Troubleshooting and Testing a 1963 Gottlieb E.M. SWING ALONG Pinball Machine With No Schematics!

ladies and gentlemen this is joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today we have been working on this 1963 cat lib swing along pinball machine which apparently was the first pinball machine to feature swinging targets which we now call spinners they had a trumpet a drum and a saxophone check that out so we've been working on this old game we had a lady come in and really wants to buy it but we have to fix it before she can buy it so uh we did a video already on this where we went through checked everything out cleaned everything adjusted everything and then at the end of the video we tried to start it up and play it and it didn't work but that's typical that's usually how that goes but now we've cleaned everything so we're to the point now where we just need to fix everything so we'll uh we'll see what we can accomplish on that now i made a list while i was going through it of stuff that was suspiciously screwed up this is our printing company down the road in gastonia we always show this just for our english fans right okay so here's what i found in the game so far just looking at it right so the 115 volt hold relay is disabled it's missing they have the the switches connected so that the black and red wires are always connected and the black and orange wires can never connect which is what apparently what the relay would do if it was off so they've just bent bent the switches so we need to check and see what that does the brake is missing on the score motor which is this little metal piece that makes it stop in the correct place every time so that might be an issue uh the bell grommet is all wobbly so the bell is kind of hanging in the back so i need a new bell grommet and then one of the other bells is missing so that's what i've found so far so i've ordered all this stuff and it's on the way i also figured out that one of the score reels has a broken piece inside of it so i also ordered that so it's coming it's just hanging behind the game right now so it's coming so whenever we plugged it in it didn't it didn't work right it did all kinds of crazy stuff it didn't reset um it uh it didn't score right the one point relay locked on all kinds of crap like that so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn it back on and see what doesn't happen first like the resetting and then we're just going to go through it piece by piece and try to fix it i've got the schematics kind of i don't have the actual schematics but there was a nice french gentleman on a french website that made a document in french that explains how all of the uh schematics work so i'm gonna try to use that to fix it that sounds fun to me now i don't speak french or anything like that but i think i should be able to figure out i mean they're all latin languages right shouldn't be that big of a deal okay so uh the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna plug it in and then we'll see what happens and then we'll try to start it and we'll see what happens and as we go we'll write down stuff on this notepad and then try to suss it out what do you think about that okay so i plugged it in and it came up and says tilt that's interesting that there's a tilt for the second player and a tilt for the first player huh that might be interesting once we get it going to see what the difference in that is um so she's tilted so let's try to start it and then i'm probably going to unplug it because it's going to do crazy stuff so notice the scores it's at 373 and blank well that's a little better what the what the [Music] okay so the one point relay is stuck let's unplug it if you've got a relay sticking on you don't want to leave it on it'll burn that thing up but you do want to leave it on long enough to figure out what the world was going on so you heard a couple things there this time it reset the relays which it didn't i mean the scores which it didn't do last time so maybe it's christine itself could be right okay so this uh we had two things going on this was going boom like that it's very technical term right and then this one wasn't really making any noise but if you look carefully it was stuck down hell it's stuck down now that's interesting well that could be our whole problem it's stuck see this is a regular one so there's movement and then it springs back well this one is stuck that's probably going to be our problem i've just got a a blade bit or something so why was this one going it's because the coil was pulled in but because the one uh point relay was still stuck on it never came back out so the zero to nine unit is connected to every time you score one point it turns this and this is used probably for like random features so matching and things like that they may have some lights that move around on the play field or something but so this one was the one making all the noise would make you think that was the problem that's probably not the problem it's probably this one but like i said see it's stuck so let me see if i can figure out why that is and then we'll try it again okay so one of the blades was just bent out of the little [Music] um actuator or whatever and uh when i mess with it i got to free back up turned it back on and now it's not locking on but check this out if i hit it it does so that time it didn't but look what happened we advanced one point so now it's stuck did we advance a point so i think if you look you see sparks and stuff i think it's just the switches are not quite happy so whenever that pulls in i'm gonna have problems with the brightness on this video folks you're just going to have to deal with it being too bright or too dark sometimes whenever you score a point what it does is the switch on the play field pulls in the one point relay and then the one point relay pulls in the one point score reel but they have this they have it wired in such a way that the one point um relay stays locked on until the one point reel turns all the way around now why would i do that because if you hit a point if you hit something that's one point and you hit it really quick well if the ball is only on it for a second that would barely be enough time for the one point relay to pull in and then there might not be enough time for the power to flow through that and then they'll make the one point reel pull in as well so they they set it up so as soon as that one point relay comes in it stays in until the reel turns around that way the ball can roll off the one point whatever on the play field and you don't have to worry about it uh not being on there long enough to score the point so we're going to test it on the play field here i would imagine these stand ups here give us one point that was 10 see the 10's doing the same thing i know it wasn't one so if we hit something that's one point we're having trouble where it doesn't always go all the way around which is telling me that it's something either the whatever pin on the one point relay sends the signal isn't sending it or the coil is having trouble pulling in and um opening up the switch to kill the power to the one point relay so i'm gonna look at those and i'll tell you what i run into okay folks so i looked on the reel and the the uh coil on the reel has a white and gray wire going to it i mean a white and red wire going to it and so i looked on the one point relay and sure enough the switch on the back has a white and red wire and when i look that switch was gapped a little bit farther apart than the rest so i cleaned it a little better and then i made it where it's a little closer and now i did that with the power off restarted it seems like we're getting there so let's see if our pot bumpers do it too yes okay so the red one is not always scoring but that could be when i was not scoring 10 either so i'm gonna get rid of the one point relay stuck and then we're going to move along to red pop doesn't always score one point it may not score 10 points right either but we don't know yet look we've got we've got light issues the play field lights are not on and the back glass lights are not on the one player and the playfield lights so what's that all about one player and playfield lights are out that kind of sounds to me like it might be the score motor the score motor uh not having that brake on it maybe it's not stopping at just the right spot to turn on the lights or something or it could be like the game over relay since i didn't get very far and then reset it maybe it didn't start up right or something i don't know okay green one is also not scoring but the yellow one is still scoring green pop not scoring one point if i can read it people what's it matter okay purple one works fun so the purple one and the yellow one worked fine but these two don't i'm wondering if there's something going on with the 10 point thing right okay so 10 points lights yellow let's see if we get 10 let's see if we get 10 points we do but it didn't light the yellow one nothing's lit so let's see if it rolls over to our hundred it did it did all right so let's see if this one gives us ten that should like the green it does give us 10 10 and lights the red 10 and lights the purple all right so all of those stand up 10 point ones are working that's pretty cool um this should give us 20. very slick 30 50. how sweet it is 30 and 20. whoa what what fully what what happened [Music] what in the world let's do it again okay so the 20's giving us 60 each time and 40 that time and it's just the left one the right one doesn't do it yeah it does okay so the 20 well let's see if the 31 does it again now thirty one's fine okay so the 20 point rollovers give you too many points 20 point rollovers score multiple times that's an interesting one why in the world would it do that okay what else do we have um we don't know about the lights and the pop bumpers that's about it we've got some other ones here that say certain points when lit and that they will light the swinging targets now we haven't cleaned the play field or anything yet but so these say 10 points when lit i wonder if they're one point when not lit yes okay interesting okay uh so none of those are lit yet so this would light one swinging target gave me 50 points i suppose how y'all doing tonight so it seems like this one is giving us 50 points because this must be lit or something okay uh which means it probably lit up some of these to make them 10 now instead of one that one's still one that one's about ten but the bulb isn't lit and that was still one okay so it looks like most of that stuff's working so we've got a got most of our stuff figured out we need to get the light bulbs back on figure out what's going on with that and then what we wrote down so interesting okay so first let's see if we can figure out what makes the first player lights come on and why our playfield lights are not on it might just be a loose connection or it might have blew a fuse or something okay so remember earlier it was tilted so the way the tilt works is there's just this one switch on the tilt relay and but when that switch opens it kills this relay which is the 30 volt hold relay right and the 30 volt hold relay has a bunch of switches on it and one of them [Music] is this top one here that i got kind of clean but i guess it wasn't clean enough because if you mess with that it gives you all your lights back so we got all of our playfield lights back and we got our one player lights back and all of that so i'm going to turn it off clean that see if that gets it a little better and then we can test some more stuff on the play field uh that's actually uh light driven okay so what i got it back up and running one of the cleanest switch and everything one of the interesting things about this machine is that uh this was from the era where they just kind of held over bonuses and stuff so there's certain things like lighting up the pop bumpers that it just stays like that until it resets so some of the stuff like so right now everything's lit up i think it's just because we got such a good look 100 points and resets targets when lit i think it's something like that i think it's just holding over from game to game but all of these pop numbers are lit now so now we can actually see if they're doing their 10 points like they should that one is the red one is not the green one is not the purple one okay look i turned off that i wonder if it's just a that's just a loose bulb okay so the red and green ones do not work one point or ten point so they're definitely definitely messed up okay so uh maybe we fix that first just we'll do and try to do them a little more in order so let's check out what's going on with the red and green pot bumpers it's pretty simple the way they work so here's one of the working pot bumpers is the purple one and as you can see there is a little spoon looking thing this is gonna be hard to show you because it's buried down in there but there's a little spoon thing and whenever i hit the skirt this is gonna pop by the way so get ready so what's going on is the spoon that switch is connecting which is turning on the relay for it so there's a relay down here that is the purple pop bumper relay all right the relay is making it score and it's making the coil come in when the coil comes in it pulls this down which on the top knocks the ball off of the skirt which since the ball is off the skirt that switch is no longer connected and this uh switch here kill opens up when it's all the way down and kills the power to the relay which kills the power to the [Music] coil what a clever way to do it right so on each relay there are three little switches one of them turns on the coil one of them scores and i don't know what the other one does why do you think the other one does but whenever this pulls in [Music] that's what makes everything happen so and so that is turning on the purple one that's turning the score of motor so i mean the score reel so the green one and the red one i'm guessing it's just a misadjusted switch or something oh i see exactly what it is so on the green one see that the blue and white wire it's not connected if it's not soldered to the switch it can't work so that's that one now on this red one [Music] on this red one which is the other one it doesn't work look at that outside switch damn if i can get to it so you can see it look at this last switch it's not quite touching so that's the problem so i need to adjust that one a little tighter and that one i need to solder back on so let me do that and then we'll check that we'll check the pot bumpers again okay so we want to see if our pop bumper score yellow red green boy i like this purple i believe our pop bumpers are fine people i believe they're just fine this uh 100 points resets targets when lit light was on a second ago i wonder what what makes that happen hmm i thought maybe it was something yeah look every once in a while it comes on let's do it to it ball two still player one all of our targets reset ah interesting okay so ten points lights green i think the green bulb is a little yeah 10 points lights yellow 10 points lights red 10 points lights purple okay so all that's good 50 points when lit it didn't like it but maybe just because the ball hadn't been thrown in a while 50 points when lit i think we're bringing it back to life it's christining itself green one 50 points when lit worked good red one 50 points when lit worked good can we give it can we give a shout out to 1963 with the green insert the yellow insert the purple insert and the red insert wow what a beautiful game we'll do a whole video at the end where we play it and show it off and everything okay i don't see anything that's not working 10 points when lit on the kickers working um oh 10 points when lit on the center spinner that's working but that score reel is a little screwed up watch this i'm so i'm gonna go crazy on the spinner it's just it's working but it's kind of hanging so we might need to mess with that a little bit uh yeah okay so let's see what else is on our list the red pop bumper doesn't always score we fix that the green pop bumper not scoring we fixed that the one player in the play field lights being out we fixed that this is stuff that we were waiting on parts for score real parts broken yeah we're waiting on parts for that okay so the only other one that was significant i thought was the 20 point rollovers at the top score multiple times let's see if it's still doing that now i've turned it on and off 10 times so it was this one mainly there we go so it's hanging what is that all about let's see if we can figure that one out okay folks so with the play field up there is a 20 point relay which is this u relay now when i hit this switch the switch lets go it doesn't hang so the switch is the switch only connects once and what that switch does the 20 point switch is it it makes the 20 point relay come on the u-relay now watch what happens with that that relay will come on which then turns on the score motor and gets the score motor turning so why do they do that it's because there's a switch somewhere on the score motor that the score motor turns in thirds okay so it will turn one third and then stop one third and then stop one third and then stop so what's going on is it's turning one third and there's a switch somewhere that there are two uh bars or two uh steps on each third of the score motor so maybe it's like this switch right so it turns one third and this switch has a little bar on it like this that will go boom boom it'll hit two little bumps from here to there and since they have the 20 point relay wired in um series with that switch it'll hit the ten point relay twice boom boom right but what's happening is it's turning a third and then it keeps turning another third and another third and another third and another third and no matter depending on how many it turns it uh it's giving you 20 points each time for each third that it turns so i'll do it a couple times you can see what i'm talking about so this switch cannot be the problem because you hit it and it's done it it opens back up but the whole purpose of that switch is to turn on this u relay so watch what happens when i hit it sometimes it does and it's doing it sometimes and then changing and so we might have to do it a few times so that time it worked perfect so it went it turned on the u-relay which turned on the score motor which you heard and then it went click click gave us 20 points and then stopped all right so that time it gave us 60 points did you see what happened it gave us two points and then it almost let go but then it pulled in again it gave us another 20 points and another 20 points so why is that what's it doing it's because there is a switch on this motor that when it turns two revolutions that is supposed to open up to kill the power to that relay that's what's going to happen now there is a little motor switch position chart here which will tell us where that switch is i don't know if i can read it and show you at the same time but we're looking for anything that says 20 points ah it doesn't say it hmm i'll have to figure out which one it is i'm sure it's one of those it's just i don't know uh it's the u relay hmm let me look on my schematics and see if i can figure it out from that which switch it must be all right so i'm looking on my french schematics here and this is what turns on the 20 point relay i mean this is the 20 point relay okay and the way it gets power is you roll over one of the two 20-point rollovers but like i said that switch opens back up this stays on and then whenever it gets to a certain spot you see it open for just a second and then it clamps right back down right so the way that it's once these once you roll over the thing it pulls it in but then the thing pulls in a switch on itself right so there's a switch on the u relay that keeps it pulled in through motor 2b now i don't speak french but i'll bet that means motor boy i bet you anything that means motor in french so when the on the motor switch to b is holding in u so what's going on is this relay is pulling in the motor starts turning well there's supposed to be a point where this switch opens and when that switch opens uh it will no longer be providing power to the u-relay through this switch which means the u-relay will turn off which will turn off this switch and then the score motor will close this switch again but it won't matter because that switch is now open and they do it like that so that the like i said on the score reel so that it holds in while the score motor is doing the complete two revolutions and so that it scores 20 points but only the 20 points so this should release it's not releasing but here's the tricky thing is it that switch on the relay that's getting stuck so if it's adjusted too tight what could happen is as it loses power it starts opening but then it gets power back through it as soon as this closes again because that switch isn't all the way open you see what i'm saying so if this opens this starts to close and you see it start to close but this switch isn't all the way open yet it's still closed so whenever this switch closes again throws power back through it kicks it back on so it could be doing it if it's that switch or that switch which one is it well it has to be that one because if it was this one it would also be screwing up the 30 point relay which remember we specifically checked and it didn't do it and it would also be scoring up the screwing up the 50 point relay and remember we checked it didn't do it it only does it on the 20 point relay and it does it on either one of the rollovers so it can't be either one of these switches and it can't be that switch because it would mess up these as well it must be that switch so if you looked at that uh switch on the right there with the yellow wire going to it that is the one that we were talking about and it is very close it's adjusted too tight so i'm going to separate it out a little bit more make it look a little more like this one and then we'll check it and see if it's good enough all right folks let's check it out let's check it out perfect perfect perfect perfect perfect let's check the other one just to make sure perfect perfect perfect let's do this 30. so see it's the x one behind it you'll hear it do it three times done done done so how did they make that do 30 well they put it on a different switch on the score motor that hits three times for every third so watch i'll hit the 20 again watch when it turns it'll turn one third and then it stops one third and it stops on the 30 one third and it stops okay now here's the cooker on the 50 one third and it stops but it's on guess how they made it work they ran it through a switch that hits five times each third right very cool so uh yeah that should have fixed it so let's we'll test play it for a second and then we've still got to wait for those parts okay so we're on ball three i have 1828 points boy i got it going on um because i'm playing without the glass on this is one of the old ones with the ball elevator and then the shooter rod is on the actual lockdown bar which we don't have on it right now so we'll see if it scores anything on its own though hard to play one-handed people went to ball four [Music] i didn't even get i didn't even get a chance ball five didn't even get a chance out of flipping [Music] didn't work either hey how y'all doing tonight doing good okay folks that does that i'm gonna write down the 10 point reel sticks on the one player because remember i was doing that weird thing where the spinners don't score all that great on the 10 point and then um second player reels we don't know about yet so i got we gotta mess with the score reels some more but we're waiting on the parts for the score reel so we'll show you about how that works the bell is missing we've got to replace the grommet and the one of them the brake is missing uh and then this part up here isn't that big of a deal so that should do it for tonight but whenever we get those parts in we'll do another video showing all of that so hope you enjoyed it what a beautiful little game really leave your comments below give us a thumbs up taking the trouble to film it for you and thank you to everybody that's been using our amazon links especially right here before christmas that's so cool people are buying all of their christmas presents on amazon and using our link and we're getting a little piece of the money of it so thank you for everybody that's been doing that if you don't know how to do that you just click the link down below and it takes you to amazon and it gives us a royalty for anything you decide to buy while you're on amazon thank you to everybody and check out my brother donny that's our brother channel he's been raising all kinds of hell lately we've been working on this old grocery store that we bought little tiny one though not a big one we're not rich like that we're just rich enough to buy a small one a little tiny grocery store so go check that out i'm over there with them usually the link is down below and i will see you on those videos and i'll see you on the next swing along video which will probably be up tomorrow so come back and check it out um so yeah leave your comments below give us a thumbs up and we'll get the parts in way before you have to wait on the video and we'll have it uploaded for you uh i'll do the waiting you won't have to wait so see you see you soon on the next the next video