Repairing Williams' 1960 SERENADE Woodrail Pinball Machine - What a Beautiful Piece Of Work

ladies and gentlemen this is joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening we've got a really neat machine here that a customer has brought us to get repaired this is a 1960 williams serenade pinball machine it's right in that gap between the old school ems and the new school ems so this should be an interesting one it's got awesome artwork and it's uh one of the later wood rails i don't know how long they actually made wood rails but um called wood rails of course because the side rails on the machine are wood so this is 1960 here's a firepower from i believe what 79 or 80. of course by then they had metal rails uh do i have another williams i don't have another williams in but a lot of the ones in the 60s actually had metal side rails too so i don't know when the the wood rail stopped it almost looks like hmm this area here was there was like a a cigarette holder it's a weird little thing it's like a it kind of ripples like this and you can put four or five cigarettes on it but the ones i've seen had them on both sides but maybe maybe they weren't original and someone just added one to it but anyway what a cool looking game now this particular one i noticed right away has the wrong legs on it they're too tall so it leaves the the lock down bar the belly bar where the machine is sitting a little bit too tall you see compared to those other ones um so at some point an operator picked this up somewhere and was moving it around and whenever uh he had it broken down the legs must have got misplaced or mixed up with some other ones and they ended up just putting the wrong ones on it so it's a little bit too tall but hey i'm a tall guy so it doesn't bother me nice vintage paint now you could completely repaint this but it's only original once people i bet some of you hate that saying and i don't know what happened here what is that all about i guess that's just old school where i don't know what would have caused that um it's got a very nice apron the apron looks great lockdown bar looks pretty good it's scratched and has uh paint on it and stuff but i believe this gentleman i'll check to make sure i'm sure he's watching this but i think he said he didn't bring the glass because he didn't want to break it but of course we have the back glass i'll check with joe just to make sure but i don't think we have the glass the playfield glass and it's probably a different size than the more modern ones but we'll check into that too the actual playfield which is pretty common for this era is in great shape now it's dirty you might even say it's filthy but that'll clean up a little bit and the artwork appears to be completely intact so let's see what this thing's about okay we got two girls here one playing a guitar and the other one playing a squeeze box and she's got a they've both got a couple knives i don't know that might just be for the kickers but uh there's some um double when lit chests there um the girls are very pretty of course they look like they could even be sisters and they're both pirates i guess so this one's got a skull and crossbones on her hat and this one's got the pirate scarf on or whatever look at her sleeves they're cut off sleeves like a uh like some some uh scoundrel on a pirate ship might have where he cut off those long sleeves and then there's a ship out here in the background i always loved how they did like the waves and stuff look how easily they did that just a few colors thrown together and makes it look really good and another one there it has apparently gobble holes look at that the ball falls down in there and disappears awesome so that is not a kick out the ball falls in there and goes back down to the drain some people hate those because it's another way to lose the ball and then up here there is a kick out hole that probably is missing a piece maybe not i haven't worked on one this old in a while so the ball falls down in there but usually there's like a plastic piece that may just be on the gauntlet but i'll check into that there may be a piece missing underneath um i guess the ball couldn't really fall under the cabinet but we'll figure it out okay and so you got a couple characters on a ship up here with the moon looking down at them look at the light shining on the on the sea reflecting on the sea cool cool cool what have we here what in the world let's go under one of the legs or something we'll save that okay and so we've got plastics here the plastics are in pretty rough shape one point one point that looks pretty burnt up another pirate another pirate three pop bumpers in the center another pirate a matching pirate a dagger another dagger 10 20 30 40 50 selector does that have lights under there looks like it may looks like there's individual lights that are probably going to light up each one of those that's pretty cool it'll be interesting to see how that even works um so yeah cool art one point change selection one point and change selection and it has the small flippers now a lot of people see those and they flee they they freak out oh god it's a two oh god it's the two inch flippers look people it's gonna be all right okay it ain't gonna be that big of a deal we're gonna get it where they're strong enough now look how this playfield is set up okay there is no shot all the way to the top of the playfield so if you had three inch flippers you would just hit those pop bumpers a little faster if the flipper can get the ball from here to there that's all the strength you need on it people these were designed a little different back then there now the games have all this flow in them and tons of fanned out shots but back then it wasn't really like that you were aiming towards certain targets and the ball you know you can't make it there's no shot past the pop bumpers deal with it people you'll be all right you'll be all right you might accidentally have fun okay uh and then here's the back glass it's in pretty good shape there's a couple little spots you know up here and stuff but let's see what we're looking at here so there's a ship two ships three ships four ships i see four ships that's right behind all those women there are four ships um let's be moving son it gets me here i guess he's pointing to his heart it gets me here ball and play and you can see where it's going to light up three four five so there's a girl here wearing short shorts ah and not really short shorts just regular shorts playing a guitar and she had time to put on uh pearls and she has something on her leg i don't know what that is oh it's her boot look the other girl's got boots like that too okay and then you got this girl who was doing some kind of mambo or something i don't know boy this artist he really knew what he was doing didn't he he had certain classes in school he excelled at i can't get into it people i'll get kicked off youtube you know what i'm talking about um this girl kind of has that patsy cline sneer on her face look it up you'll see what i'm talking about um a lot of attitude very well drawn very cool and then you got a cat or something over here he says say cc you got this girl with her fingernails painted this one too really cool and then you got this guy oh god nobody likes a guy like that come on man the hell out of there you're messing up our picture um it's a three score game and then it has a light if you get a thousand points every time i point this out everybody always goes what happens if you get 2 000 points if you get 2 000 points you get 1 000 points i don't know what that is oh it's a falling star look they labeled it for me it's a falling star one or two can play it's more fun to compete this thing's got a really cool freaking theme to it doesn't it i like it so pretty cool all right so uh let me take the lockdown bar off and then i'll lift up the play field and let's see what the bottom of the cabinet looks like and what the bottom of the play field looks like so the lock down bar on these old ones just has these long bolts with wing nuts that go way down through it so you lift reach in and take the wing nuts loose to take it off and then you slide the glass out but we don't have that with us here is the trough these are the old ones where you actually have a manual ball lift you press this little button and it pushes the ball up into the the shooter lane i think there's probably supposed to be more balls okay now i mentioned in a previous video or in an email to somebody actually someone was asking me about the kick switch so on the bottom of one of our games there was a switch on that bottom board and he was asking what that goes to and i was telling him it was the kick switch and so back in the day the way you turn these things off was you kicked the bottom of the machine now not crazy you're not trying to break it or anything but they would walk by and kick the bottom of it to turn the machine off at the end of the night that's just how they were designed people and then you would turn on the power by hitting the left flipper button so let's read this label here advise location that tapping bottom of cabinet will turn game off completely that's how ever made cool okay so uh it's a little dirty but no big deal score motor here you know just like and all the other ones we've messed with there's a big relay bank here but it's kind of strange there's a cover on all of the switches i've never seen that but they've got all the switches covered with a metal plate i don't know why they would do that maybe to just keep trying to keep things from falling into the switches maybe i guess that technically would be more of a relay bank because it's reset by one coil these are just this is just a arrangement of relays that don't really have anything to do with each other they're just next to each other on the uh on the mech board and then some more over here transformer back there a couple jones plugs like usual so pretty standard fare stuff we have a couple stepper units that actually look pretty clean to me look at that not that bad we'll clean them up anyway but um this one says selection unit on it so that my that probably has to do with that one two three four five thing that we saw in the middle which would be those five light bulbs right there one two three four five and these this is the the gobble hole thing i was talking about now i don't believe that the williams ones were called gobble holes i'm not so sure about that but they fall down in there and then they roll all the way down and then they drop back into this trough and it can tell what happened with some switches and stuff it's more relays kick out hole and wouldn't you know it look there's a piece of plastic broke just like i thought that was an easy one though people that was an easy one okay three pop bumpers switches all over to all over the place uh pop bumper relays now look look what this says number one bumper relay number two bumper relay another thing someone was asking me is should both of the pop bumpers fire at the same time in a lot of the games yeah they do on the ems because to make all three of them fire separately so like if the ball hits this one only this one fires it has to have its own relay so sometimes if two of the pop bumpers scored the same they would just use one relay so whenever you hit one of them both of them go down it's just how they designed them i don't know for sure there's no third one on this one but probably okay uh there's the flippers and there's the kickers okay so let's look in the back of it and see what's going on back there so here is the back big old wood door we put a lock on it whenever we put the head back on it after the gentleman brought it to us nice new lock now i got to tell you some of you will know what this sound what i'm talking about some of you won't these things smell a certain way it the best way i can describe it is it's the smell of burning dust and oil i've thought about this a lot that's what it is it's heated up dust and oil because all of these coils get hot and there's some heat gets in here and the light bulbs and everything and there's dust on everything and there's oil on everything and so it's like it's it's heated up burning dust and oil and that sounds like oh that smell nasty no it has like its own kind of smell to it vintage electronics kind of smell like that um so i can smell that now so here are the big six score reels williams big old big ol wheels uh there's the replay unit which they have a case around now why would they do that it's so that kids can't stick something through the back of the door and hit a switch or something and add up a bunch of credits and then uh it's got these little relays i've seen these before instead of having relay blades they kind of have thicker contacts more heavy duty you might say well why did they do that why didn't they just make them like the other companies well some of them are i don't know they must have some reason might have been a patent thing or there there have been thousands of patents on pinball machines so just every little thing they would patent and then try to sue the hell out of each other because there was a heated rivalry between williams and gottlib and bali they were all trying to take each other's share of the market and then you've got these blades here that are where the connectors for the head plug in look at that beefy baby and someone has been kind enough to mark them to color code them for us so we know which one goes where right so we've got our ball count unit stepper unit here and then over here we have our match unit sometimes they use the match unit for other things so it may like if they need some kind of random thing happening on the play field sometimes it goes on that first player relay second player relay number of balls three or five he has it set on five the number match is on or off so at the end of the game a number lights up and if your last digit matches that number you win a free game double number match adjustment okay oh oh look what it's saying double number match adjustment you get two replays five replays or ten replays it's set on two replays so that may be that if both people get if both people match it's such a unique event that they allow you to win up to 10 replays just for the heck of it that's what i want to guess that means score adjustment this is to set the what score you get a high a free game at very cool first player score reset relay second player score reset relay there's actually pretty sparse there's not a ton of stuff in there that's very fixable so there you go that's what we're starting with very cool um i get let me lay that down and we'll uh this board the light board and we'll look at the back of the black back glass and see just how bad it is because you really get the the full uh the full story from looking at the back of it okay so it's filthy um but it's not that bad someone has actually painted it it's hard to tell but it has been painted a long time ago see that so someone has shellacked it or something like that uh likely to keep it from flaking and it seems like it's worked so bravo to whoever did that back in the 60s or whatever yellowed a little bit but um that's very cool i've never seen one somebody had done that to but somebody way back in the day was thinking crazy it's like a like a little time capsule here okay so here is the coin box got a bunch of stuff in it so at some point a cam lock has been bought but it wasn't put on so they must have figured out it wouldn't fit something there is a pop bumper but this is from a newer game this is a that's the standard pop bumper coil this is from this would probably fit all kinds of stuff as a matter of fact most of that's new actually they're pretty new so i think maybe they had that swapped on at some point or they were going to swap it on but we ain't going to do that we're going to rebuild the ones that are on there um some extra rubber rings the problem with saving rubber rings is that they dry out so you can't really keep them too long they get all dirty and you can't really save them this is usually something to do with like the coin where the quarters go in aha look what i found it only holds two cigarettes i thought it held more than that so that's the thing that would have been on the wood rail matter of fact let's go you know i mean i know why he took it off he probably doesn't smoke but he won't mind if we put it back on for a minute so you would have it like that and then while you're waiting all right charlie i get next you put your cigarette up there i don't know how the hell that works i never smoked so i don't know i don't know i mean what in the hell were they doing so i guess they put the cigarette like this or like this so the ashes fall on the floor and catch the building on fire or they fall on the glass and catch the wood rail on fire i don't get it i mean i don't i guess you're playing so you need your hands so you lay the cigarette right there while you play the freaking game i mean back then a lot of people smoked so i guess it made sense they actually make reproductions of these because some people you know it's it really makes the thing authentic and look period correct you know so some people want these but they make brand new ones that are chrome which is probably how it looked when it was new i'm sure that was chrome so that's pretty cool all right there's a little cheap screwdriver we've all got some of these don't we a little square nut for something ah just the rest of that plastic thing in the back i was talking about i think uh-huh did you ever read the sherlock holmes books he said that if you found one clue you could figure out if you were good enough you could figure out everything that had ever happened just from that one clue so if you were good enough you could say look at that that looks like the plastic piece off of a off of a kick out hole there must have been a fight here well that's a heck of a washer probably for the one of the head bolts tons of light bulbs what in the world looks like hmm almost looks like it was designed frosted or maybe it's been painted look it kind of looks like they painted it i don't know it's old who are we to say people if you're if your pinball starts getting rust and stuff like that on it so it's all over the surface of it don't use it delete up your paint it'll scratch it every time it rolls over to play field it'll scratch something up yeah this is usually for something like where the quarter hits it you know like these are i don't know that's the piece of wood we found here's one of the big wing nuts that holds the uh lockdown bar on and then the other one was a small one so who knows see how this ball is smaller than the other ones that may be for the tilt there's the other wingnut they're both the same thread they're just one's huge one small um okay and then the best things oh there is an address label here i'm not going to show you the address but there's an address label from bluefield west virginia now you may know i'm a west virginia boy myself born and not raised um so bluefield west virginia i believe this game spent some time there spent the night in the can there at least once uh so here are the schematics let's make sure they're actually for this game for williams serenade that's all we're going to need to fix the whole thing people that ought to get us going very cool neat old game okay so i put it all back together we're trying to do this new thing where we try them out uh in the um you know as they come in just to see what we're starting with right because we're trying to see how the customer would have saw it now whenever we fix them we usually just go through and start at the beginning i didn't put my wing nuts back on start at the beginning as the line enters the machine and just clean all of the switches rebuild all the stepper units uh you know and work on everything as we go and then whenever we get done it kind of halfway works and then we kind of troubleshoot the last few things but we've been trying to whenever we first get it in plug it up and just see what it does just so we can see kind of the customer their view of the machine now before you do that though you should always look in it just to make sure there's no major issues like for instance the head hadn't been plugged in yet that wasn't really a major issue but if those blades were laying down inside the cabinet when you turn the power on it might send power it might be touching something and short something out or whatever on these ems it doesn't usually there's really not much too short out but you can literally burn stuff up so so it looks like there was nothing loose in there that's going to give us problems um we've plugged it into the wall let's see if it does anything now i don't remember how you turn it on because there's no power switch right i think the gentleman wanted us to add a power switch nothing she ain't doing much but she's humming so that's probably the score motor in there turning around boy it's quiet compared to a lot of them [Music] we're getting more they reset one of the score reels so there's no power switch so i'm going to do it the way it's supposed to be done that ain't good i hate to do that with it i don't want to beat up that coin box in there so the light tap didn't it didn't say a light tap on the bottom well that was fake news okay so here's the notes from when the gentleman dropped it off william serenade one the score reels keep resetting and the tilt relay triggers at startup so you know it's kind of stuck in startup mode two the large bell relay needs installed needs a holder all right three on and off switch and set to free play and four print a game card for it okay so that's uh kind of the things that he noticed and you know his comments and things that he wanted done on it and uh we'll do the rest okay folks so that's what we're starting with uh we'll do it just like we do our other ones we'll clean through the bottom get all the relays doing what they should get all the stepper units doing what they should and uh slowly she'll come back and then we'll do some a little probably do a little bit of cosmetic stuff on the play field other than the flipper obviously needs replaced i don't fall off that it won't actually come all the way off it just tilts whenever you lean on it if you don't have the uh wing nuts on it so there you go make sure to leave your comments down below let us know what you think about this this genre not genre this era of williams machines have you ever played any like this these late model wood rails i guess you would call it so let us know what you think make sure to give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it for you check out our website lions arcade.com we have all of our prices and pictures and descriptions of the stuff that we have available for sale right now on the website we also have a parts page on there where we have links to some of our t-shirts and things like that and then also parts that we use in some of our repair videos so go check that out and uh if you follow any of those links on there sometimes they take you to amazon depending on which link it is if you go to amazon through one of those links or the links down below under this video it gives us a tip for whatever you buy while you're on amazon so you can use our link to go peruse and then buy some shampoo and it gives us like three percent or something like that of whatever you buy so we appreciate everybody that's been doing that and finally last but not least don't forget to check out my brother donnie now we work on these old pinball machines arcade games and jukeboxes but my brother donnie is more into cars and trucks and we have a couple old buildings in a small town near here that we bought in the downtown area that were dilapidated a little bit and we're fixing them up trying to get them ready to rent uh to help kind of revitalize their downtown area so go check out the my brother donnie channel i'm over there with him a lot on that join us next time and we will start tearing into this serenade and see what we can fix as we go through it and see if we can get a nice reliable game out of it for this gentleman and give him uh years of fun with it hopefully so we'll this will be a little series that we do i kind of like breaking it up into several videos because i'm obviously long-winded what's the word for it loquocious i'm laquocious uh but also because of some people some girls don't like boys like me but ah some girls do you know that song some people like that and some people don't if you don't like it don't watch my channel how about that right but uh for the people that do like it uh i like trying to do like long-form ones if it's a kind of john uh not genre era of machine that we haven't done before so since this is a 1960 williams if somebody's watching this that maybe has one from you know i don't know what the where the break would be but maybe 56 to 63 or 64. they're probably all very similar um maybe they could watch all of these videos and have a nice long playlist of every little thing on them and it'll help them fix theirs so we'll probably do several videos of this just going through each little part but this will be a good little intro to it so i hope you enjoyed it and we will see you on the next one this is williams serenade