You'll Enjoy Watching This 1964 SHIP-MATES Pinball Machine Come Back From The Dead!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening. This is a Gotlib 4-Player Shipmates pinball machine. We had a customer bring us this and wanted us to fix it up. So we got it in a few months ago actually and we haven't worked on it yet. The main reason being because of the back glass and we'll talk about that here in a minute. But the thing's in pretty rough shape. Cosmetic. The play field, not so much. So we think it's going to work just fine. We're going to be able to get it going. These are cool. This is the era where they had the different size legs on them and it kind of did one of these numbers in the cabinet. But we'll just check out the cabinet first. You can see the original paint is in pretty rough shape. That metal piece there I believe was painted on the original ones and it's all flaking off. Coin door has a lot of rust. The edges of the lockdown bar here, that's from people putting their hand on it. Just the acid from your or the oil I guess from your skin rots that away for a while. So it's interesting that that one's worn and that one's not very much. Maybe it's because you lean on it while you're pulling the thing. I don't know. I mean that's how I'm playing the flipper. Huh that's interesting. One side's worse than the other. Much worse than the other. Okay so the side on this side you can see it's similar. Now it has that thing going on where I don't know how much that will show up but it's yellow and white. It could be that someone cleaned off some of the yellowing. Maybe it's just nicotine or something. See the streaks in it from the white up above. I don't know. The front is pretty yellowed and this side it's pretty much just all yellowed. It has a simple little design though so I think Joe's going to actually just repaint it by hand. So we're going to see if we can get this looking much more presentable. All right so before we look at the back glass let's look at the play field. Now one of the things we pride ourselves on not just with pinball machines but with all kinds of stuff is you have to look past the obvious and see what's under the obvious. So one of the reasons this looks so bad is because it has a piece of plexiglass in it. That's just an old piece of plexiglass. So that is scratched all to hell and it's all foggy looking and so that's part of it. Okay so under that plexiglass where I look at the play field, the play field has a lot of dirt on it but it's in decent shape. Most of the paint is still there. It's got the typical issues where it's got some planking and stuff like that going on and there's a little bit of wear at the kickout holes but it's not the end of the world. Got a little bit of wear up here around one of the pop bumpers but again not really bad. And you know this is a 60s Gottlob. It's early 60s Gottlob. It's a really cool looking game so it's worth saving definitely. But that play field's rough. I mean the play field is not rough. The cabinet's rough. But okay so this is why we've been waiting to work on it. It's this freaking back glass. This poor thing has seen much better days. Let me go turn off the jukebox. The jukebox is on autoplay. We're testing it out. Okay so this thing it's faded a lot but it has flaked away in major areas. Now I have often repaired screwed up back glasses here on this channel. So sometimes we can do that but this one is just too far gone to really be saved. I don't think anybody would really save it. You can just see how bad it is. So I've done worse than that before but once you get over here to the guy he's just got the whole leprosy thing going on and the little girl on his shoulder. Same thing with her. I wonder which one of them's the devil and which one of them's the angel. She's tickling his chin. He's got his arms crossed. It would have been cool to get this one done in time for Labor Day. But over here once you get past that there's like major areas of paint missing with tons of arc on it. That can't really be repaired where it would ever look decent at all. So you're in a situation where you really just need to replace the back glass and you know I don't like doing that. I would rather keep the original back glass. Here's a Williams Student Prince that we've had around for a while. You can see on this one the play field's in horrible shape. All messed up and the back glass on the bottom there has some serious problems. But all in all it's still presentable. Some people would want a brand new glass for that too. I'm just going to save it. I think it's pretty good the way it is. I mean it needs a little work. I'm just going to make it look a little better than it does now and save it. That's typically what we do. But this one's just too far gone. And so Donnie brought it to us. Not my brother Donnie. Rodney's brother Donnie actually. There's two Donnies. Donnie brought it to us and we just told him man that back glass I don't think we can save it. And so we set about on a quest to get another replacement back glass. So there's only one place that you can get this particular title if yours is all screwed up. So basically the only place that you can get a glass for that game and several of them is bgresto.com. And a lot of the basically this guy uses a different process of creating the glass and he's able to do a one-off glass. Now if you have a Gotlib glass like this that's restored basically he's going to make you a new glass if it's in the shape mine's in. And then you have to promise to get rid of the old glass. You have to destroy the old one. Basically it's not they don't have a license to to make brand new glasses that they sell. So they that you have to replace your original with their basically restored one which is essentially a whole new glass. So that's how that has to be done. So basically you have to sign a you have to agree that you're going to get rid of the old glass. Destroy the old glass. This one's already destroyed so it's not too big of a stretch to have to take it the rest of the way. So we've been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and we finally got the thing in. So I'm going to show you how kind of what we received in the mail and then we'll go from there looking at the rest of the game. We'll put that glass away until we get to the very end of the machine so that we don't scratch it or break it or screw it up or anything. But basically we had to wait around for the glass to come in before we started working on it. We just wanted to make sure we had all the parts before we did our thing. All right people we finally got it in. We have been waiting on the back glass for this. Gotlib shipmates for a while now and we finally got it. So we're going to open it up and see what kind of what do we have here. This was made for us by BG Resto to replace our bad one here. Been looking for a while. It takes them a while to get the to get caught up. They've got like a ton of work. So let me open this up. All right I got it cut. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? I don't know that you're ready people. We're not going to completely unbox it yet. I just wanted to show you what it looked like when we got it. That does look like what we're looking for and this is glass baby. I'll give you just a little look. All right so we did get it in. So that means we can start working on the game. Very cool. Okay so now that we've got that in we can check this sucker out. So we just plug it in right? Probably not. I'm not going to plug it in. Now I usually lately have been plugging them in just to see what the customer was seeing. So I used to never plug them in. I just start fixing them and then plug them in after I'd worked through them a little bit. But and lately I've been just plugging them in because the customer is going to do has already done that anyway. I'm sure Donnie plugged this in whenever he got it. But I on one like this I mean there ain't no way in hell the thing works. So I just don't want to fry another. I'm not going to screw with that. I just noticed this pretty rough dent right on the lockdown bar. So we're not going to plug it in. So what I am going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take off the lockdown bar. I'm going to slide out that piece of plexiglass and get rid of it and then we're going to lift up the play field and see what the inside of this thing looks like. I need y'all to pray and hope for me that there's no rats that have ate half of the harness. I don't think there is but we'll see. I had to reach in and grab that bar and pull on it. You never know what's in one of these suckas. There's a picture floating around the internet from way back in the day where some guy was messing with one of these outside just a random pinball machine and when he opened it there was a big black snake about that big around coiled all up inside of that freaking thing just chilling. So watch your hand when you stick it in there folks. Boy it looks pretty good to me. The outside looked beat up but you know nobody's been in here so this looks pretty decent. Big old reset bank over here on the right with a ton of coils on it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, maybe eleven or twelve of them. It has the schematics that will help. Yeah it all looks pretty good. So it has their one of their famous rototargets on it. There's a couple. There's one that looks like a carousel and then there's this one. Look at that. That's how the target's behind it. I hope it spins clockwise. If it tries to spin the other way it's going to break something. Boy it looks really good. You know what this reminds me of is that one we did called Masquerade. Yeah cobwebs on it. I don't know how well you can see them. Probably been sitting a long time. One, two, three, four, five or six accoutrements hanging over here. Some kind of relays and then a little reset bank or something back there too. Boy it's cool. Cool old game. It'll be awesome to play this thing. Look at the front after I took off the lock down bar. I don't know Donnie it's yellowed a little bit. So we'll see how good we can get it. We're not going to do the splatter paint. There's we're just going to do it by hand with a foam brush. You can do this with stencils and do it the right way. Do it with a spray gun to get to get the splatter paint and everything on it. But man you're talking a lot of work. A lot of money you have to charge the customer. So we're going to paint it by hand get it looking a lot better than it looks now but it's not going to be factory perfect you know. Okay so the back door has a bunch of tape on it. I'm going to take all that off and so we can take the back door off and see what the inside of the head looks like. All right so it looks complete. I don't see anything missing anywhere in the machine except a couple little things on the play field. Big old rat trap score reels. I wonder if they trapped any rats in there. Several relays over here obviously. Yeah was it the masquerade that was just like this or was it the uh we had one that had rust all over it. I can't remember. It may have been the uh we did a pool themed one that had the little pool balls in the back box that was similar to this too. It's just that really strong composition back then. Like the way the the metal and stuff that they built everything out it was just heavy and thick and you can tell they weren't as careful with spending extra money back then. Now this white stuff that's interesting. What is that? I don't know if that's mold or it's just I don't think it is. Almost looks like it was just on there from the factory. Some kind of paint or something. What do you think? Should I touch it? Let's touch it. I'm gonna touch it. What do you think? Yeah that's paint. So why would there be paint on there? I don't know. Maybe it's a scrap piece of wood from the factory. Now remember the other side is painted. So the front side is painted white. So it's probably just paint got on the back of it somehow. Somebody stepped on it or had it on their hand or something. The other side of that piece of wood will be all white so that it reflects the lights a little bit better. And then this board here is where the four Jones plugs plug in. It's so that you can separate the head from the bottom. The wires are kind of discernible. They have it all faded. They do look pretty dusty. So I think maybe for a long time it could have been that the back door was on it but not taped on it. So it was sitting open or something and dirt and dust could get down in there. But it didn't really fade the wires. A lot of times these wires will all be like the exact same color. But on this one you can still see you can kind of differentiate the colors. So it'll be that'll be good if we have to track something down. So all in all I think it's a pretty cool little machine to start with. The cabinet's in rough shape but the electronics all look pretty decent to me. That can all be fixed. And that back glass of course was destroyed so we had to get a replacement for that. The actual play field itself has held up pretty good. So I don't know. What do you think? Well I guess we could plug it in. I mean it doesn't it's not as bad off as I thought it was. So the only thing I'm worried about is much better. Oh look as soon as I did it it went back the other way. Let me see which way that thing spins. Yeah see I don't I don't want to do this. Look that's how you break crap. You know I don't like that man. I wonder if that unplugs. No it doesn't appear to. So I don't want to mess with it too much until we get a chance to work on it. You know what I mean? Hell if I spin that around it breaks one of those pieces off. I'm gonna be schlonged. I'm just gonna take me forever to fix that. So we might remove that and then try it or something. All right folks I looked in the schematics and the only way that thing can turn is if the L the O or the P relay comes on. The L relay is this for when that spins through there. You can see the spring is actually missing. And the O relay is the five point relay and the P relay is the 50 point relay. It shouldn't have any way to score that. So we're gonna try it. Now they have rigged up the cord here. Looks like they cut the cord off of VCR and taped it to the other one. All right let's see if anything happens. Now there's no power switch I don't believe. Nothing. Dead or in hell. Let me make sure there's no power switch. Yeah there's no power switch. Nothing. Let's try starting it. Something clicked. All right so there you go. You plug it in and nothing happens. There's no power switch. So we're starting from the very beginning on this one. All right I pulled the play field out so we can see it a little better. They had this rubber thing in there attached to these two hooks. That's not original but they just did that so that the the the wires coming off the the harness coming off the play field doesn't hang down on top of these relays and screw them up. They plug in back there but they're kind of long so that you can tilt the play field back. So sometimes when it's laying here those things are hanging down and touching relays. You got to be careful about that. Yeah everything's cool. All right so I'm going to clean it up a little bit and hit it with the vacuum. All right so I have checked the fuses and this fuse is hella blown. You don't even need a meter for that one folks. You can tell can't you? You can tell that's blown. Come on people that's obviously blown. So that's that. So the fuse that it was. Now remember whenever I hit the switch I could hear a click but the fuse that it was was this one with a red and yellow wire on it and a red and white wire going to it. Okay so that's basically all of the secondary coils. None of those can come on but there's a couple down here that can come on. The W, the E, the K and the bank setup. Now I hit the replay button. Yeah so I hit this switch right here. So this thing is shown. Let's see how it's drawn. Usually it's drawn like waiting for you to hit start. Whatever. Okay yeah so this one would be normally closed. So power would connect through the main fuse through the bounce switch. That's the one on bottom. The shutoff switch I think may also be the one on the bottom. The anti-cheat switch I think is the one on the door. And then if the SB relay hasn't tripped, the replay button switch would get power through here. You hit start. If the motor is in its home position where it should be now. The motor is over on this side of the transformer so it can't work. So if it's still sitting in its home position and ZB I think is like... I don't remember. If one of those isn't tripped whenever you hit that and if that one isn't tripped and if the replay unit isn't at zero so you have credits on it, it would turn on relay E. Okay relay E is these schematics or in bad shape. They're obviously the original ones. The replay button relay. That makes sense doesn't it? So the replay button relay comes on and then it will close the switch on itself and hold itself on as long as the score motor doesn't turn and open that switch. Right so that's what happened. When I hit start it turned on that one relay because it's over here and it runs off of 120 instead of running off of 25 volts. So that's just how that went. So that's why we heard a click but nothing happened. Let's see what's the next thing I can show. Yeah for the transformer to come on to light that up and light that up Wow double ex-squeeze me. For the for the transformer to come on you have to get power from here over to here. It's hardwired and then you have to get power through the fuse through all these blah blah blah through this relay. Either the K relay will do it or the R relay will do it or the W relay will do it. Let me see how W acts. Okay W can only turn on if you hit the coin switch. Okay K can only turn on if you hit the coin chute. So when you hit that switch it would turn either that one on or that one on. But what I did was I hit the start button which turned on E which won't turn either one of those on which is supposed to try to turn on the reset relay. Yeah now I see. So E holds itself on but it also closes this little switch on E. So power should connect through here up to here across here through here and turn on K. So when I when E comes on it should turn on K. Okay when K turns on it should connect this and turn on the transformer. Since the two switch the two uh fuses that do do the lights weren't burnt it should have turned on the lights but it didn't. So that could be all kinds of stuff that could be the switches on the E relay it could be the switches on the K relay. Lots of stuff. So I'm gonna start cleaning switches on the whole bottom of the machine and uh see if I can figure out what the issue is. All right we're working on this shipmates for a friend of ours. I'm going to start repainting the cabinet. Now this isn't going to be a perfect restoration. I'm just going to do a kind of quick and dirty paint job on this thing. I'm just going to repaint all the this kind of a cream color and then do the blue and the red. And he's not all that picky. He just wants it to look a little bit better than it is now. So I'm not going to be going through doing any bondo or anything like that. I'm just going to go right over all these wear spots in it. This side here is probably the worst. Of course I'm going to paint all the legs. I'm going to paint the coin door. And I'm just going to do it all by hand with a foam brush pretty much. I'm going to get started and we'll see how it turns out. All right I got the white painted. Let me put another coat on the head part of it but and obviously I'm not too concerned about getting it on the red and the blue because I'm going to come back next with those two colors and overlap the white a little bit and try to get all my lines pretty straight. While that's drying I'm going to go outside and I'm going to paint these legs here. I just sand them down when they're real rusty like that. I sand them down and I actually like to use hammered paint. So I'll get some gray hammered paint and that'll hide a lot of the imperfections in them since these are pretty rusted. And they'll end up looking like this. I like to put new bolts in them too. It kind of sets them off a little bit and they're pretty cheap. So that's next. I went to dinner and Joey said he was going to work on the pinball while I was gone. That ain't the same. He repainted but the coin door was all rusted. How would I know if it's the same? I guess it's the same game. Boy he's quick. It's like 20 minutes. Oh the paint's still wet. That's how he did it. It's still wet. Okay. All right. Well that looks pretty good. So the best way to do these is to stencil it. Create stencils, cut them out, sand down the cabinet, fill in all the imperfections, put some primer on it, put your stencils up, paint in the body color, put splatter paint on it, then paint in the other colors with the stencils. But you know the best way to do it is also the most time-consuming way to do it and the most expensive way to do it if you're charging someone for it. So you know to be honest to get a top quality paint job where you take it all apart and do what I was just talking about. I mean you're probably if you can find someone willing to do it you're probably talking about about a thousand bucks just because of the time involved. So as a hobbyist though I would encourage you to do that yourself you know if you've got plenty of time to sit the thing around. It's not uncommon for people to be working on a game like this to where they take it apart and they're painting on it for maybe a month or two to get it just right. But we did not paint on it for a month or two. This is probably took seven eight hours something like that. I was a kid. He didn't do it while I was at lunch. All right but it's looking a lot better. I need to clean the inside of it though. We didn't paint that. So I've went through and cleaned switches. All of these relays and basically you're just looking for anything that's not adjusted right. Everything seems fine. I cleaned the switches on the score motor. Again everything seems fine. So we have this relay bank here. I haven't cleaned them yet so I'm going to pull that back so we can look at what it looks like. All right so here's what I want to show you. This relay bank is just a work of art. Look at this thing. If you're into mechanical contraptions here you go. So they have a range one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven. That's a random number isn't it. They have arranged 11 sets of relays on this bar and each of them of course have a purpose. Let me see if I can read it upside down. It says first player thousands relay, second player thousands relay, third player thousands relay, fourth player thousands relay, second player relay, third player relay, fourth player relay. So basically if you start a second player game that trips. First ball relay, game over relay, start relay, last ball relay. Okay so on the start relay there is a really interesting switch. I've shown this before. If I can move this with one hand. I think I can. Let me show you just how one of the relays works. So we'll do with this. All right well let's do this tall one here because it's cool. So you have a coil down here underneath this that you can't see. It's actually down here and when that coil energizes it's going to electrically magnetically pull this plate that way and when it does it's going to cause this armature to fall. All right and it's just done with springs and stuff and on this armature there are these little yellow you know posts or whatever you want to call them and then you have the blades of the switches. So this switch blade and the one below it are not touching. So that switch is open right now and the same with this one and you see one of the blades is long and one of them short and so when this bar falls when this armature falls that will hit this and close that switch. At the same time that's happening down here you've got something similar going on except this one the big switch is a make and break switch so it's it's already connected to the one above it and it's not connected to the one below it but the one in the middle is the long one so when this falls it will hit this which will disconnect it from the one above it and connect it to the one below it and the same over here and they've also put a little spacer on it so that at the same time it will push another one over here to make it disconnect. Okay and so they just they've got all kinds of little switches that do all kinds of things so whenever this plate pulls in it trips like that. Now I did it it hit my hand and didn't do it real quick but it usually will do it you know at the speed of gravity and there's a spring pulling it and all of this right so that has now made all those switches things so this switches change state so this relay here once it drops the only way to reset it is this big coil on the back will pull in right and whenever it pulls in it will push this around which is going to reset this entire setup right and notice it's right in the middle of the bar it's not on the end like they did on some relay banks like drop target relay banks but the most interesting switch in the whole game is this one what happened on the start relay there is a switch here that is open when the relay is up when the relay is reset this switch is open and it's really hard to see it and it's hard to adjust it i would love to be able to show that to you let me see if i can find a angle here where you can see it i'd like to show you that it's open there you go so see how it's open and it's just a long blade and the end of it's bent but if this were to trip i don't know if i can do it because the bar is going to be in the way but yeah you can see it there you go so if this were to trip it allows that switch to close and so that switch stays closed until the relay bank resets and opens back up that switch is really important that is really easy to be misadjusted because it's constantly being bent by the armature plate resetting and all of that right and it on every game right so you have to get that one right so let me show you in the schematics what that switch is doing so when the game is started see all of these switches it says score runoff switches see how they're all open that's if all of the scores are at zero so if any of the score relays or the score reels are not at zero and there are 12 score reels there's three for each player if any of them are not at zero like for instance you've ever played a game on it and scored one point um if they if any of them are not at zero they need to reset at the very beginning of the game back to zero so that switch on at least one of the score runoff reels will be on one if you only scored one miserable point right so one of them will not be at zero that is going to turn on the d1 and the d2 uh reset relays and so uh let me see what they're actually called it's not the reset it's the yeah they are reset relay reset relay okay so that is going to turn on those reset relays now they will hold on until all of those switches are back to zero and then they will no longer be held on and will turn themselves off when they do down here this switch will close because it's drawn in the you know normal position of the of the game so that switch will close back and as the score motor is turning the switch on motor 4c will at some point close and since the reset is done and they have turned off that will be closed and once the balls played unit gets back to zero that switch will close and if the small if the sv that's the one we were just looking at if the start relay armature switch is closed now remember we said it closes if the start relay has tripped if that switch is closed so in other words if the start relay is tripped our jukebox is trying to talk to us i honestly don't know if the youtube algorithm can even tell what song that is i know what song it is but they're playing it on a trumpet i'll bet it don't know we'll let it play we'll see if they make me delete it they may think it's a cover song i'm doing all right well if i have to delete it you won't hear the rest of the story i better stop sounds pretty good brother so it's all reset that switch should be closed fuse isn't blown boom it'll reset that bank that bar we were just talking about now without that the thing will just stay in it'll just stay screwed up right because the start switch will stay dropped i'm going to start relay will stay dropped so if the start relay is dropped constantly you're going to run into all kinds of problems like for instance that will be thrown which means that the score motor will be running non-stop big problems all right so i put the play field back in cleaned all the switches in the bottom plug i cleaned the jones plugs on the playfield plug them back in let's see if we get anything different at all how did i do it before did i just hit the left flipper button let's do it with a card so i don't get electro killed nope that wasn't it one of these days i'm let's try the start button ah uh-huh did you see that a few things turned on the game didn't start but we have lights so we have our first signs of life now i will admit earlier whenever i hit the button i heard it go click but uh it wasn't enough to hold anything on but now we've got a couple light bulbs here those are on the coin let me turn off the lights we've got all kinds of stuff in the shop here that we're working on right now folks beautiful old jukebox a couple em pinball machines a sega outrun wait till you see what we do with those you're not going to believe it this one here incredible but this is the one that we're working on right now that didn't really help yeah there it is so there is a little light for the coin slots the camera can't tell what i'm trying to do um so that's pretty cool so all that we've been able to accomplish so far is to get the freaking light bulbs to turn on now there's no on off switch on these it's a little bit too early let me let me unplug it and then we'll hit that button again just to see if that's going to be a permanent thing or not nothing now remember we haven't actually cleaned anything on the playfield and we haven't cleaned anything in the back box including the jones plugs if i hit start so it's attempting to do something so another thing we can try is to spin the score motor uh-huh houston we have found our problem score motor won't run wonder if it's just unplugged or something i didn't put one of the fuses back in well that would do it joey got painting on the cabinet and i forgot all about it let's put one in all right so i put it back in now if you'll remember when we looked at the schematics there is the primary side of the transformer uh that is all 110 and there are a few coils over there okay there's the transformer and then there's the secondary side of the transformer which appears as 25 volts that's the one that had the fuse missing so but it was blown remember so y'all stand there and watch it and i'll see if i can stretch arm strong we're gonna plug this thing in tell me if it blows the fuse did it blow it yet not yet okay so why didn't the score motor turn back to home position it's because it's on the secondary side of the transformer and the transformer isn't turned on yet remember i'm gonna hit start and it very well may blow the fuse now we're worse than we were i wonder if i blew the other fuse messing with it let's try turning it or i wonder if my problem is i used all the credits i don't think you can subtract credits right now well we're worse than we were people what was pulling in over here you know those 120 coils they they bite you a little more if you get bit with one of them so when i hit this we're getting everything but then it gets somewhere and it stops again but she's trying she's trying we have a little bit of signs of life so we'll keep messing with it on the next video we need to do the back box but uh in this video you know we checked it all out got the cabinet painted and uh got it at least trying to light up so i hope you enjoyed it leave your comments down below what you think so far make sure to give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it for you and make sure to check out my brother donnie if you don't know about my brother's channel he has a channel here on youtube as well uh joey and i work on arcade games pinball machines and jukeboxes our brother donnie i just say my brother donnie just because i like that phrase better whenever i'm pitching his channel but it's both of our brothers my brother donnie's channel has a uh you know he does old buildings old vehicles things like that and he has a farm uh with cows goats chickens all that good stuff so go check out his channel i'm over there with him a lot of times and we will see you back in a couple days where we'll get a on this beautiful shipmates pinball machine