Episode: 3644
Title: HPR3644: Pinball Machine Repair Tips
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3644/hpr3644.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:44:24

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,644 for Thursday 21 July 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Pinball Machine Repair Tips.
It is part of the series Hobby Electronics.
It is the first show by New Host Celeste, and is about 25 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, as a first show, I introduce myself and show some repair ability tips for
July 15, 2022 Pinball Machines.
Hello everyone, this is my very first episode I am making and I don't know if I will have
time to make other episodes, but I am following HPR from some time and I wanted to contribute
back in some ways, at least with one episode.
We will see if I will have enough free time to make more, and also I need to find curious
topics to talk about that may be interesting for you.
Today's topic is about Pinball Machine Repairs, and it's not strictly a topic about
new tech or current days tech, even, but I thought that maybe some of the audience,
as this is Hacker Public Radio, you are Huckers, and you like to tinker with stuff,
do it yourself stuff and similar, so I thought that Pinball Machine could be interesting.
First of all, we will follow this path a little bit or who I am, I'm not saying much,
but just to warn you about me being Italian, then we will see how I got the Pinball Machine
and then some repair ability tips.
First of all, as I said, I am not a native English speaker, so I hope you can understand
completely what I say, and I hope I don't make pronunciation mistakes all the time.
One of the common pronunciation mistakes I make, I do, which is
I end up reading English words like they were Italian words.
For instance, do you know the radar, the spinning thing in airports or on boats to detect
other boats? Well, I read it in the Italian way usually, because in Italian we just
copied the writing of the words and we read it in the Italian way, so it becomes radar.
And I tend to make some mistakes like that, so if you don't understand the word,
maybe just simply write it down, letter by letter, and then read it in the strange English way.
Because you know, for people who don't know, in Italian, each letter has its corresponding sound
and vice versa, so you just read what it's written and you just write how you heard the word.
That's it, you have learned how to write in Italian. You have this key now.
So let's start. How I got a Pinball Machine.
Some maybe a decade ago, it was, yeah, it's already a decade ago, there was a shop owner,
a local shop owner who had a shop where you can find many coin ops and play them. You can find,
you could find a Pinball Machine, there's a lot of machines and similar. And this guy was
dismantling all the old machines to replace them with new ones. So he was quite happy to get
rid of the old machine without having to pay for the dismantling. So me and my dad, we just had
the chance of finding him at the right time, at the right place, and he said, hey, I have this
Pinball Machine, do you want one? I want to get rid of them for free. So if you pay for the
transportation, you can just come here and pick it up. Wow, that's perfect. The problem is one,
Pinball Machines were not designed to be moved easily and they are very heavy. So bringing it around
is quite difficult. Secondly, it had many broken parts, it almost functions, it almost worked,
but it had some missing parts, the rubber bands were all destroyed, were very old and
stiff, not elastic anymore. And also, there were some patches, some very badly made repairs,
like there was a broken decals and instead of buying a new decals, this guy picked up a screw
and screwed that into the decals, added one randomly in the frame. So at least this was not so bad
looking, so that screw is still there, but that's shame, that's a shame when you
destroyed the original part, like that. Okay, so some repairability tips, I wanted to give them.
So first of all, I was saying, it was not fully functional and for many years, I tried with my
debt to repair some parts, but when you repair some parts, after that maybe some months passed and
another part breaks and then another part breaks. So we never got it fully functional because,
as I said, it was already full of patches, so it was just easier, it was just better to replace
stuff instead of trying to add another patch of the patch. Luckily, there are some websites
where you can find parts, and I will talk about this later also. So fast forward to 2020,
you have COVID-19, you have lockdowns, everyone at home, and finally we got all the free time we
wanted to finally completely repair the pinball machine, and we did it. We did it.
In the meantime, also the screen broke, but we repaired that, and wow, it works, and it's
some months, almost a year now, yeah, a year now, almost two years, actually, yeah, two years,
and it's been working, it's perfect. So we did a good job. Anyway, let's see some repair
ability tips. First of all, if you come from European Union, or if you come from every state that
uses the metric system, usually probably depending on the machine, you should probably find some
imperial units or ranches. Not because imperial units are good, honestly, I dislike them a lot,
you're free to use imperial units, just be ashamed of that. They are not sensible, really.
Anyway, let's go back to the main topic. My pinball machine was in Indiana Jones,
the pinball adventure from the 90s, produced by a company named Williams, I think it's based
in California. So everything is designed in imperial units. So make sure to find imperial units
or ranches to be able to ask for you everything you want. You also need a complete set of ranches,
because you have some strange formats like 11 out of 16 inches, 5 out of 16 inches, and similar.
You have to buy the full set. Second tip, there are some high voltage parts, so pay attention,
really pay attention, because we are used to nowadays electronics where everything around said
5 volts, 3.3 volts, and similar, 12 at most. But 90s technology in pinballs
ran at full voltage, I would say, at full voltage. So obviously there were some parts
that are lower voltage, like the electronic parts, but all the screen also has 100 and something,
I can't remember the correct number, but it was more than 100 voltage.
And also the coils. The coils need a lot of power to drive them.
There are some protections in my pinball. Make sure there is one protection in yours too,
which is when you open the little door, when you open the door, the pinball disconnects the
coil circuitry to protect you when you put your hand inside the machine, so you don't get
electricity in your hand. But it's really better to just unplug the electricity before touching
anything. And also, after you have unplugged it, wait for seconds, maybe even a minute, because
there are some very big condenser, which maybe are not cold condenser, I'm making a bad
translation from Italian, capacitors. Yeah, capacitors. There are some very big capacitors,
which remain charged for some time. So make sure to wait for them to completely discharge before
touching anything. Another thing I wanted to suggest to you is where to find parts.
There are some website of there who still make parts on their own.
For example, the last website I bought from, it was called Ministry of Pinball, something like that.
And it has quite complete parts. Pay attention to customs, if I think that shop is from Netherlands.
Also, it happened that one of the parts took so much time for the shipping, because it was
from a shop from United Kingdom and since Brexit happened, even if you're in Europe, it takes so
much time to get past the customs. So keep in mind that depending on how it goes, it may take
a lot of time. They're not scamming you, it's just slow. A cool part about
how Pinball machines and 90s technology maybe, in general, was built, is that it was easy to
repair. Also, big components were very big and easy to handle, then current days,
circuitry and electronics. So it's really easier to unscrew a coil and swap it,
than it is to swap a microcontroller, solder it to a board, using a microscope.
That's really easier to swap a coil. It's really easier. But also, they tend to
make you repair the object easily, the device easily. My Pinball machine and most Pinball machine
have it too. They have a schematics book. Inside the machine, you open up the door,
and inside you have the full book with all the schematics of every possible circuit in the
machine, with listing every possible component, every possible resistor, the value of each resistor,
the code on the PCB of each component. So you can really see what's going on and know what to
swap where it is and similar. Also, in the schematics book, you can find a description of
some voltage control point. So you can troubleshoot the board by checking the voltage in the
specific parts and seeing if it's corresponding to what it's written in the schematics.
Some of these books can also be found online, so if you don't have one in your machine or
if you're buying a machine, make sure you can find one because they are really useful.
They guide you in repairing it.
One thing I wanted to say is that if you want to buy a machine, you have your found one,
there are some parts you have to worry more about and some parts you have to worry less about.
So you can estimate if it's a proper price or not better.
One of the worst thing you can find is machines that were left in a humidity in bed condition
water. You will spot them from the wood who got bent and every contact probably, every contact
is oxidized. Oxidization is repairable with some spray substance, but bent wood, that's a problem.
You would have to swap everything or ask someone to make a custom wood board just for that.
That's not an easy stuff, so that's a problem if you find bent wood.
Some parts like a specific circuitry may be difficult to find.
The good news is that many boards are common between different models, are the same between
different models. I can't recall if it was the coil controller or some other sensor parts.
Let's say it was the coil controller or maybe the ball loader. Anyway, parts like that
are common between many devices. For instance, they put the same six-ball controller,
the ball loader, the one that keeps the ball, and then loads one and you should do it.
And then it keeps all the ball that fall down in it. That part
has space for six balls, but they used the exactly the same component for every other pinball.
Even pinball who only had one ball or maybe they had at most three balls,
they still use the six-slot loader. So why? Because in that way, they only had to produce one part,
and in one shot they had repair parts for everything. That's quite smart.
As I said, make sure to check that. If the components who are broken are very common one,
like that, they are easier to find. You don't have to worry about that. But if there are some parts
like the ROM of the board or the the game controller board, something very specific,
make sure to see if there are some repair parts if that's broken or if it's oxidized or risking
to break for some reason. After getting your machine, you would probably have to swap every
single rubber bands in the machine. Because rubber becomes very hard, it gets not elastic anymore
after some time. So we'll have to swap them. Luckily, rubber band sets are very easy to find and
quite cheap, so you're ready to go for that. Another part which is easy enough to find,
not cheap, but easy enough to find at least, are decals, decoration, plastic decorations.
You can find them online somewhere. I was checking before recording this podcast for my
pinball and I have still many parts. Another part you may swap once you get your machine are lamps.
In the 90s, 90s machines, you only had simple old-style lamps, which was okay, very cool,
very warm, but they break so easily. They break so easily all the time. You repair some lamps,
then you play for some time. After some months, you have to open up everything in the pinball
to reach through three lamps that broke in the meantime. One suggestion, one suggestion I can give
you is that there are retrofitting parts where the producer of the repair parts
made something with the same structure of the original lamps, but
swapping the old lamp with LEDs. And LEDs are quite more bright. They someway ruin the
DM experience. They are really bright, but at least they don't break all the time. They don't break all
the time. We swapped every lamp with LED lights and I like the original look, but I would not go
back for any reason. They are good looking, they are a bit more modern, and they don't break.
Some people sell or swap the sound room. In the pinball, you had already programmed chips,
so if you want to swap the sounds, you have to swap directly the chip. I didn't do that because I
fear of ruining the board, and also I like the original soundtrack, the sound, the feel of that
sound. You can find gameplay videos of this pinball machine. As I said, mine is Indiana Jones,
the pinball adventure machine. I have played either machines in public places,
but honestly, Indiana Jones, the pinball adventure is one of the most fun I found. It doesn't have
tons and tons of stuff. Later machines, after that, went on the challenge of adding more features,
more features, more features, and then you have four flippers instead of two, and then you have tons
and tons of moving parts, but it ended up being messy and unplayable. And the other end, it's not
as simple as previous pinballs. I played one, which was really, really old, and it was almost only chance.
So, pinball like that are a good compromise between features and playability.
The gameplay is very fun and changes over time when you play.
So, I can suggest you, if you are buying one machine, ask the seller to play some matches, play
a bit half an hour with the machine. So, you see, if you like its gameplay or not, if it's simple
enough, if it's too messy for you, if it works, if you spot any broken part, any broken sensor.
So, you can make a good estimate of the repair price you will have to overcome.
And also, you see, if the price of the seller is saying is unjust or is it of if it is a fake price.
So, I hope these tips can be useful to you. And as I said, I don't know if I will make another
episode, it depends on my free time and feel free to suggest new topics. Usually, I spend more time
doing computer stuff, programming, and similar, but it's a little bit different episode
this than compared to what I do every day. Anyway, thanks for listening, see you maybe next time.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com,
internet archive, and rsings.net. On the Sadois status, today's show is released on
their Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International License.