Let's Finish Up this Williams Pin-Bot Pinball Machine! New Displays & a Fire Breaks Out!

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today we are working on this awesome pin bot uh and we uh if you didn't see last week's video we got it in and started working through some of the electronics and we got the sound working worked through the power supply things like that and we are now up to working on the Playfield so we're going to tear the Playfield apart get all of the uh the old dirt off of it and then rebuild it then we're also going to mess with some displays so let's get into it we are a little farther along on the pin bot basically we have pulled everything off of the Playfield stuck it over here on our other Playfield and so this is what we're starting with it's in pretty good shape you've got a little bit of U um the myar is a little faded and uh you got a few spots on the inserts where it's you know cloudy a little bit but all in all everything's in pretty good shape um a little bit of wear up there can't even really see that though I don't think with everything on it um and we had some problems like the pot bumper had fallen apart things like that oh there's there is some wear around that pop pumper but again I don't think you can see it it's down underneath everything but we're starting with a pretty good candidate so I am going to clean clean clean clean clean clean clean and start putting it back together we ordered a bunch of stuff for it one of the things I always loved about this machine is the robotic fingers that are painted underneath the flippers python Angelo he was awesome okay so we' pulled everything off the Playfield we've cleaned it all up waxed waxed waxed looks pretty good got a nice little Sheen to it it's not perfect though waxed waxed waxed we repaired the pot bumper [Music] obviously we got the sound working again and now we are just putting stuff back together okay so this is what we came up with after we repopulated everything and cleaned everything it's in pretty good shape it all came out pretty nice it's not perfect but this thing is going to play great the main flaw if I was going to say there were flaws like what keeps this from being perfect is that it's got myar you know it would be better if it didn't have the myar sticker over everything but it has protected the paint so personally I have no problem with myar doesn't bother me at all and then the other thing is that piece that we were talking about on the ramp is broke that top piece should go farther over that should be flat so it should be filled in like that doesn't really affect gameplay and you can't buy one of those right now they're all sold out everywhere so even if you wanted to you couldn't really replace it um we also replac the uh face plate inside so it all came out pretty good looks decent so we'll uh we'll open it up and look at what's going on oh there it is look he wants to show you we'll open it up and look at what's going on underneath so this is what the underside of the Playfield looks like we've replaced all the bulbs and the uh We've ran into two issues so one of the issues is on this resistor board one of the resistors has came completely off so those those are used for flash bulbs so somewhere some flash bulbs aren't going to work because of that so we need to resolder whoop that one's broke too so we need to resolder two resistors back to the board it should be more like of that and then the other problem is check this out of course we're going to rebuild the flippers but look at this apparently this flipper coil CAU on fire or something at some point and was replaced so there's some old flipper coils down inside of it if you look see how there's something in there so that's that's the plastic inside the the coil that got so hot that it melted so that must have been the one that was [Music] replaced oh that's just dirt so that one was all right so we ordered some parts so we can rebuild that and we'll try to clean off the smoke damage too just so it looks a little better you can also see that at some point they've replaced the capacitors with a different style that's tape to the play field that actually will probably work just fine but I'm going to see if it's the right size cap and all of that you've also got the um end of stroke switch here wh I didn't like that the end of stroke switch here and the um Lane change switch I believe is what that is are all screwed up so we're going to have to swap that some of that stuff too so we replaced our got our resistor back on there where they're supposed to be and then another thing that we ran into uh just looking at it was a lot of these switches up on the trough were bent out of place so I I guess the thing it couldn't have been operating too well with the trough switches not working right but uh we got those straightened out um this one was bent a little bit so we bent it back where it would go back up through the hole like it's supposed to this one was bent out of place uh and then this one was flipped all the way around uh and was not where it should be of course like we said we replaced all the light bulbs and then here's what we did with the uh The Flipper we were able to clean that up a little bit whenever we started looking at it someone has rebuilt the flippers not too long ago so what you want to the way the flippers work you can replace everything on it get it brand new to where they will work perfect or if there's a problem with them you can uh repair whatever's you know just replace certain things to make them work like they're new again so obviously we had a problem with that switch which we were able to replace and I'll I'll show you the uh the old one here in a minute but whenever we looked at it whenever they replaced this coil they also replaced that one I think maybe that coil was used though uh but it looks like they also replaced the plungers when they did that because there's no wobble in the see how whenever I move that up there's no play in it like there's no um see how it's all solid there's no play in that joint there so there's really there's nothing worn on it so there's no need to replace it um if you have the shaft worn or the end of it's worn too that could be a problem also your um coil stop if it's worn that can be a problem everything looked fine so whenever they put these caps on it they must have re you know whenever they replaced that burnup flipper too they must must have went through and replaced all that stuff so in other words we left everything we clean the end of stroke switches on both sides this switch here is the lane chain switch and this Lane chain switch was burned up so I'll show you what was in the uh in the bottom of the game so we already looked at the coils uh also whenever you're rebuilding flippers usually the coil is not a problem unless it's like this where it's melted because it's shorted usually your coil was fine so when they replaced this coil it probably wasn't even necessary um this was the resistor that had fallen off the board it was in the bottom few pieces of Hardware this is the U cabinet flipper switch and you can see see how pitted and messed up that contact right there is so that's not making good contact so they were wise to replace that so they replace place that and then this is the lane change switch that we swapped this plastic piece that was here burnt up whenever the coil burn up and then it also burnt up the end of stroke switch literally there was probably a fire um which should never really happen on a pinball machine and so we were thinking maybe the reason it happened was the fuse so the fuse this fuse was in the bottom it's a five amp fuse which is for the under the Playfield is too big it should be the one on there says 2 and2 Amp um so it could have been that it was over fused we'll have to look in the back box I don't know if the flipper Fus in the back box is 5 amp and if that's what this is or whatever but it was just laying in the bottom and then another thing that we saw on a lighter note um we found these so these are inspection tags that they put on the bottom of the Playfield uh in the factory so this part was inspected by J Santiago that's a real good name that's probably the guy's actual name and then we found this one and I'm not so sure that's the Guy's real name not so sure um another thing of interesting about this one that I'll talk about since we're talking about the inspectors um on these on the on pinbot there are flasher bulbs so like right here's a bundle of them and so Mo typically on these games you have 89 flasher bulbs are called U number 89 and then um on pinbot in particular they had some that were 1251 flasher bulbs uh I think I've got that right yeah 1251 number 1251 flasher bulbs and so the different number flasher bulbs are different voltages and things like different brightnesses things like that so they have these little stickers that you put on the uh where the Flasher bulbs go this one's worn out but it says 89 bulb and it tells you where to put the 89s and where to put the 121s because they use different voltages and even though this thing was inspected by the inspectors the stickers were in the wrong spot so it was saying to put 1251 bulbs in places where there should be 89 bulbs so if you get one of these and you're uh working with that uh you have to be sure that you put the uh bulbs in the right spot so I'll show you where the 89 bulbs go and where the 1251 bulbs go all right so the Playfield has opened up see the lights back there on the face that are flashing those are the 1251 bulbs those are the only ones that need to be 1251 bulbs so there's three of them on each side there's six total it's going to cover up again there's six total the two eyeballs you get two from underneath the Playfield and then there's two right here in the middle of the face plate and then there's two about right here on the down on the Playfield and they they arrange a triangle so the these three or 1251 bulbs and these three or 1251 bulbs all the other bulbs on a play field are 89 bulbs anywhere you find a a flasher it should be an 89 let's look at the back box all right so here on the back box you've got the sticker still here on this one this is what the if the stickers are still present what they'll look like says lamp 28 volt number 89 so these two are 89 on the back box the two Over There Are 89s on the back box but again the two that are basically the eyes of the robot are the 121s so the ones invol I call it the robot I guess it's a robot the ones involving the robot's face are the only ones that are 1251 so in the whole machine you've got eight 1251 bulbs you've got two on the top right in the middle that are his eyes behind the back glass give me sight and then down here in the bottom the ones that are under the Playfield that are actually in the saucers that the balls land in that are actually his eyes those are 121s and then the four on the top that are around his um visor are the 121s these are 89 that one's an 89 this one's an 89 the ones under here are 89 and the ones under the pop bumper are 89 so everything's 89s except for the ones around his face and then his his face again on the back box Bo so one of the last things we're going to do in this video is we're going to install these new displays so this is the PIN score display system LED displays instead of the old um I guess they're gas I don't know I can't remember what they're actually called the original ones but um we bought this it's about $200 but um this will really make it make it look great now they make specific ones for specific games so the only games that these will work on this particular set is Grand lizard highspeed Road Kings pinbot and laser war now I believe we've got videos of all five of these on our website I mean uh on YouTube here I can't remember laser war maybe not might not be laser war I think ours might have been laser ball no I can't remember may have been both that's the only questionable one but these uh the reason that there's different kits is because different games at at about the time they were making these particular games they were coming up with new stuff and pinballs all the time so uh on this particular one the top two displays are alpha numeric and the bottom two displays are just numeric and they're they're separate so at some point they went to where everything was mounted on one board and they hook up different and things things like that but this is the correct one so I'll take everything out of here and we'll see uh what it came with so we'll read through uh the instructions a little bit and then we'll work through it when you can watch us put it in it says it takes about 20 minutes to do pin score LED displays are powered from the gamees 5 volt power supply and require no high voltage that's good right we were talking about that earlier in the video pin score LED displays use about half the power of competitive LED displays oh now they're just bragging making them safe to add to your game pin score displays have been tested for Reliable operation and compatible games in very rare cases a game with a failing 5volt power supply may not function once a pin score display is installed so basically it may draw down the 5 volts just low enough to where the board won't boot now because you're you're hooking up an additional thing to the 5vt L other symptoms of a failing power supply include erratic game resets and erratic game behavior in these situations the game's power supply should be repaired or replaced prior to installing pin score LED displays the plasma display Tech found in your machine's old displays required high voltage to energize the segments the high voltage circuits and pinball machines have high failure rates and are diff difficult to repair as the parts are obsolete LED displays will function correctly even if your original games Power high high voltage Supply power supply has failed you may disable your high voltage Supply by removing the appropriate high voltage fuses see your machine's documentation this will reduce the risk of electrical shock when servicing the machine installation installation time about 20 minutes tools required quarter inch nut driver and or Philip screwdriver uh failures from improper installation are not covered under warranty uh this is the most important thing of the whole thing okay are y'all listening this is important the most important thing caution this display system cannot be used with any original display or driver boards damage to both the new and the old boards will occur if the systems are mixed so do you understand that the original boards and the original driver board are their own thing this is a completely new system you can't swap parts back and forth like leave the first display a certain one or whatever you can't do that so like for instance on this game we're only missing two displays if I plug in those two displays to my old set it will fry those old displays and probably screw up I mean it will fry the new displays and probably screw up the old ones too so here's what we're going to do unplug the main power from your pinball Ma machine remove game back glass rever a owner's manual for Specific Instructions unplug all display boards connecting cables and remove the original display boards and then it says Mount the entire system do not mix old and new driver or boards so basically it says take all the old ones out put all the new ones in so let's go look at that on the back of the lightboard we've got this display driver board here which seems to be working pretty good if you saw the uh two displays on the front by the way the other two displays are missing because we took them off and put them on a different game so all of the displays were working but we figured hey new LED displays would look really good on pinbot let's do that so I need I need to remove this board all of these cables we're going to keep this long one though they may have a replacement for that I don't know but we're going to remove uh all of these cables and this board they just pop right off and then we're going to remove our last three displays which again they just pop right off of these little spacers so um I'll take all that stuff off so we removed our old stuff and so it was bragging it said that the old stuff uh is obsolete it says uh the high voltage circuits and pinball machines have high failure rates and are difficult to repair as the parts are obsolete they're really not that difficult to repair the the the power supply is fairly easy to repair and it can be upgraded to make it more reliable and this this driver board is very easy to repair um now there are a few obsolete chips website this is a udn 618a I'm pretty sure they don't make those anymore but you can still get them you know so this could easily be repaired actually uh this driver board actually doesn't have any problems um and you know us if you've watched any of our other videos we like repairing the original stuff I don't even put LEDs in the machine even though I'm about to put LED displays in the machine so why uh why are we replacing it because the glass is obsolete so what happens over time is the uh the the you know this is the old plasma stuff see all the little lines and things in there this actual board is very simple the board doesn't have any problems and and can be repaired if it does but that glass you can't really get anymore you had to get old New Old Stock ones they may still make them new I don't know but they're very expensive it's like $60 just for the glass may even be more than that um and there's some U there's a lot of New Old Stock ones floating around but this is the perfect type of game to to just upgrade it because you know I could uh find a couple used ones and then put new glass on it and I'd end up probably being in it $120 or something like that to to uh fix my two ones that are missing or I could put this whole new system in for 200 and then I've got all these parts that can use on other machines so if I if I get an alpha numeric a game in high speed or something and one of the alpha numeric displays is bad I can just simply plug that one right in you know um so we're going to go ahead and do it and these things are great because uh these all of these original plasma display glasses are kind of on borrowed time eventually they're all going to go bad and they start basically they have like a a gas inside of there I guess it's whatever but uh it leaks out over time so just bar they call it out gassing I don't know if it leaks completely out of the glass or if they just mean it leaks from one area to another I don't completely understand how it works but they start going bad after a while and you'll see that they're half lit up or they're they'll have bright spots where something's burnt uh they they'll actually short inside the glass and so what it always comes down to is you can fix everything on it except that damn glass and you you just have to buy a new or a New Old Stock glass for it and it's really expensive uh to Tinker with just one display so uh what we're going to do is leave the New Old Stock glass still out there and people if they have one of the displays where there's four uh glasses mounted on it or five glasses mounted on it they can buy those ones to fix that entire board with just that one display but um this is such an easy one to swap a new set in that we're going to do that and then we'll save these parts like we said U for another game but it'll fit Grand lizard high-speed Road Kings pin bot or laser war so if we get any of those machines in and just one display is bad we'll be good so uh this gives us extra parts so now that we've removed all of this uh there's nothing in the machine we'll we'll pull open all the new stuff and see how we can mount that in there all right so we've mounted everything we'll look at that here in a second it says we're up to connect the cables so this is interesting the power connectors are keyed to prevent incorrect alignment B use the existing two ribbon cables for the top two displays so these these are the two for the top two and then it says use the included two ribbon cables for the lower displays right so the reason that you have to do that is because it's a different size so these are the cables that were on the bottom two displays remember they were just numeric so it was the older style and so on the newer style they made it alpha numeric so they used a bigger cable so since this kit uses all the same displays and uh basically it can do the bottom ones are often numeric too but they're just going to use them as numeric you have to have these you have to have two more of these big cables so it says D observe correct polarity on all ribbon cables as they are not keyed the red striped wire on all ribbon cables goes to pin number one also labeled as red on all boards okay so we'll go look at that so we have mounted all of our new boards and just like they said all of the ribbon cables we put the red stripe on the bottom red I don't think you'll fry them if you put it backwards but why test it so all four of these red stripe on the bottom and then this bottom one as you can see it still uses one of the smaller connectors because it's just um numerical or I guess I guess yeah it's just numerical um but same thing red wire on the bottom one interesting thing about the way they design these was if you look the mounting holes that they made are elongated so you can slide it side to side and so by doing that you can make it line up with your back glass a little better so you always got to love whenever they put little minor stuff in there like that just to help a brother out right so we've got all four all five of them mounted and then on the back we mounted the board where the old one was and then carefully plugged everything in all the same exact wires plug in the exact same spot the board mounts in the exact same place it's literally as simple as just unplugging all the old ones plugging in all the new ones it's that easy but then you have to be really careful like they were saying about your red wire if you notice it's even counterintuitive these two are on upside down but that's how they go and then these two are on flat um the match one goes there and then the one from the CPU goes here then you've got these four connections here and very important there is a little pot A Little Wheel up here that says brightness control so these LEDs you can actually turn up um how bright they are so let's try turning it on and see what we get would you look at that all of our displays are up very cool let me try to I'll try to uh reach the uh brightness knob without getting electri killed all right um so I'll turn it up that's done and that's all the way up that's what we were looking for people I think they make these in different colors too I think you can get blue ones red ones but you know we're old school we like the orange we'll call it Amber so we sound sophisticated so our displays are back very cool well what I'm going to do is I'm going to button up the last few things we still have to put the legs on it and everything and then uh I'll be back and we'll show what it looks like when it's all done we've already filmed one of these before um with gameplay and everything but we just wanted to film some of this so you could see some of the minor issues we run into nothing major on this one though love those displays though we got to try the back glass in it so this is how they look mounted in and everything and while I was standing there looking and admiring our new displays that we installed and how cool they looked the unthinkable happened Joey's laughing at me because I'm meing it dramatic the unthinkable happened just like we were talking about in the earlier part of the video the uh bridge rectifiers that need a fuse if you've seen that online people talk about how that update has to be done to the machines I'm going to show you on this machine why that has to be because this one the bridge Rec fire just shorted out on so while I was standing there so this is a Williams system 11 in a system 11 there is a flaw in the electric design I'll show you what I'm talking about over here in the back box there are two Bridge rectifiers one I think is for the solenoid voltage and one is for the lamp voltage okay so they put these two in uh but they made the mistake of not putting a fuse on the lines running to these Bridge rectifiers so the reason that's a problem is is because the lines run from the Transformer at the bottom to these bridge rectifiers and then up to the board well if the bridge shorts the bridge rectifier turns ac voltage into DC voltage if the bridge shorts there's no fuse for it to blow so the purpose of a fuse is to make a weak Link in a line well since it's between you know the plug comes in and uh the power goes to the Transformer I'm pointing at the bottom because it's under the play field power goes to the Transformer and then other voltages come out of the other side of the Transformer each one of those voltages goes up here to somewhere with a fuse on it except for these so if that shorts there's no fuse to blow and it's not strong enough to blow the fuse on the other side of the Transformer I don't know if that's even electrically possible but so what does it do well if the ac lines are tied together because of the short inside the uh Transformer it just starts melting the wires so while I was standing here looking at the at the uh display apparently it did that just coincidentally it had nothing to do with the display um I started seeing I started smelling smoke so I unplugged it and I could see a little bit of smoke coming from over here so I go look and look at these two wires here see how they've melted it just did that it wasn't like that before and then it plugs into this harness and here's the two wires that it becomes and so when it first did it those were really hot obviously and uh it was starting to melt the insulation off of them crazy so what you need to do to fix this if you have a system 11 and it's it's mandatory you got to do it because if this thing we had a a um system 11 Williams millionaire pinball machine one time and it just kept going man it burnt up all of the wiring down down to the Transformer I mean there there was we had to rewire that whole part um and that might you know it might catch something on fire literally now once the wire burnt through it would in the electrical connection where it wouldn't keep doing it but if you know if you've got a machine around that's unattended and it doesn't have a system 11 it doesn't have this fuse mod on it kind of playing with fire literally so what are we going to do we're going to or what you need to do on your machine is find the two blue wires which are the AC wires going to this one Bridge rectifier and take one of the blue wires run it over here to the wall run it through a fuse and then run it to where it goes on the bridge rectifier and so that way you've fused one of the AC wires and then you need to do the same thing on the top the two wires on the top are red so on a bridge rectifier you got a AC wire and another AC wire doesn't matter what order it goes in and it doesn't matter which one you fuse uh but that's the input to it and then the bridge rectifier makes DC voltage that comes out of the orange wire and the in this case green wire so the orange wire is positive green wire is the negative so I'll get the uh multimeter and see if I can check this where you can see it this bridge must have shorted so I pulled the um I pulled everything out of it and cut these off soldered new ones on put it all back but I'm going to show you what I'm talking about you can see a little better outside of the machine so there are two pins that say AC and then there's one that says plus and one that says negative so the way you test them is you take your meter put it on diode check and then you go to the positive connection and put your black lead put the wrong lead on it so you put the black lead on it and then you connect your uh red lead to the AC on one side and then to the AC on another side and see if you have any shorts so that's still kind of hard to do holding the and then you do it on the other one you do the you put the where the negative is you put the red lead on it and then you put the black lead on the AC all right let's try it the other way okay and as you can hear we've got a short on this bridge rectifier so just like we were talking about so I'll show you what we did in the machine so we've had the game up for quite a while now because we're watching it to make sure nothing burns up um so what we did on the on the wiring uh we got lucky and the actual wiring itself was fine it had just started to melt the insulation around it so we were able to wrap tape around the wire each separate wire so that it had nice insulation that's separated again the actual wire inside was still intact and wasn't burnt up or anything so like just like we talked about um and we did it for both of our new bridge rectifiers um on one of the ac lines on each one and the game is on by the way on one of the ac lines on each one we ran it through a fuse first so the fuse needs to be an 8 Amp Slow blow fuse so you want to wire an 8 Amp Fuse in line if uh your original Bridge rectifiers are still fine and you don't need to update them or anything all you really need to do is remove this blue AC wire from one of the two AC pins and just run it through a fuse and then run a wire from the other side back to where the blue wire was and then the same thing on one of the red wires still at the top don't don't trust my colors though make sure you're doing the ones that are marked AC so the red wire ran in we took it Loose ran it through a fuse first took the new wire and ran it over to the where the wire was before that way if it starts doing what it was doing a minute ago it'll uh it'll instead of burning up the wires it'll just blow the [Music] fuse he wanted to uh let you know that he was working good so that has fixed that issue and uh one other thing we had the knocker up here someone has pulled the wire off of it I guess they got tired of hearing it so uh we'll probably respect the previous owner and leave that off but we'll tie the um thing back so that it doesn't just hang there and uh we've got a couple other things we need to do to clean it up let's see if we can finish up those last few things and then I'll show you how turns out all right so we are all finished up got the back glass back in it got everything clean we haven't put the glass on it yet got the legs back on it everything's looking good got the coin door light bulbs working you do and uh we think it turned out pretty good so leave your comments below let us know what you think and uh give us a thumbs up for taking the time to film it for you if you want to see us play pinbot we've got another video on here where we go over all of the instructions and everything and uh film a video of us playing it so you can check that out here on YouTube we we put it up I think a year or so ago and leave your comments below give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it for you let us know what you think and we will see you on the next video pinbot