One Of Our Most Challenging Repairs Yet - Gottlieb "Spirit Of 76" Pinball Machine Left Outside!

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 spirit of 1976 pinball machine Spirit of 76 Joey when was this pinball machine made 1976 yep that's right why did they make it in 76 now this is before your time you weren't around in 76 neither was I why did they make this machine why don't you tell us it's the bicentennial it's 200 years after the country was founded so it Stars and Stripes Forever look they got the pilgrim there or not the pilgrim that's Daniel Boone it looks like there on the side with the uh gun I said that at the beginning of the video they're going to demonetize us now they there went the algo uh there's the astronaut and there's the uh the F player the ban from the uh the Revolutionary War I suppose it's pretty cool look there's the Spirit of 76 plain pretty cool so very patriotic game obviously this one a gentleman brought us now Joy tell us about what happened here what did the gentleman say well these him and his wife came down yep real nice people yep they said they watched the channel hello well thank you for watching people and they wanted to make sure I had it right and they were very detailed of what was wrong with it okay what did they say is wrong with it they said it was broke oh here we go with this again everybody keeps saying that you're always right about your diagnosis I've been doing this a long time he knows a broke one when he sees it okay I'll tell you one thing I noticed that's kind of interesting there's no Kickers look now think about this from a financial uh point of view people 76 that was late in the game uh they started making Solid State Games in 77 or I think maybe late 76 Williams had one I can't remember or early 77 so this was right there right about the end of the solid state games I mean the the Em games but look what they've done so of course inflation you know we wouldn't know anything about that today but you know back in the day they had this thing called inflation um they had uh they usually had a kicker here on on the sides but on this one instead they have two in lanes and no kicker and they didn't move the kicker like there's not that's not one that's not one that's not one and that's not one but they were able to put these cool drop Targets in that kind of maybe that makes up for the kickers not being in there so they they were probably trying to figure out how to make this game and not spend a ton of money on it so they've got a saucer in the middle and four drop Targets on the left four drop drops on the right the traditional three pop bumpers but no kickers anywhere so they saved two coils and two Kicker assemblies by doing that so uh but this is a cool game we've had I don't know if we've had this one or if we had the other one which was uh what's the other one called I can't remember I'm sure everybody's screaming it um but very cool all of these 76 patriotic games are pretty fun in my opinion and I like the how they changed this it'll be more interesting we'll see how that works but uh it's kind of rough a little bit it's got a plastic missing here that's the one that breaks all the time so they may have removed it because of that a customer came in uh so I looked on one of our older videos and there is a round form that goes right here in these three holes and then these four are posts and a plastic piece goes over the top they reproduce the plastic piece so we'll call the customer and see if he wants us to get that I've also found someone that had this one this one looks bad too so maybe we'll swap that too we'll see what he wants to do but really that one I guess is cracked too it's got tape on it I don't know we'll just well and this one's cracked really he might want to consider an entire new set we'll ask him um he may want to do that himself too I don't know the back glass is in pretty good shape u in certain areas but other areas have problems like the one the two the three the four and the 76 you see the red and then over here I guess that's going to say game over and it's messed up so the red is tripping on us but maybe we can paint that back we'll see the Playfield itself is kind of worn it looks like maybe rats have been in there so you've got some wear here where the ball has kicked out but over here look at all this it's kind of usually that's rat urine has done that I mean I hate to say it but that's probably what it is that can be cleaned up up and then repainted so I think there's only three or four colors there so I think we can probably make that look a lot better okay so uh let me slide the glass out of it and we'll see what the inside looks like okay so there's really nothing special in it it's got the original cash box there's nothing extra laying around inside of it uh the pinball it looks like is back there in the back corner so whenever we get these you know they're sitting up on their end so all of the stuff runs down to the bottom of it this particular one though that bottom panel um this little panel on the bottom was kind of abused so um we reattached it and put a board back there to reinforce it before we ever set it up so all the relays look in their proper place doesn't I don't see any hacked wires some kind of little unit here that does something probably has something to do with the drop targets if I was going to guess or maybe the bonus no that that would be the bonus one uh score motor everything looks right looks like just a standard GB from that time there is a bunch of relays back there the three pop bumpers we talked about more relays the two drop Target Banks the coil to eject the ball in the middle there and then the flippers it looks like at some point well I don't know I was going to say looks like somebody's replaced them um I don't know that one I Believe been replaced very clean looking I guess those are original see that unless they replaced every coil in it which they may have so I don't see anything missing so far with the exception of that uh Center plastic and and the assorted stuff what is this written on the under the underside of the Playfield what does that say nothing Bose goes kind of weird Okay so let's look in the back of it all right so you got your reset relays score reset relays you've got your match unit here and then your point relays got 16 score reels you can see a little bit of the just the wear and tear thing's a little rough we're going to save it but it's a little rough it's been neglected for a while you got the player unit here the Credit Unit or replay unit whatever they call that and that's the more modern version of it and that's it so everything is uh looks like the only thing that's severe I mean there obviously everything needs to be worked but the only thing that's a major issue is that is missing so we'll have to see what's going on with that I wanted to look inside it first just to make sure let me see if the drop targets are uh original 1776 let's see what the other side says I've got a good idea 1976 let me know if you need any more good ideas okay the the light hitting the Playfield will kind of give you an interesting view too look how that's all alligatored up they call that that's uh when you go to clean that you're going to lose some of this paint it's just I mean you see that right but we'll do the best we can to get some heavy wax on it to keep as much of that down as we can this thing is seen some moisture and um it's just you know it needs some work so we're going to work through it you can see more of the rat problem I was discussing that's almost certainly what that is all right now if I wasn't filming the video I would just start working on the thing but if a customer buys a game like this so let's say you buy this from someone that's been in their basement or whatever it's been in their storage building you're going to try to plug it in you know I mean uh you're going to see if the thing works and so everybody's going to do that one of the interesting things to me is look how these scores are it's on 60,000 70,000 30,000 and 30,000 how did that happen it almost looks like the last time it was played it played a four-player game and then uh somehow whenever it resets the the the blade on the reset the score reset relay that resets the 10,000 Point reels didn't work but there's two different blades there's one for the first and second player and one for the third and fourth player so I don't maybe somebody's just been in there messing with it so my whole point is normally I wouldn't even try to start the thing because it's not going to work I'd just start fixing it but it makes the video better if you see kind of how the customer would see it because a customer would buy buy this and then think I wonder if it works and they're going to plug it in and just see if it works it's kind of like the vintage radio crowd um if you buy a vintage radio that's been sitting around for 40 or 50 years you're not really supposed to plug them in you're supposed to rebuild them first because if you turn them turn them on with bad capacitors and stuff you can burn up Transformers tubes stuff like that but most people don't really know that they're going it's a radio they're going to plug it in the wall and see if it works that's just how that is right so this thing I'm sure somebody plugged in um to see how it works and on a pinball machine it's not really going to hurt anything if you plug it in and it doesn't work right so I plugged it up let's turn on the power and see what happens all right so we still got a lot of lights so Joey always talks about this people will call them and say it still works I mean you plug it in and it lights up right and Joey always says well if I run 120 volts through you you'll light up too so they've got a flasher in the game over one that's pretty cool so coming up in game over is actually a good thing it's supposed to do that means the lock relay is probably working right um we have three credits on it and I put the rusty pinball back in the out hole we're not going to play it with that pinball especially with this paint delicate but maybe maybe we'll see if it'll uh if it'll start and kick the ball over okay okay it didn't like that so I hit start it went click something locked on started making a bunch of noise turn it off um because something ain't right so let's turn it back on okay now we're back wherever we were and it says two credits so I'll do it one more time just to make sure now the start button is not doing anything so that's what the customer would have found it ain't doing much folks so uh I guess we'll start in on it so the very first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and pull this pinball this play field out of here so we can get down to that bottom uh Mech board and start working working on that all right so here it is with the Playfield out more nastiness here you're looking at Trails left by a rat as it climbed out of the coin box you know so this is the point where you think about things like the antivirus and stuff like that personally I'm not all that squeamish about that stuff um but I'm also fortunate to be pretty healthy so if you're not super healthy and if uh you have a weakened immune system and things like that this probably ain't for you doesn't bother me that much but again I've been fortunate so um I'm just going to clean it you disinfect it the best you can and go with it so all of this like water stains and stuff that's all like rat urine stuff like that that's just the sad fact of this now you may think oh I would never well if you've ever bought anything old or something that's been stored away somewhere even if it's a chest of drawers or something like that there's probably been rats all through it this one is just a little easier to see they've hit this one a little harder and so back here you've got this was the back part that was loose whenever we got it there's just some dirt and things I don't what I some kind of nuts or something so I'm going to vacuum all this out clean it up the best I can and then uh we always use whenever we wipe things down we use cleaner that's got like bleach in it you want to kill it see that's what this is too I mean I can get more descriptive of it if you want but I think you all understand what's going on here right uh you get them in different uh levels of this this one on a 1 to 10 10 being the worst is about a five sometimes you get them and they're a two but none of them are ones or zeros right so there's been rats in it but it's not the end of the world it's not as bad as it's not the worst I've seen I've seen much worse so um clean clean clean okay so I went in I cleaned it up some of our filth here I sprayed down with bleach and then some of it that was kind of rusty too I hit with wire brush um got it I think a lot better A lot more presentable just trying to make it as palpable as possible palatable palpable palatable palatable as possible uh as I went through and I started cleaning these relays now you've seen me do that in a million videos so basically if they're closed you want to make sure that they open when the relay comes in if they're open you want to make sure they close when the relay comes in and you just clean all of the contacts because uh that's usually what's mainly wrong with the machines bad connections either on contacts on the on the relay relays or uh where the Jones plugs plug in um so I did a few of them here and I've gotten down to the game over relay now I've mentioned this a bunch of times the game over relay sits right there it's the first one so let's say that you're sticking something inside the the machine that might be one of the ones that you hit now what would they stick in the machine I don't know the lock down bar while you're working on it or something you know I find all kinds of crap in them but if you look at this game over relay it is all jacked up so so this is a good example of what you're looking for now it's open right now so if it pulls in it will move this down and see how like that middle set of switches by my thumb here so that's closed and when it pulls in it's still closed and the one on the left over there looks like it might be closing and it nothing's lined up right and this top one it's closed and it never goes to where the other one's closed and blah well that ain't right it looks like the whole problem is this blade right here is in the wrong place instead of being where it's at it should be in the lane below it so it's just not lined up right now how did that happen I don't know they didn't do it on purpose because if you did that on purpose the game would never work right like so that's why we're not able to start it this thing is all all jacked up so the game over relay has gamed us over so I'm going to adjust that the way I think it's supposed to be and then I'll show you how it should look now keep in mind we haven't even looked at the schematics yet um but we'll we'll see how it should look and then uh or how I think it should look and I'll show you that you know in a in a perfect world you could fix these without schematics if you make sure every uh contact is clean and and all the stepper Motors are moving like they should and all of the Jones plugs connections are clean the thing ought to work perfect all right so the way you can tell how it's supposed to be is basically the blades should just be pretty much straight so so that blade lines up with that little slun that blade lines up with that little slant see how they're all pretty much straight I mean that one's bent a little bit but they're Not Bent all the way out of the way where they're going in the wrong slot and now the ones that are open close whenever you the relay pulls in and the ones that are closed open so I think that's how it should be we may have to keep messing with it if that doesn't fix it so while I was doing that I found two other ones so that's the game over relay this is the bonus unit score control relay it is also all jacked up it's stuck closed because this one blade is up here when it should be down here and this one's deceptive because there's one right across from it so it looks like that's how it ought to be but if you look this Long Blade is the bottom blade on this one so should it should be in this bottom setup right and then we have this one which is the ball return relay and it has the same thing going on how that's stuck up in the wrong one if you push this out see how they all pop out of place and stuff so I don't know if that just got knocked out and then somebody put it back and didn't know how it goes or what to do but so we need to fix them too so here come the cops I can hear them you hear them here they come there they went another day of Freedom so I think I got all those right the score motor everything looks good I just cleaned all the switches um but then whenever we get over here one of these relays the power lead is um the solder broke so I got to solder that back and then on this one uh you have a problem right right there so there are three little blades that go around where are my fingers and um one of them has come disconnected so I'm going to pop that out of here and we'll resolder it so here's that disc you can see what I'm talking about here it may have still worked because of the way they have that other one but we're going to tie it together with that like it's supposed to be now on the other side you have all of these some of them are tied together as well but look how they're not all some of them are stuck up and down and everything part of that is because of the way the wires are attached it looks like these were added by somebody maybe the replace broken ones but if they're sticking like that sometimes that gives you problems where it's so basically this plate goes on there and then turns and touches contacts if you've got one of them depending on how far down that goes if you've got one of these stuck up then it never touches you know so uh if you've got some that are doing that they may be bent or you may just need to put a little bit of oil on them then I say a little bit you don't want to put a lot because you don't really want oil getting on the end of this Snowshoe here because then you'll get it all over the the um felic board or whatever that's called and uh it'll short traces together so you just want just maybe like you do a clock just a little tiny bit of oil CU it's metal on metal or grease might even be better so let me see if I can clean it up a little bit so I got that back in so we have done the relays found three of them that were messed up soldered the wire back in fixed this thing I don't even know what it is yet uh the score motor cleaned all of those I cleaned this Jones plug because it runs to the coin door so that might prohibit us from testing it some more and I'm going to pop the play field back in but I'm going to clean the Jones plugs on the play field before I plug it in I'm also going to clean the Jones plugs in the back box so basically you know clean all the little posts so that you make sure they are making good contact and then we're going to try to fire it up and see if that's enough to get it to at least kick the ball out or start a game or reset or something all right so we got all the Jones plugs cleaned everything plugged back in let's see if that had any effect what do you think what's your opinion is that going to do anything we're right back where we started but let's see nothing I got nothing people let me see if I can add some more credits to it let's see if simply hitting the credit switch will add a credit no it will not hm well let's try just moving the credit wheel up what do you think about that come on I don't know if that me go up or not I would park it like right next to the other one okay we're up to number four so we started it before with three but it didn't start so nothing folks that didn't do a freaking thing H well I have other tricks up my sleeve let me prop the play field up so here is my next trick oh I see what's going on look at this the score motor is not turning it's not at a home position so is it simply turned off it is ahuh that could have been our problem the whole time people been in there screwing around with it do you see the issue here they have the plug for the motor not plugged in it's in the off position come on PE it the wire has to touch people come come on people the wi's got to touch what are you doing if the wire don't touch it's not going to that ain't going to work without the wire touching okay so just to be just to be fair we're going to turn it off cuz you know it's cheating if I do it hot swap it you don't want to hot swap it now is that wire that's just some dirt I didn't get out of there that's something the rat left okay so let me set the well I can do it with one hand don't let your dreams be means people you can do it with one hand who almost got it Wham now let's see what happens since the score motor can now move so the score motor makes everything uh that has any kind of action happen so for those score rails to reset that you need that score motor right so when I turn it back on it's probably going to move back to its home position and hopefully it will stop all right all right so it moved back to its home position and it stopped so now what happens if I add a credit it might actually start but we'll see okay all right so now let's hit the start button well it kind of started I mean you know it kind of started let's try something else I've seen this happen before we're going to do it again sometimes if the player unit now I didn't mess with this but if the player unit is on ball one it doesn't go through like it needs to to uh start the game I mean to reset everything uhhuh there's one of our problems so I'm pressing this and it is not moving the player unit so we've got just all kinds of stuff not working right here people oh yeah this is this is locked slap up look at that that would do it all right so that's next video so the way this works normally on a golb of this era um there is a relay a uh coil back here let me see if that thing's hot no cuz we didn't have it on long enough so this coil pulls in when it does it moves this one step right and there are about 20 or 25 steps all the way around this thing and it only goes in One Direction so the first position is ball one player one the next position is ball two uh ball one player two ball one player three ball one player four and then it's ball two player one ball two player two ball two player three ball two player Four 3 3 3 3 44 44 5555 keep straight people and then uh that's kind of the game the next positions where it goes to game over okay so when you reset it what it does is it moves forward another position or two and that position makes it start resetting things and then it move once it gets to certain thing reset it moves forward another position and that makes it reset something else every time it moves positions it's closing some of these switches because there are little plastic cams back there and so those little cams close certain switches and that makes things reset and gets it all back into where it wants to go and eventually it works its way all the way back around to position one and then the ball shoots out and blah blah blah so it appears what's going on here is it's not resetting because this is never moving so it's staying on ball one player one um because it's literally seized up I don't even know how that happened we're going to have to carefully disassemble that I don't know if it's just stuck or if there's like some serious rigging going on you know we already found three or four things that weren't right uh so we'll have to completely disassemble that and get it right but this thing never ever ever ever ever never ever would have worked with that like that so apparently it's been broke a long time I kind of get the vibe that somebody's been here in here uh messing with stuff that maybe doesn't know what they're doing now I ain't complaining some some technicians technical people whatever whatever you want to call yourself I like calling myself a repair man some repair or junk man will be all right too cu the late Fred Sanford got rest his soul he is a junk man if it's good enough for him it's good enough for me uh some repair people and man means man or woman of course in this day and age uh some repair people they get all upset if somebody's been messing with it that doesn't know what they're doing and my my counterargument to that is you don't know what the hell you're doing you know a little more than they did but in the grand scheme of things you don't know what you're doing I don't know what I'm doing we're all just trying to do what we can do right so yeah people people mess with them that that don't know what they're doing and they make stupid mistakes and they break stuff and I've done every damn bit of that myself too I've broke all kinds of stuff I've made mistakes on every freaking video I've made mistakes on this video and some of you saw it right so uh uh I don't mind whenever somebody's been messing with it and even if they've screwed it up it is what it is if you're a true repair man you can fix that crap even if somebody else messed it up that's my opinion so we'll fix it next time so I hope you enjoyed the video so far make sure to give us a thumbs up and let me know what you think and what you think about that philosophy and I'll see you on the next one now don't forget to check out my brother Donnie I have I work on arcade games pinball machines and jukeboxes with my brother Joey our brother Donnie has his own channel where he works on old uh homes old buildings old cars and he has a farm with cows and goats so I'm over there with him on that channel sometimes we'll see you over there but I'll see you back in about two days where we'll get to the mystery of why that thing's all seized up hope you enjoyed it