Tracking down Switch Problems - Bally 1979 KISS Pinball Machine - Let's Get This Sucker To Play! A-3

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 super cool vintage 1978-ish era bali kiss pinball machine one of the most famous valleys of all time uh the gentleman bought this from repo records in charlotte and he's uh uh he brought it down here to us to fix up for him get it working again and we've got it up and running uh if you didn't see the first video we rebuilt the power supply and the solenoid board and showed off the game a little bit we've already done the play field and got it back in nice shape um and uh on the last video we were messing with the mpu we put a brand new mpu board in it and we got the thing to boot up so it's up and running but it's not running right so it's got some issues so we're going to work through that on this video so right here at the beginning give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it for you we've been telling people to do that at the end but not everybody watches to the end but you know what everybody watches the beginning so we're going to mess with it a little bit today and see what we can figure out now that what it's the problems that we're having is it's uh the lights are doing some weird things so you've got some lights flickering which could be the lamp board or the mpu i doubt it's actually the mpu because it's a brand new one it's gonna be connections or something like that but uh so we've got lamp issues uh it will not start a game and it will not play a game it won't score so i think there's probably switch issues so i'll show you what's what's going to happen on the last video whenever we tested the dc voltage to make sure that it's getting five volts over to the board uh like it says in the in the uh manual uh you're supposed to check dc make sure you get five volts or more we do and then you're supposed to check ac as well but i forgot to do that on the last video so i figured i'd just show you so we've got .02 volts ac that's not much at all so i think we're good there and the reason that uh there's nothing there's not much ac coming through is because we did replace the filter capacitor and all of that so the game is up and running but it ain't running right so what i'll do is let me disconnect this and then we're going to i'm going to start a game and show you what it's not doing and then we're going to work through it okay [Music] so it's trying but it doesn't kick the ball out you did hear it reset the drop targets you can manually kick the ball out uh but it doesn't score right nothing's working right nothing's doing its thing it's kind of like it's frozen a little bit which typically means you've got switches that are stuck or something so we're going to have to figure that out we've got some kind of switches stuck or even the displays might be calls in this so the first thing i'm going to do is unplug some of the uh things from the uh lamp board and we're gonna go into test and see if any of the switches are showing us that they're stuck [Music] okay we're in the solenoid test i've unplugged everything on the lamp board just because all of the twinkling lights and stuff i don't know if that's causing problems or not but we're in solenoid testing every solenoid is working including the ball clicker that was it there it just didn't kick the ball all the way but it's at least trying when it starts the game it doesn't even try [Music] sounds like we blew a fuse so the knockers and the coils in the cabinet are still working but on the play field they're not so something's something's tripping people i'm going to guess out hole kicker but we definitely got issues so i'm going to get a piece of paper and start writing down what we're finding out that's the sound board test i think it's uh missing a note or something so it's suspect as well okay the game is telling us what's wrong with it now you might notice two of the display three of the displays aren't working this one was just working but it's not so again people we're working through it we're working through it so far all we've got is the power supply done and the the a brand new board in it right we've got other issues obviously we're working through it don't get discouraged we're going to make it so i've i've went into the test menu and i can't even read what test we're on because this display is not working so i could probably take that display and put it up there but luckily bali was pretty smart with the way they did all their tests so the first test is always all the lights and so i unplugged all those because a lot of them were doing crazy stuff and i didn't know if that was actually affecting the cpu or something uh and then the second test is all the displays well three of them aren't doing anything the third test is all of the solenoids and you saw it going through and uh whenever it was trying to kick the ball out it wouldn't come all the way out i did this by hand when i was trying to kick the ball out it wouldn't come all the way out that's probably a little screwy under the apron we'll look at that here in a little bit and then eventually it blew the fuse under the play field for the solenoid so one of the solenoids screwed in it and then the next test is the music test that just plays a little melody over and over again that i don't know the melody is trying to play but it sounded to me like there was a note missing in there so the sound board needs work so basically we're figuring out everything needs work the displays need work the the sound board needs work the the light board needs work the solenoids need work we've already done work on the play field we've already done work on the power supplies we already put in a new mpu so the next test uh is the fifth test so there should be a five right here again we'll get to that here in a little bit and it's the switch test so that's what i wanted to get into so like i was showing you like i was telling you usually whenever you have problems where stuff is just going screwy there's something wrong with some of the switches so when you put it in the switch test it'll say five here and then you will get on all four displays whatever switch is activated blinking now if i hit a switch it should add it to the equation here so if this is like switch 20 it should say zero seven and then blink and say twenty and then go back and say zero seven twenty zero seven twenty and it'll show all of the switches that are connected but it's not and that's because it's showing switch seven so zero seven let's look in the manual so in the manual it tells you what all the numbers mean so one is drop target two drop target three drop target four drop target five light a line six the credit button seven tilt switch that makes sense doesn't it the tilt stuck on so what's happening is when we start the game it starts the game and then immediately tilts itself because the tilt switch is stuck down you may remember this exact same thing was going on on the skateball that we had but bali has a pretty good self-test so you can actually go through and it'll tell you if you know what you're looking at what's going on so we've got a tilt switch stuck somewhere so we need to look inside of it and figure out which one of it is see how there's a little three there's three different tilt switches so one of them is either stuck on or the wiring is messed up or the mpu board can actually cause that problem too if there's something screwed up on the mpu board but since it's a brand new mpu it's probably not that so it should be something simple we'll go see if we can find what screwery not my first choice of word my screwery people have done to this thing all right we have tracked it down the top connector handles all the playfield switches and strobes and the bottom one does just the cabinet play field and switches and strobes so i even unplugged the entire top connector and uh still had the same problem so uh with the bottom connector on i've removed one of the tilt wires from this switch somehow this connector must somehow be shorting out to the uh basically the way this works is the blue line comes over here the red line comes over here if that if you pick up the machine this ball rolls down and hits that switch which shorts it out but uh for whatever reason whenever this is connected you can hear it beeping it shorts the tilt switch together so i got to figure out why that is i guess somehow this switch is connected to the metal somehow it must be by the rivets or something so i will check it out um worst case if that thing is damaged somehow where the switch mounts i believe the uh well um you know what the way it wires [Music] we got something going on here i'm gonna keep messing with it we'll figure it out but it's if i unhook the wire from that everything's cool so but we gotta make sure that we can still get the tilt to work just in case they want the tilt to work but something one of these tilts is shorting there must be a bad diode or something somewhere so i'm gonna keep looking at it okay folks i found it i had seen it before and i even checked it earlier but it did not behave as i thought so this is what you look for because the damn cap should have known there is a little cap on the tilt bob i've disconnected it now right it goes across the two the strobe and the return on the switch so whenever this tilts if it just barely touches it the cap makes the pulse wider so that the uh the game sees it you have the same thing on pop bumpers a lot of times um let's see if i see one still on here i see one here well this one here has been uh cut loose already they they short out on pop bumpers and it makes the switch stay closed but so i thought that whenever i saw it earlier and i checked it and it's not shorted according to the multimeter but if it's hooked up it says that the um it says that the uh tilt is on so i'm going to replace that i'm going to put the wire back on and then we'll check it to make sure that the tilt works but i think we're ready to check all our switches again so like if i hold one down we're getting uh we're getting our stuff let's see if this tilt works there must be a slam switch instead of a tilt switch but uh that's the deal so i'm gonna replace the capacitor i actually have the right one i'll show it to you check it out four seven three that's zero point zero four seven micro farad and so the original one was a point zero five okay so i'm gonna swap it i'm gonna put all that wiring back together and then we'll test make sure the tilt works okay so we've got that cleaned up we've had a couple people ask about how the tilts work i've shown it in in other videos but we might as well show it again so basically like i said if you pick up the front this ball i cleaned it up a little bit it was all oxidized rolls to the front and see it's rolling on the metal which is this one this one wire is connected to well if it gets all the way to the end because you're picking it up it hits this switch up here whenever it hits that switch it's connecting the blue wire to the red wire and you get a tilt so if i let go of it no more tilt and then the other one is the jiggle one so if you shake it enough that thing will flop around and uh will hit this now this little plum bob here can actually go on upside down to where it sticks up through this hole and then if it does it makes it since it's conical it makes it where it's easier or harder to tilt someone is taking it all the way off and hung it down at the bottom so it's really hard to tilt but if you shake it enough and this uh if the plumb bob if it was up here or if this touches the ring you're doing the same thing you're connecting the blue wire to the white and black wire right and if i let go of it so our tilt works all that for a freaking tilt can you believe that but now that it works uh i'm gonna check some more of the switches and uh we'll make a little list we'll just go through and check all the switches and uh make a little list of what's screwed up and if we find any more that are that need work we'll uh we'll we'll uh see what the problem is with him okay folks so the only reason that we fixed that tilt like that was because it was keeping everything else from working none of the switches would work because the tilt was stuck on for excuse me so we're going to test all the switches now so we've got it in switch test for some reason that one display started working again whatever so we're going to go through and just test each switch with our hand just to see if they're all working so i'm doing a coin switch oh i already did the four drop target ones because if i knock those down they'll stay down and uh each time it will tell me four switches down so i can't do that so we're at zero which means there are zero switches with anything on it coin switch number nine ultra coin switch number nine as well the other coin switch number ten okay well two of them are the same for some reason whatever start button number six all right the test button works because we've been trying it so that's everything on the coin door it's all gravy baby so now we're down to the play field so outlane 34 in lane 27 in lane 26 outlane 33 stand up target 17 12 13 14 15. you kind of want to watch and see if anything starts giving you the same number maybe get some wires crossed or something 25 18. sometimes you will get some that do give you the same number like this is a a just a rebound rubber so it's 25 and this one over here probably is two oh i would pick the one that doesn't work all right it's not doing anything we'll go back to that one uh spinner sometimes the spinners don't work great you got to clean them sometimes that's fine 30. let's see about the other spinner 31. okay top roll over 21 22 [Music] 5 23 24. we're looking pretty good i don't know if the kickers actually have them yeah they do 35 36 pop bumpers remember the fuse is blown on the play field right now 37 39 40 38 18. 19. okay the only one that isn't working is the one i tried to make oh the out hole number eight this one i tried to make an example of and there's one behind the drop targets i don't know if i can touch without knocking a drop target down yeah 25 so that's one isn't working oh there we go 40. looks like it's just dirty okay it's off not working something's going on with that one so top left rebound [Music] okay so we'll uh we'll pop up the play field and look at that but uh it looks like everything else is pretty good okay so this is the one that wouldn't work and on the top it's just a rubber ring it's the only thing on the play field that wouldn't work whenever we pressed it you see how you have two wires going to it the way they wire these up there's actually a little diode that's missing that should go from here to here i'm gonna zoom in there should be a diode from here to here it's been i'm sure that was cut off maybe it was shorted or something see this one the wire connects to a diode which then connects to the other blade and all the switches work like that um the switch matrix just needs diodes in it so for whatever reason somebody's cut the diode off it must have shorted or something so we will put one back on but all the other switches worked fine uh let me show you on the pot bumpers so the pop bumpers this is the coil that drives them but to make it fire you roll up on that skirt look at that dirt all over me you roll up on that skirt on the top and this switch closes well when that switch closes sometimes it does it really fast so the same thing that we had on the tilt for it to elongate the pulse it has a little cap on it and you can see all of the caps have been pulled loose probably because they shorted or maybe the operator knew that they short a lot so they have been cut off of all four of the pot bumpers they also put them on some of the stand-up targets are supposed to have them so let me see if i can find the one on the front so like this stand-up target look at the focus likely had one so if you look close see how you see some extra stuff there that's where the cap was and they cut it off so i need to add that cap back on the pot bumpers and the stand up targets it'll work without it but the reason they put it on was that if you hit it real fast it always scores so they want it to you want it to always see that pulse even if it's just for a second so you get your point so i got to add those back in and i have to add that missing diode on that side so that should get all of our switches working and uh every all of the switches in the cabinet working and then that will leave us with the lights to mess with the sound board to mess with the solenoids to mess with and the displays to mess with but hey we'll have the switches out of the way let me uh solder some of that stuff in and then we'll see what we end up with so in the schematics it says all all diodes are one in four thousand four very common all capacitors are 0.05 mfd micro farad uh so that's easy enough and if you ever want to know where they go it usually says in the schematics so the left if you see uh say the k rollover it shows a switch and a diode but if you look on the thumper bumper it shows a switch a diode and a cap so the left thumper bumper the right the top and the bottom you thought i was going to say thumper bumper four times didn't you so all of those have it also the s lower target the s upper target the i target and the k target i'll have it the kiss stand ups and then the a b c and d targets all need to have one of that cap just so that it can see a really fast hit makes it play better so i'll get the i'll get the soldering okay so i added one two three four five six seven eight nine ten 11 12. right back where it ought to be [Music] what do you think about that so i'm going to vacuum it out clean up the inside a little bit and then we'll lay it back down and we'll go back into switch test and uh see if the those switches are still working make sure none of them are locked on or anything they shouldn't be but and we'll see if that one where i put the diode in is now dioding properly and then hopefully that will be it for the switches and we can move on to something uh something else like figuring out why the solenoid fused blue again that's the fuse it was working fine so that's next up okay so i'll clean it out and then we'll uh we'll mess with the switch test one more time and hopefully we'll be done with that [Music] okay so with it up and attract with the uh [Music] with the tilt not stuck we now have four displays and the kiss lights are working better this thing is christining itself it's bringing itself back we're just helping it a little bit and it's doing the rest i have i've probably told you my theory before this machine only has one purpose it's an inanimate object but everything on it is designed to make the whole kiss pinball thing work right so things break and if you fix them the other things will kind of do what they're supposed to do it seems like they work towards their purpose that's my working theory at least so i don't know if they'll completely christine themselves but they do seem to uh they cooperate a little bit now part of it's your attitude though so you saw how like the power supply was screwed up took me a while to figure out what exactly it was then the tilt switch was screwed up took me a while to figure out exactly why that was etc etc there's you know you kind of just got to stick with it so let's go back into test mode and see if it's still all screwed up so that's the first test we haven't done any of the bulbs yet we'll mess with that at a later date there's our displays we haven't done them yet either but it looks like they're starting to cooperate a little bit okay so here's the solenoids i put the fuse looked fine i took it out i uh the the holder was a little loose so i snugged up the holder a little bit and i put another fuse in just in case i tested it the old one was fine uh so who knows so we're about to go into solenoid test let's see if that's uh if any of that's working i'm just gonna watch it for a second see if it's gonna blow a fuse again or if it didn't blow it before but we'll see if it can keep it up the little you're hearing in the back is it turning on the flipper relay you could probably hit the flippers it yeah if you if you hit the flipper button right when the relay's on no work okay [Music] so i'm going to blame the uh i'm going to blame the solenoid thing on uh the fuse holder needed proper tensioning now that it's gripping a little better it seems like it's all right here's the fuse that was in it i tested it and it's fine and of course it looks fine so i don't know okay so we're back in the test mode oh you may have seen it kicked the ball out so how did i fix that i'll show you exactly how to fix that if yours won't kick the ball out see if there is a toothpaste cap stuck where the ball goes in front of the coil so when the coil comes out and it hits the ball if it's hitting a toothpaste cap or whatever this is instead that keeps it from hitting the ball so if there's one of these in your machine take it out because that's not factory it must have i don't somehow i got on the play field i tried to blame it on joe he did the play field he said he didn't have nothing to do with it he never took the apron off so he didn't see it i don't know people seems a little fishy to me okay so we're back in switch test mode so we got to test all the ones with with stand-up with uh caps on them now i wish in test mode by the way if you hit them real quick it won't show up in test mode but if you put it in game play it will we may check here in a minute that one's working that one's still working that one's still working that one's still working that one's still working that one's still working that one that one okay we're gonna do the four pot bumpers you don't think it's gonna pinch me do you oh no okay and then finally boom what a lovely sight every damn switch on this thing works now all right people so if you're working on one of these you got switch problems do it systematically go into the test see if any of them are stuck on get you a piece of paper test every damn switch write down all the ones that have problems and then go underneath start looking at it oh i should have mentioned earlier when i was wiggling that connector and we had joe look at the front what must have been happening was i was moving it enough that it made the wire from the whatever part of the matrix does the the tilt it must have just been building bending the the uh connector enough to where it wasn't making good contact and it no longer could see that the tilt was shorted so that was not that had nothing to do with it really it was on the uh it was the cap on the on the tilt so all right so that's that so let's do this let's uh get it back into game play and then let's see if it'll finally start a game after all this time so these are your thresholds where you can set the high score and all of that we're not going to do that yet it's booting up all right we're gonna put this in the down in the thing and remember we set it on free play right so at the beginning of this video we tried to get it to play let's see if it'll play down [Music] what do you think about that okay so let's see if my hitting it fast thing works i don't want to hit it too fast because if it pops off it goes over there and breaks something this it's gonna be god-awful i think i missed him i guess i don't have to have a pinball to do that let's see let's see if i just hit it really quick it seems to be crazy responsive right so that's what you're looking for let's go let's go nuts shall we okay so there's no way you could have possibly hit the thing that quick with any of with with the the pinball right so i think that's good enough so i believe all of our switch problems are no more what do you think get get your butt back up there you know one of the things that's missing on some of the modern machines some of them is the long as hell bonus countdown it should take forever to count down a bonus make you think that you did [Music] something very cool all right let's do the third ball and then we'll end the game and see if it's see if it ends the game and it'll play a song too [Music] all right if our buddy in my head is watching we have one of our followers in my head he's a big kiss fan what song is that they're trying to play i've never heard that one if you uh if you hear it you can tell which i'm sure he can let us know down below we're all curious um so there you go folks so we are far from done on this thing but we did get all the switches working the thing you can actually play a game now the solenoid seemed to be working i think it was just the loose uh fuse holder hopefully it's it's playable as it is and uh i didn't mention in this video but i did the other one we have the back glass it's in the back we just haven't put it on yet it's in nice shape too you're gonna love it you're gonna love it but you're gonna have to wait for it so uh uh we've got all the switches working we got the power supply working we got the mpu board working we're rolling right through it we are rolling right freaking through it so what's left the lights are driving me crazy some of them aren't working so we got to fix some light bulbs basically replace all of them we have to do the sound board and we have to do the displays but that will not be today that will be tomorrow so if you uh if you subscribe to us here you'll be able to see that now if you look down below we have a link to amazon if you go buy all of your kiss paraphernalia and you know what i'm talking about you know what i'm talking about if you go by all your all of your kiss paraphernalia or anything you you like at all from amazon 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know what that's like people we come from modest means too nothing wrong with that so uh leave your comments below and it had did you know you should know if you've been watching all of our videos that we have a second channel now it's my brother donny's channel and it's called are you ready for this my brother donnie he's getting famous now to the point where you can just google my brother donny and it'll pop up you'll see exactly what i'm talking about that is literally my brother donny and he's he's always into something and he's filming a lot of it now so uh like uh yesterday this is typical donnie he called me yesterday well man you ain't gonna believe what happened to me what happened donny i was driving down the road hit the brakes none of them were working i was on this big long straightaway nobody was in front of me so i just coasted and i started breaking it down from gear to gear and i got it down to oh that's for all of you english people i started breaking it down from gear to gear and i got it down to nothing and then i rolled into a garage i had to drive for six miles no brakes i got it in a garage and then i had to show them how to fix my brakes they did and it only cost me 80 bucks so i told him yeah we got to film a video about that so you'll see the evidence of that it's probably up by now on his channel but uh it's just constant stuff like that every day pretty much has got something so leave your comments below make sure to subscribe to his channel if you get a chance to i'm over there a lot and uh we're usually working on it has nothing to do with arcade games but usually we're working on vehicles or uh we remodeled a a uh renovated an old mobile home that we bought always lots of crazy stuff going on over there so i'll see you over on that channel leave your comments below for the fifth time i'm asking you to leave your comments below give us a thumbs up and we'll see you on the next video which will be probably tomorrow