carefully solder the wires back and then I'll show you how they need to be adjusted to make sure that they are working properly and you will get a good nice flipping action out of your little two-in stunners on this game all right there so there they are with the new IND stroke switches installed there identical and if you get them from pinball resource at least they even come riveted to the little bracket just like the original ones very cool um uh and so basically the way that works we've been over this a thousand times but we get a lot of new people in our channel that um maybe don't understand all of the stuff that we've talked about in the other videos because they just weren't watching back when we did those but basically there is an end of stroke switch on the flippers and the reason for that is whenever you press in The Flipper button and hold the button in it will burn up the coil if it gives it full power for more than five six seconds something like that it it really takes longer than that but you'll start having problems at after that so what they did was they designed a switch that opens when the coil pulls in so you hit the button and it pulls the flipper in and it opens that switch with that switch opened you have disconnected these two wires they are wired to the switch so right now these two wires are shorted together so that means the coil of this pinball machine is from here to here and then shorted together from from here to here so it has a lower resistance so the coil is real strong strong Wham once you open that switch you have now put the coil from here to here and then from here to here through the coil not through this switch so it has made the coil the wire that is uh wrapped around the coil much longer which makes it weaker and since it's weaker it can handle uh the voltage on it for longer and or the um you know the voltage running through it for longer it makes it where it won't burn up so you can stand there and hold it in if this switch opens in definitely you can stand there for an hour and it won't burn up the coil um so it's very important so if those aren't adjusted correctly where they never open you will have very uh strong flippers but they'll burn up if you hold the button long enough they'll Buzz a lot too you'll get all kinds of problems if they are open where they never close or they have dirty faces on them where the the electricity doesn't go through that switch well you will have weak flippers they won't do their snap that you want so the reason people replace them is because they whenever they open and they close it Sparks a little bit um on these em and so it burns these things slap up so over time they get pretty screwed up and you probably saw the ones that were R there were all B up but that's about how you want it about how we've got it you want it to open about that much maybe a little bit more and notice again the small blade when the big blade hits it it'll move a little bit watch it move now notice how that left contact maybe this will show this once and for all maybe it'll show it notice how the left contact is a little bit higher than the right contact now it's going to hit it and move it a little bit okay and it's hard to see because of this cardboard thing in there it's still a little higher than the right one but not as high so the idea is that whenever it does that and watch when they open that it rubs against it just a a little bit it wipes against it and it might be you know just a little teeny tiny bit but the idea is that actually keeps it clean so whenever they close they're going that's an exaggerated idea of what it's doing right so that keeps it a little clean and the other thing too is if it if you see it touch and it goes like this and you don't see this one move well maybe it didn't touch we're talking about little tiny I mean you might still be able to slit like a little piece of paper through there maybe it's one mil away and it's not quite touching it just looks like it's touching but if it moves it well it must have touched it so that's about how you want it so those are new hopefully those will give us some nice Snappy flippers but the problem is on this machine we don't have flipper buttons they had them they had them hardwired into the switches that used to be here on this machine so we don't we don't have um they had it hacked up with a wire running up here and connecting to this wire and this wire which are supposed to connect to another switch here that the button on the side of the cabinet when the play field is down connects together but the switch is missing so we still got to mess with that so while we're at it while we have the soldering iron out let me show you something else that you run into all the time let me show you something look at this would you look at this now you could unsolder this take all these wires off and go put it in a tumbler or something and that would be the best way to clean this up but it's a lot of work notice there is a wire soldered there there's a wire on each one of these this is just a general thing that you will see on a lot of sockets this rust and the way these are designed this might be a good one to show it on see this wire you need two wires to make the light light up right this is going to be like the ball number three wire or light or maybe the ball number two but the I think it's three see this one wire is soldered to the frame of it that is not this little ring you're seeing that's under the ring now on the other side of this Frame the the um light socket is press fit to the frame you can actually spin it but it is fitted to it so let me show you another one here so you get the idea if you haven't seen these let's look at this one or let's look at this one so this is the exact same thing so on these the wire is soldered right there to the metal frame of this socket right and this lamp socket is just press fit to that now if I turn it see where this is I can actually spin this but it is connecting this to this metal plate which is connected to a wire down there right so the outside of this socket is connected to a wire if there is rust or corrosion or something inside this right here where this touches that plate then the electricity won't flow through it it won't work so sometimes you can fix them by just spinning them a little bit now you'll notice whenever I do that it's also spinning this that's because the other wire is attached to this little Fork here right that is insulated from the metal frame with a little piece of fiber so see how it's not touching that what it's touching is this little thing this is a little plunger that this ring is touching it's barely touching it and so if there is rust on your connection if there is rust down here where the plunger connects to this little plate the electricity will not go through the light won't ever work up won't ever right won't ever work right so one wire is basically connected here and one wire is connected to this plunger which touches the tip of the bulb inside so once these get rusted you either have a bad connection from here to here or you have a bad connection from here to here the other side of this is touching the bulb so if you replace the socket that's one thing that'll fix it but on something like this you can't get a replacement because it's press fitted on there it's not an individual socket this one has six different lamps on it and it has a bar that's a certain length there's spaced a certain length part um and that's just how it's designed so you kind of got to work with what you got now the easiest like I said you could unscrew all of this unsolder everything now you could take this out and put it in a tumbler or sand blasted or whatever our buddy Mark in Australia he um has a really nice tumbler that he's always showing me that where he gets this stuff looking great um but we don't have one here and it it you know it takes a little bit of time and it's a little bit of effort to take all of that off but that would be the best way to handle this another way you could do it is you can get rid of the cutesy little plate here that's got all the rust on it and everything and just solder your wire directly to the end of the bulb of the socket the bulb will still be able to move the spring in and out so that you can insert and remove the bulb but you get rid of this little tab here that may or may not be making good contact with this little plunger which is touching the bulb on the other side so whenever I see them that are really damaged like this I just move the wire so I'll show you what I'm talking about I'll maybe do this one and this one the other ones will probably be fine um and I'll show you how that looks all right so the first thing you have to do is you have to take a file or something and clean up the top of that where the where you're going to solder the wire to so you got to get that nice and clean where it'll take solder and then you just put a little bead of solder on it and connect connect the wire directly to it and you'll notice if I move this wire we are now directly connected to the little part that little plunger that touches the bottom of the bulb so you've basically gotten rid of this thing which is all rusted up and there a potential place where you're going to get a bad connection uh between there and the plunger so you're simplifying the socket basically now I wouldn't go around and do every bulb like that but you could right it's just gonna make a little better connection uh so we got that there's probably some more like that as well I mean they look there some of them look kind of rough if if you didn't see the first video um there's some there were some rough places on these let me show you another one this one now on this one you probably don't have a bad connection on that that's probably still working as intended however I noticed whenever I was replacing the bulb earlier that the socket is a little loose so you can spin it very easily so what's happened on this one is that the Press fitting of the socket to this plate has loosened up there's a little that little wafer on the top there if that shrinks just a little bit that fitting isn't quite as tight as it used to be um so the way you can fix that is you can either put a glob of solder between the body and this Frame to kind of solder it together or you can solder a wire to this Frame and then solder a wire to here the problem you're going to have though is if that gets too loose what'll happen is it'll move around in the hole and this part of the light the plunger part will touch the frame which will short it and cause you problems probably blow a fuse so you got to watch that so you can the sockets can be fixed up or they can be replaced but like this bar here you're not going to replace that you're nobody's going to make that and sell it you could get rid of the bar and mount six sockets like like uh these and then route a wire to each one and then put this wire on the top so this this entire bar could be replaced if you wanted so light bulb things to think about we'll see we'll play it first and see how it goes and then uh we'll make a list of all the lights that don't work and then we'll uh we'll adjust those as necessary now one of the other things on this particular game are these very targets here these things are really cool I like the idea of them some people hate them but I like them very Target unit and it says patent pending that's because this was the first game that used these and so the ball you got to use your special skills here on top of the Playfield if the ball hits this it knocks it back and so the way it works underneath is we're at the zero position right now I've already cleaned them and everything that's why you can see the dialectric grease on them you see the two little um blades there they are on top of two rivets that represent the home position now in the previous video we saw where those have to be at that position so that it can turn on a relay down here in the bottom the re the very Target reset relay um that's just used in part of the the way that the thing works so let's say I hit it with the ball we need to check this right so we hit it back to there the first position and it has it will stop there right well the little things are not even on a rivet there because I guess you don't score anything if you just barely hit it if you hit it again it will lock in that position and they are on top of of two rivets so that's connected to some money and it'll give you 10 points or whatever hit it again it will stop on nose rivets 20 points 30 points 40 points 50 points right now if those don't line up you can adjust all of that by loosening these screws and moving that around but you need just need that clean I put dialectric grease on them another thing to put grease on is the top of this because you see how this switch right rides on top of it the problem you're going to run into is that whenever this releases it's no longer holding this back which allows this spring to reset it back to zero but there's a little tension there you know and one of the ways that there's tension is this is sitting on top of this so you kind of need it oil it up a little bit another thing is this can actually be bent a little bit where it's digging into the side of this groove all right if you tighten up this spring the problem that you run into is you can't hit the damn Target back so you got to get them just right basically you want these things to where they'll just barely reset so right now we're turned upside down and they won't reset that's probably pretty good but you see that they are moving pretty pretty decent so our hope is that whenever the play Field's down and it's not trying to fight gravity right gravity may actually be helping it a little bit they're mounted here and it's trying to go that way right that that'll be enough for it to reset because you want this thing just borderline not resetting right because that way you that you won't be fighting this spring whenever you hit it with the ball you want the ball to be able to easily knock that all the way back bam give me my 50 points and same with the other one so uh I have cleaned those up and we want to see if whenever we start the game if it's able to reset both of them and we were having problems with it resetting that left one so while we're waiting on that solder to dry uh I figured I'd show you our new channel if you didn't hear on the weekends we've been doing these videos that we call amateur repair time and it's basically working on old radios old clocks just other things that I'm interested in and so we started out doing that on Sundays and I thought at the time well I'll just throw them on the channel and people like them that uh they can watch them if they don't like them they don't have to watch them because they don't have anything to do with arcade games pinball machines and jukeboxes but it's just other cool stuff that I like so if you look it's stuff like there's a clock this was a projector uh this one was a little radio that had a phonograph in it this one was a phonograph um it's another projector so it's just stuff like that right and uh it's just other things that I'm interested in and I thought well I'll just put it on on the weekend as like an additional video however we've been doing that for about a year and our channel is doing fine I don't want to scare anybody or anything nothing bad is happening nothing uh we're not um nothing's happening with our Channel but I started noticing something interesting and uh basically that has the long story is we have created a separate channel for that content so if you look it is at amateur repair time and you can check that out here on YouTube just go up into your box at the top type amateur repair time will pop up this is our other channel and so that's where I'm going to put most of that content in the future and I've got a lot of it on there already so you can go check it out if you want so we we appreciate everybody that's subscribed to it and everybody that's going to subscribe to it but let me just tell you a little bit about how the YouTube algorithm works if you have any interest in that at all because it's these big companies it's interesting how this stuff works in my opinion because that things happen that you don't even foresee happening on our channel from the the very beginning we've put up all kinds of different types of videos so our very first video was about a pinball machine our next video was about an arcade game our next video was about a video game system because here in our shop that's what we do so here in our shop we have arcade games pinball machines video games we have jukeboxes we got all kinds of stuff you know and it's just there's a bunch of old vintage computer stuff over there that's just how we are I'm like that Joey's like that Donnie's like that we like old things we like we it's basically a kind of a flea market mentality where uh when we were kids we went to the flea market all the time now in here we keep it clean it's not like a flea market but uh there's not just arcade games or just video games we have a bunch of different stuff like that we've got some records over there for sale so if you do that on YouTube though it causes a problem because of this algorithm the way YouTube works is you may have noticed that you've subscribed to a channel and then if you don't watch a couple of their videos they stopped telling you that those video that a new video came out from that channel and uh you may still want to watch those videos you just haven't had time to watch them yet or whatever right but where it messes up a channel that does different types of videos is let's say you only like the pinball videos you're watching one right now well you might not care about an arcade game video you know you're just not into it so you may not be interested in watching that there's nothing wrong with it there's nothing wrong with not wanting to watch all the videos and when I'm working on like we did a video on this radio whenever I'm working on a radio you may not just not be in radios so that's not your thing so you're not going to watch that video but what happens is YouTube says oh this guy's done with that channel he doesn't like this channel anymore so he's not going to watch any of these videos we're going to stop suggesting these videos to them and then the next time we do a pinball video that you would like to watch it doesn't even tell you about it so it kind of screws us up it also happens with new viewers so it says hey this guy makes pinball videos here's his new video and it's one of these videos about a clock and so it sends it around to all of the pinball people and they all see it on their homepage and go I don't want to watch a video about a clock and just kind of skim right over it or I said clock it's a radio and skim right over it and then YouTube goes the algorithm goes ah man nobody likes this channel they don't we're showing their videos the new people none of the new people want to watch it it's because the algorithm's shown it to the wrong people because we've got five six different things that we're making videos about so with that said if we break this off into a separate channel uh and in the for the foreseeable future the videos are going to be on both channels so you don't have to go sign up right away or anything if we break this off into a separate channel the people that are interested in this kind of content can subscribe at amateur repair time and watch it and then when they spread hey this is a radio video and they spread it to radio people and they watch it it helps that channel and if I make a pinball video and they show it to the pinball people it'll help channel so it just if you make videos about a bunch of different things on one channel YouTube doesn't really like that now it hasn't hurt our Channel or anything we're still getting just as many views as we ever did and everything's cool but we're just thinking long term so all that to say amateur repair time go subscribe to that if you like the other type of videos that we do on the weekend and uh we appreciate everybody that watches those and like I said we'll still have them on this channel for a little bit longer but um that's our long-term goal so I just figured I'd explain it so people would understand why you need more than one channel so back to the pinball machine all right so we got my brother Donnie here he's going to test it for us Donnie this machine the flippers don't work oh that's not a problem I got some no no no no we're just trying to all we're trying to see is if it will uh see these two oh here's what the flippers ended up looking like people see these two little targets here yeah we're trying to see if they will reset all the way to the front when you hit the start button okay now you usually you know you're real good at fixing stuff so hit the start button and we'll see if it works it's in the on the coin door right in the middle man you're pretty good at that Donnie right here's the bow man I think I can flip with my fingers you can try I guess if you want no it might get you know we still got we just fixed this light bulb too woohoo that was all rusted and messed up but we're getting there we got this light bulb out I can't reach it so we got to mess with that one so folks we got more to do here uh we thought we had her we well we didn't think we had it done there's just there's so much work I mean little stuff like fixing light bulbs and stuff it just gets it takes forever so we're going to have to do another video of repairs on it so we're down to most of the Cosmetic stuff is done we got to do something with the flippers that are a problem I'm going to work on these a little bit just cuz I don't like them I got to still clean all of the score nine of the score reels are the biggest pain yeah I know so uh We've uh I usually do that last anymore I get tired of cleaning them but there's only eight of them on this one so it ain't that big of a deal there may even only be six of them because usually one of them's fake anyway we'll figure it out so leave your comments down below let us know what you think Donnie tell them about your channel a little bit now I told him about my channel amateur repair time amateur repair time but tell them about your channel my brother Donnie is my channel and we're working on mobile homes and repairing them and fixing old buildings and working on trucks and cars and doing a little bit of everything so y'all come over and check me out and uh see what you think give us a thumbs up for filming subscribe to the channel if you havn't already and we'll catch you on the next one there you go folks we'll see you next time