Repairing a 1971 Williams Stardust Electromechanical Pinball Machine

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another pinball repair video for you today we got in probably how long has it been Joe how long back did we get this one a little over a year ago we got in this William Stardust so basically we have so many games they sit around for forever before we start working on them because we kind of do them in the order that we got them or try to at least and sometimes we'll have them and if we're waiting on parts and stuff but this one we weren't really waiting on anything we just haven't worked on it so we're getting ready to do this this is a Williams Stardust pinball machine and it's got the pointing people on it so we're suckers for the pointing people so we're going to fix this thing up whenever we got it it's in pretty decent shape but it's it needs to be shopped so the first thing you notice is that there's no place to put quarters because sometimes whenever you buy games from operators they didn't want you putting them back out on route and be in their competition so what this particular operator did was he he took all of the coin stuff off so you can't possibly operate the thing or that's at least what he thought so sometimes whenever an operator would sell a game they'd do something like that but we're probably gonna leave it like that because it's gonna be in somebody's house likely the cabinet is in pretty good shape it's got a little wear but it's not enough that we really have to mess with it so we're just gonna leave it like it is with a little bit of patina see patina is a good word for not mint right it's in pretty good shape so we can leave that like that it looks complete the playfield has just a little bit of wear where the flippers have been dragging so whenever the bushings wear out that the things go through on the playfield it'll drag sometimes at the end so it's been dragging just a little bit so we might have to touch that up just a little bit that would be real easy though and we'll have to replace the bushings so it doesn't do it anymore and then there's minor wear you know all over the place but I can all clean up that'll all look pretty good so all in all the things in pretty nice shape I'm fun looking game of his art had the people had pointy wrists and fingers and elbows and shoulders and stuff we always thought that was a real cool stylized look like look at her arm real creative way of doing it so but you can see that the the back glass is flaking a little bit so we'll have to do something about that that's like very time-consuming so basically we're going to take this thing and we're going to pick the glass off open it up clean all the switches inside of it clean all the switches underneath the playfield look at all that clean all the switches replace all the light bulbs then scrub scrub scrub the top of the playfield get it as clean as possible take everything off of it get it as clean as possible clean everything as we put it back on put all new rubber rings and everything on it you can see sometimes whenever they sit for a while the Rings actually break clean clean clean new rubber rings and then we'll take the back glass now clean all the score reels and everything clean all the switches on them and then repaint parts of the back glass that are flaked this one's missing the back door to somebody to find one of those but we figured we'd film a little video of it before we started so you can see what kind of shape it was in so the first thing we're going to do is open it up and start cleaning switches all right both so this is what we're starting with we pulled the playfield out and the inside is actually very clean on this thing looks good so we're gonna go through and we're going to clean every switch and get them so they all so they all change State so you can see now you can see like this top bar so when you when it pulls then it pushes the bottom switch and then when it lets out it pushes the top switch and let's go with the bottom one yeah everything suggested where it changes state every time the relay works and you have to get all of the switches clean so we're gonna start in on that and get that doing its thing first now the reason we didn't just plug it in is because there's always something wrong with them anyway so we go through and clean all the switches usually we don't adjust them unless there's it's just obviously out of whack if it just looks like it just needs to adjust it a little bit we leave it alone because it's probably working if you go trying to adjust all of them you'll screw something up and you can see that three of the fuses have been removed so there's only one fuse in it so it's been given people trouble apparently but what's the first thing we're gonna do clean all the switches so that'll take a while but through the magic of YouTube it'll be done as soon as we come back okay folks so we are working on the underside of play field I cleaned everything in the cabinet everything is pretty clean so it wasn't it wasn't that big of a deal and so now we're cleaning the relays on the underside of the play field and some of the stranger stuff so the sense this is an e/m it's got all kinds of stuff all over there's five pipe bumpers this is a kick-out hole this is a kick-out hole it's got all these gates on the side so if that pulls in it opens a little gate on the top of the play field so ball can go somewhere that's not supposed to nor that it couldn't before got two kickers like most games two flippers another gate another gate and then at the top you've got this push up post that pushes up through the play field which is this assembly so we've taken the little top piece off and started cleaning it and then right in the middle the play field the big thing is you've got this arrow that spins around in the play field and the way they made that work is that's basically a score rule lying on its side underneath the play field and as this pulls in it moves the arrow so we got to clean that all up and we will have to clean the score room basically what we're doing with cleaning them is we're going through and every switch we're cleaning the two contacts with a we use a file that's like worn out so that it doesn't you don't want to use anything real aggressive because if you scrape up the contacts they don't work as well so we just use something that's fairly smooth so it just cleans them all you can even use like a business card to do it but I haven't found anything that's messed up yet and everything looks original I haven't even found anything that it looks like anybody's worked on so so far I don't see anything that we have to replace or buy now I might need new links on the flippers let's see there's too much playing those seem pretty good actually a little bit of playing but I don't know but I'll take this out and take the metal sleeves out of the coil and put a new nylon one in there so that those are back back back a little snappier but basically we're just cleaning cleaning cleaning cleaning cleaning I'm gonna clean up this reel as best I can and then we've removed all of the light bulbs and we're cleaning the little inserts underneath them on the play field so that they shine bright I think you get all kinds of dirt and stuff in there like here's a good one it's not dirty that is so we're cleaning all that out then we'll put all new light bulbs everywhere we'll put new coil sleeves and those flippers and then we'll slide this baby back in there where she goes so I'll come back whenever we get more done okay folks I found something video worthy this is the little PCB board that's underneath that real thing that we were looking at it's the exact same setup as a score reel on a Williams pinball machine this is the PCB board loop it's the PCB board you can see all the wires connected over here on the sides and you can see that each wire connects to a little tray so the way this works is there's a little piece that fits on here region so this little piece fits on there and as the score real terms click click click click click or this way click click click click click it turns around and it makes these two little contacts connect a different thing so one of them is always riding on this middle thing right and as it turns the other end of the horseshoe connects to this outside thing and so by doing that you connect this to this or this to this or this to this or this to this or this to this or this to this okay now you can see if you look really close that the way they connect this to the edge of the board is through this trace right here right so the problem obviously is this black area that trace is broke so like this never would have worked right because it's not connected now if you look real close look over here between these two so there's a hole there and I'm pulling up black crap you see another one up there okay and then look real close on all of this nylon see all of the gooey looking stuff so here's this again see all the goo all over it see how the nastiness on it that is wd-40 which is flammable so somebody this you know somebody decided to spray wd-40 all over this and on some things you can do that and it doesn't matter but on certain things whenever you do that depending on how much voltage they've got running through it whenever you do that it actually causes a fire so basically they were shorting some of this stuff together and then as the machine was doing its stuff it didn't like that a couple things were shorted together and started burning this trace and then it was burning between the ends over here so basically since it's it's I don't know if it's hmm I'm not so sure if it's flammable or if it's just conductive but basically it was connecting this trace to this trace and so that's why you were getting the burn in the middle and everything so big no-no and then the other thing is whenever you spray this stuff on it it makes it off gummy and gooey whenever it dries after a couple years sound nasty that is people think that it lubricates but it's not it's not good for them so basically because of that that board is screwed up I can't you anymore so I'm going to that that's the exact same board there's the part number that's one a Williams score real someone had to find a William score drill pulled a little board off of it and then resolder all these wires back on the edge of it but they don't have a nice clean one so I'll have to track one of them down and swap that parts that are a little arrow thing works our stash of Parts I found this Williams score real look it's the exact same freaking board just like I was saying so I didn't have to order one which is good because I don't make them anymore so it had to finally use one which basically I did in my part stash so I'm going to take that board off and solder all the wires to it and then mount it on there and there I think the reason I actually have this is because this exact same thing I ran into one time before I want something and so I ordered a couple score drills just so I could steal that board off of it and I found the one that Dexter one of the Hanson that's Nick's okay folks were a little further along I went ahead and rebuilt all that and so this is the old plate you can see they were actually holes burnt all the way through it including through that one trace so don't spray wd-40 on your old pinball machines bad idea and I've soldered the wires back on right where they had them and then a father because they had already resided up I thought oh they may have moved them so I went and looked if you look real close there's numbers on the post so like all of the context or numbers now looked in the schematics and it was actually right so they had correctly soldered it back one whenever they took it apart for whatever reason probably goes the whole thing didn't work so they're probably doing the part to try to figure out why so we got that we got our center post put back together clean clean clean clean clean put all the new light bulbs in and then we took the flippers we took the metal sleeves out and so on the the original sleeves are these metal ones back in the day if you look see that hole it's rubbed right through it they get all kinds of problems and it just did gives you it makes it where the it slows the flippers down basically or makes them get stuck and all kind of stuff so if you replace them with brand new nylon ones usually you're good the actual coils usually don't get bad they either just completely short and mess up or die still work fine so usually you can use the old coils but we put new sleeves in which those costs like 10 or something like that you can also put them in all of the other coils if you want but we don't think it's usually necessary we go ahead and save that dollar and four hours worth of time to do it so here's the original plungers you see how that moves a little bit so that's just slightly worn basically this little bakelite link has a little play in it where it's just worn over the years from so we put brand-new ones on it look at that which just minor movement see it but that's normal so we've got those ready and then the last thing is the actual flippers themselves this one is cracked so it needs a new shoe and this one's real dirty so it either needs cleaned up or a new shoe depends on what should we put on that I'm gonna look in my box and see what I got and here's what was left of the parts unit that we were taking the little bang off of you can see how for real work the coil pulls the plunger in makes it makes it do its thing so we're getting there so I'm gonna go ahead and put the I haven't the said we were talking about the bushings were worn out these are the bushings which is what was making the flippers drag but they're not worn out for fun so I'm gonna leave them well let's see on the top what was making them drag they may have just been bent or something but we'll put this back in I'm gonna leave the the actual flippers out for now because that way I can clean underneath them on the top right then I'll put them back in where I can get the angle just right so we're ready all of this is clean and ready to go back in so we'll pop it back in and we'll start working on the back part okay folks so here's what we've got going on in the back box if you've seen any of our other videos you've probably seen us do a lot of this stuff individually but I should just show you how this is set up so you've got a couple reset coils here these relays reset the rules at the beginning and then some points ones that add points so we cleaned those so basically we use a little worn out file to clean the dirt off of the contacts and we've got the first player scores the second player score rules third platter score rules and the fourth player score drills you've got this unit here which it says player units so it steps up we rebuild it very simple little thing up so I'll reset it and reset so you have to get it where it does all that so see the little post so that's the first player second third fourth player four player game it does that right and it resets the first player for the second ball if it's a one player game it'll start like this and then at the end of the ball it'll go one two three and then and then reset again you'll see two go back to the first player so if it's like it if it's a three-player game gonna go one player ball and then it'll jump over the second players ball and then I'll jump over to third players ball and it'll count two times to get back to the first players ball and then the second players ball with our players ball count two times so basically it it counts through the ones that aren't playing it's real neat the way they made all that work and this is the player unit so this is what makes it free play you've got a couple switches right - that are closed it's hard to see on but basically whenever the real turns back around to zero it opens those switches if you make it where it can't open those switches with the little bar that spins around then it never comes it ever runs out of credits and then up here you have the match unit and it was the same thing it just needs it just needed cleaned so we cleaned it now look how cool this is there's a little bar that hangs off of the match unit and though right so every time the Matt every time you score 10 points the match unit moves now the reason I call it to match unit is because it makes everything kind of random it's got different things depending on where it's sitting different things happen so each time you score 10 points spot which kinda is like a pseudo-random thing and then this little bar hits the bell every time you score 10 points and so that is how that works and then around here on the front we replaced the light bulbs now the interesting thing about this and see how some of these have a rounded spot so it's like these it's just a hole it's just a hole and then a few of them have a rounded spot that's routered the reason for that is because they're making room for this round bulb so back in the day the ones that had the round bulb were 4:55 bulbs so a 455 bulb is a flash bulb so back in the day you know these didn't have computers in them so if they wanted a bulb to blink very hard to do because something had to move or something you got to make it do that a computer can turn things on and off on and off no problem but back then all they had was switches and stuff right so what they did was that these special bulbs that flash on their own you just give them power and they build up a charge towards bright and then it dissipates and it builds up charge and dissipates builds up the charge dissipate so they actually blink and if you put four of them that blink at different times so it's you know this one's coming onto the nail come on and then this one comes on and that one comes on it's a really neat look reason they did that is because those bulbs would be behind the actual title of the machine so we've got this one here so behind where it says triple strike they might have those bulbs and the reason for that would be that if the game is just sitting it here with nobody playing it and all the lights are on but nothing's moving so you might not even notice it you know but if the bulbs are flash and then it's kind of they call that like an attract mode you know it's kind of trying to attract you to put some money in it so they would put bulbs that flash behind the title on the back glass just so that it would let you know that the thing is up and working and put in your money on modern machines they all have a track modes where it you know it runs through its light cycles and you know there'll be messages on the DMD put a quarter in me it might even talk to you or play music or something back in the day all they had was these little four bulbs that flashed okay folks so we found a little problem these score rails all have what's called an end of stroke switch so when this pulls in it moves the reel and it has a set up where this switch here mounts there and so when it pulls and it opens up the switch which kills the power to the coil which makes it release and bubble block the reason they put that on there is so that the so for instance let's say you hit ten points on the playfield so you hit ten points well that connects the switch which sends power to the ten point relay which is going to be one of these all right so the ten point relay pulls in which connects power to the if it's everything settling the first player because the first players plane it connects power to the coil which pulls in to make the reel turn and give you ten points right well the reason if they put that switch on there is that it holds power to the coil even if you just barely hit that ten point switch and it just barely hits that this this holds power to either the coil or the ten point relay I can't remember how it works probably holds the ten point relay in but it holds power to the coil and it'll hold power to the coil for a minute if that's how long it takes for that coil to pull in to turn that so the coil pulls in opens the switch kills power to it and then the coil lets go and you just got ten points if you didn't have that what would happen is if you just barely hit the 10 point on the board it might not score it might be so quick that it didn't have time to connect the power connect that power and then pull the coil all the way in you know so if you just if you hit the ten point switch like that well this coils just gonna go you know and just stutter a little bit so that you have to have that to make that pull all the way in so this one's broke so that's that's why I was filming this so you see there's two leads one of the one of the little you can barely tell one of the blades is broke off so what we're actually doing is I'm taking some parts off of another switch stack that I have off of a parts core real for a Bali actually we're taking these blades off when we're going to make a new switch for it to make it work so you just run into little stuff like that I just figured we'd film what we what popped up that was strange but everything has actually been really clean and we're just cleaning through it and find him broke stuff so if I find any more broke stuff I'll film alright so that was the only one that was broke so we fixed it all the other ones we just had to clean I didn't really have to adjust any switches they were all adjusted fine and now we are ready to plug it in and see if the thing works so we've cleaned every switch we've adjusted every relay we cleaned everything under the playfield replaced all the bulbs under the playfield replace all the bulbs on the back box cleaned every relay in the back rebuilt the stepper units cleaned all of the score displays cleaned the Jones plugs the little pins you know so that they connect well and so we're ready to test it so we replaced the three fuses that were missing and turned it on and on these on the old ones you have to hit this left flipper to actually turn them on like they come up they're just dead if you hit the left flipper it turns on the lights on here I'll show you that let me see if it'll do it again so it's off I just turned it on so for instance if I had it you know if I had an old arcade and I had a whole bunch of old pin balls back in the day it would sit there and nobody you can't even tell this thing's on right but you just saw me switch it on very strange so anyway we've got some light bulbs that aren't working right you know so what I'll have to do is turn it back off and clean the socket with a file or something make it a little better there's a few of them everywhere that are a little touchy they need a little help and there's our flash bulbs we were talking about or three of them is this one not working so that one might need a little bit of work too but everything looks pretty good so we're gonna try it out here's the ball of course we haven't cleaned any of the playfield or anything yet hey check this out this is the the wheel that we cleaned up and turned out pretty decent alright alright and we I believe it's on free plane so we'll hit start and see what happens now it should reset every one of those scores back to zero if I got it right okay so I kept it in the start button and it was making the lights go weak and then everything went off probably because it blew a fuse so we're gonna have to troubleshoot that and figure out what they've hacked up inside this thing but that's where we are now okay so the fuse that there was a fuse blown and it was the one that runs all of the coils and like 226 volts that runs everything and it also runs the motor so I checked all of the coils with my multimeter and you can you can test like a continuity test on them and just see what kind of resistance they have because you're basically measuring through the coil and so if you get one that's like less than like one own that coil is shorted you know it's so basically you're sending electricity through all of the windings and then measuring it on the other side of the whole wire so it should all be like three ohms or above and they were none of them were messed up and so then I measured the motor and it was like one ohm but that's kind of how those like motors it's it's more of a direct short so that seemed fine and then I looked in my other Williams game that I have over here and it measured the same so I took the motor and I just turned it a little bit because when I was hitting the start button it almost seemed like the motor was trying to turn or you know something was going on like the lights were kind of pulsing so I think the motor was just stuck from sitting for years and years and years so I turned the motor a little bit which it didn't seem like it was stuck or anything but I turned it a little bit and I put a new fuse in hit start and it started right up and when it did it reset all of the score rules except for one it didn't reset that one and after I looked at it I figured out that this wire was broke so this wire solder is on there which is like how it gets its power so because that was broke it with him to his thing so we have the ball out looks like we're on ball number two so we'll see if it does anything remember I don't any I want to get our little I want to get our little thing spinning yeah there we go these are moving too they were like our post came up I went back down that says down post so I don't know why these aren't lit up anymore but all right so it's kind of working so the next thing I'm going to do is instead of letting this play field keep getting screwed up I'm gonna throw that old dumb ball in the trash and then I'm gonna take everything off the play field and start cleaning it and then we'll put new rubber rings and all of that on it and then we still have to do the back glass to it next is the playfield pulled everything off the play field with the exception of a few metal parts basically and the pop bumpers we're going to clean all that up we laid them all over here of course on top of our other play field we always lay I'm kind of roughly and where they are on the other play field and we put the posts like you know if there were like five or six posts over here we kind of put them in the same spot and it just makes a little easier whenever you're ready to put it back together on these old simple ones oh it's not too big of a deal but like we were talking about earlier the play field is in pretty good condition it just has some wear here and there and it's got these two bad little spots here so I'm still kind of deciding what I'm gonna do about that I don't know I'll probably repaint them because they're obvious like right in front of your face so I will probably repaint them but we'll see and we just got to clean up all the wear and then we get it all clean we'll actually test it and see if the you know everything's scoring right and figure out like if the lights are working right and all of that good stuff but this is what it looks like before we mess with it and we'll clean it up and start putting some stuff back together and then you get to see the the after shot it's much better oh wait I forgot to do that little touch-up spot much better got that touched up so the playfield is in pretty nice shape not perfect you can see some of the wear like around the pot bumpers wouldn't clean all the way off but it most of it got off with the magic eraser but we've got a little bit where there we just left it for character reasons you know the arrow part is looking pretty good all turned out pretty nice it just needed new rubber rings and stuff check that out so we're gonna do another video fixing it because there's some little minor things where it doesn't do what it's supposed to do so we're going to run through how to fix that on schematics and then we've still got to put the back glass on it so so that's how the back last turned out we just repainted the back of some of the colors you can see it of course whenever you up close to it which we had to do because the light was shot in through and you just can't have that but they came out pretty good we think so we're kind of done with the cosmetic stuff but so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna film another video where we're going through and testing everything so you can see how we get it actually up and playing so you saw us we cleaned everything and went through it all but now we have to get it perfect we got goodies everywhere so if you liked the video give us a thumbs up leave your comments below let us know what you think of it and we'll have the other video where we get it flipping up here shortly so stop by and see us or check out our website Lyons arcade and we'll see you on the next video