Repairing an Ultra-Rare 1969 Gottlieb Lariat Add-A-Ball Pinball Machine

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back again tonight with another pinball repair video for you this is a really cool game that we've had a long time that we're probably gonna fix up get in nice shape and then film a video of us playing it this is Gottlieb's 1969 Lariat pinball it's the exact same as wild wild west got lives wild wild west pinball except this is the rare add a ball version of it so if you don't know what that is I'll explain it to you here in a minute but this is a really cool game we bought this off of a guy many years ago and is in pretty rough shape we had the cabinet repainted parts of it are pretty nice parts of it aren't perfect but we had the cabinet repainted the the legs have been repainted the back glass I have at the house I need to bring back up and the playfields pretty rough but we're gonna fix this up this is a this is a real piece of work here whenever people talk about rare machines this is a really rare machine now have you ever heard me say any of our games are rare I never use that word this really is rare and it's because it's an add a ball game so way back in the day they had all of these legal problems with people playing pinball machines and the reason was because people gambled on them so they had what they called bingo machines that had you know 25 holes in them and you wear two ball lands it lights up numbers and you could actually win a bunch of credits on the game and then get paid out for it so on those games if the game was like a nickel to play you might win a hundred credits so you might win you might you might have five dollars worth of credits on it you tell the owner of the stab the establishment he comes over he hits a button on it that knocks all the credits off a knock off button and paid you $5.00 so you can actually gamble on the bingo games well because of that a lot of municipalities states and things made pinball illegal if you can believe that so a lot of the companies came up had to come up with different ways to to prove that you could not gamble on the machines so they did the got live one has anything on it here this is a Williams game from the 70s see how it says for amusement only they had to put stuff like that on the machine so one of the one of the things that you know if you look into the history of it and I've talked about it before the flipper was actually designed for that when you put a flipper on a machine now it's more of a game of skill and you don't it's less of a game of gambling but that wasn't enough for some places so some places said believe it or not if you can win a free game on the pinball machine that's gambling because you could sell your free game so let's say I'm playing this I win a free game I turn around to the guy behind me and I say hey buddy I got this game over here this worth a quarter give me a dime and it's yours that's gambling so I'm basically winning something of value even though the value is only a quarter or a dime or a nickel so as preposterous as that sound sounds that's how some of the laws in some of the places were so Gottlieb comes up with a brilliant idea so in most games like though there is a there is another version of this game that's almost identical to it it's a little bit different a little bit of the play feels different the back glass is different which you can't see yet because we haven't brought in and the gameplay is a little bit different but the wild wild west game is a is just a you know a standard a standard machine on that game you get either three balls or five balls depending on how it's set up and so when you start the game on the back it says ball number one and you play through it right and then when you I'm wondering if one two three four five six seven eight nine ten okay I guess that makes sense so you won on wild wild wild west you start with ball number one then you play ball number two then you play ball number three and then it says game over well on a Nadder ball game and so you can you can win a free game on that on an add a ball game ad D - a - B ALL on an add a ball game that was a got little kind of trade mark I don't think they let anybody else use that that phrase you started off with five balls and so it said five on the back last and they made the rules slightly different so in this particular game you cannot win a free game if you notice there's no score there's no credit reel in the back box you can't even put more than one credit on the game well I guess you can't because it's two-player but you get my point but the the the rules are a little bit different on this guy on the wild wild western game these inserts here say two thousand points and then the whites say when lit or it might be five hundred points whatever it says these little inserts say when lit on this game it says one two three four five so if you score all five of those you win a free ball so on a regular electromechanical pinball machine they didn't have a way to actually go backwards on the ball count so if you were on ball number two and you win a free ball on an e/m what does it do you don't go back to ball number one it stays on ball number two and it lights a light up at the bottom that says same player shoots again when lit right here's that eight ball which is actually a solid state same player shoots again so it just gives you a it gives you another ball so let's see Bally's lost world I don't know if I think on lost world it lights up on the back glass if you can I think you can shoot it get up forget free ball on a wall world same player shoots again we've even got this bad cats here and it says meow again so that's how they do it on most games whenever your ball ends it just doesn't take it away from you it shoots the ball back out and you play again but on an ad uh ball game whenever you get all five of those lights on the back glass you're you've got five balls left it says ball five it goes up to six right and then you keep you can keep playing you got the same ball so you do it again it goes up to seven so it's actually designed where you can add a ball to the total number of balls that you have left to play so instead of playing the balls up you're actually playing them down so the number on the back tells you how many you have left so the theory behind that was you can't sell an extra ball to the guy behind you I guess you could turn around and say hey give me a quarter and I'll let you play my game but that was just a way that they were trying to skirt the legalities of the games where you could win credits they also had games some of the some of the places like of the Bally's yeah let's look at this so this is an old eight ball to beat all the heck but we haven't done it yet look real close on the window where it says credit that's actually like a little sticker and the reason for that was in some locations it was against the law to let people know that there were extra games on the machine they said they did all kinds of little crazy stuff like this so if you won three or four games as long as it didn't say that you had four games on the machine you were fine it wasn't illegal but if it said four on it you might be able to sell or whatever you know so they actually made the back glasses where you could put a little sticker that says credit if you're in a place where that's legal or leave it off and you can actually own a Bally you can turn off where it displays how many credits you have it's also where this little light comes from on the apron there's a little white here that lights up if there's a credit on the machine like I said there's just ridiculous laws but that was the birth of the adda ball machine so because these adda ball machines were basically made for places where the regular machine was illegal they never made as many of them so wild wild west I should have looked up how many of those they made I'm just going to guess two or three thousand wild wild west but this lariat which is a different name it's basically the same game but it's the add a ball version and has slightly different scoring slightly different instructions a couple little changes in the art changes in the art on the back glass lariat they only made a hundred and fifty of these so that's pretty rare you know how many of those are still around maybe 50 so we had a guy call us years ago and he had a bunch of games we went and bottom and he had three lariats it's out of the 150 we've got three of them how cool is that [Music] but this was the worst one this thing was in really rough shape when we got it so but we're going through fixing it up the paint is kind of done some of the paint but it's been sitting like this for years so it's time to fix it our main problem is going to be the top of the playfield looks like crap I'll take the glass off and we'll mess with it but that's all flaking off it kind of it was originally pink and it kind of looks like there's like a like a wax that's you know is dust there's like a wax that's rubbing off of it so we're gonna have to very carefully look at that we're gonna have Airy carefully try to clean that off and get that all presentable if I can get it all a uniform paint color will be about done with that that's gonna be the hard part so I'll do this let me take the glass out we'll open it up let's look inside of it and see what we're starting the thing is rough there's a lot of rust on the on the apron here what to decide what we want to do with that the playfield has just problems everywhere stuff like this really scares me look at the woman's legs I don't know if all that's gonna just stay like it is or if it's all gonna go white or if I'm looking at primer under it or what I don't know what's going on there you've got the same thing going on here it looks like a lot of that's gonna chip off back here in the back you've got all these different shades of pink and this looks like it's either the clear coat or it's like a wax that's kind of flaking off see there so people that's really scaring me I hope we don't end up ruining this display field but we're gonna see what we can do hopefully we won't have to repaint the whole thing that would be a disaster we've got our plastics everything looks good on them it's just mainly or how much of this paint or we're gonna be able to save it's such a look how great the design is I mean look kind of awesome that looks you have these two super cool cowgirls here right in the middle just awesome art and so we really need to save that make it look as good as possible so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start taking everything off of the playfield and we'll get it down as bare as we can I'm probably not take the pop-up resolved yet but I may have to later but I'll certainly take all the plastics and posts off til we get down to the bare wood and see what we end up with okay we've got everything off of it it'd be interesting to see what happens with this I've got the arch off of it I guess I need to take these off too let's take these off real quick all right that's better get those out of the way yeah this is pretty amazing if you look you can see what's happened this machine's from the 60s and originally it was basically hot pink underneath the dead bumpers top it's still hot pink and it has completely faded to like a white pink which is a good color if we can get it all one color that would be much more preferable her her skirt was probably and her boots were probably the same hot pink color originally pretty wild so we're gonna save this one way or the other you know when I when we got these we had three of them we've got three of them whenever we got these this one though was in the worst condition and whenever we got these I tried to purchase a replacement playfield to replace this particular playfield because the other two are in better shape and so I thought well I'll just get a wild wild west playfield that's a pretty common game and I found one a gentleman on mine actually had a wild wild west play field that was in decent shape and he got it all ready to go and everything and then at the last minute I noticed that the play field is it's just there's a lot of differences just little stuff like I think some of this stuff is different and like I was saying the 1 2 3 4 5 s different so the all of the scoring is marked differently on the blahblah West play field and the Lariat play field so since there were only 150 of them folks this is it I'm gonna have to fix it somehow so what I'm first going to do is very carefully try to clean all of the nastiness off of it just the regular dirt and I'm gonna go real careful in certain places because like I said what is going on there I don't know if I mean it would be great if I could get all of this brown to turn white like that because that's probably the original color but it sure looks to me like you know a layer of paint is flaking off there somebody get very very careful and this is always fun whenever you have a melted piece of rubber on the playfield that always takes the paint off all right so I'm gonna wipe it down very carefully and go little by little by little by little and see how well I can clean it up just with some like 409 and elbow grease but not too much elbow grease because I don't want everything to flake off if I can get all of this crap to flake off and leave it all ones pretty pink color we're good we're done I can roll with it I could even leave that as it is if it would stay like that but I don't think that's gonna happen I think I'm gonna have to I think I might they go pretty severe on it but let's let's see what we can do so I cleaned off a lot of the loose stuff and even vacuumed off some of the loose stuff and then I took some magic eraser and started working on the bottom here basically the pink paint everywhere that it is which is her skirt her boots and the whole top half it's all I think the paint's just compromised like the top layer of the paint it's just flaking off so this is as much of it as I could get off and so when you hit it with a magic eraser it what it really darkens the pink like that you know it's a lot darker than it was this is the color that it was and then this is what it is after you clean it but if you go too far you don't get rid of the top you get like what's going on up here so you get it nice and pink it was you get it nice and pink but you've still got all of this top layer almost like dead skin cells that's stuck on it and if you keep going you start losing some of your pink so you can see where the whites starting to come through over here even more right so no matter what you do you can't get rid of all of this loose stuff which means I'm just going to do the best I can with it and then I'm probably gonna have to repaint the pink so that's fun so we'll see how that goes I kind of hate to do it because I don't like this down here I want to leave like with the spectral where it's you know chipped a little bit there it's a little bit of where I don't mind at all so if the whole thing could look weathered like that'd be fine but now I'm gonna have pink up here that's new and then there all of this is old so we're just gonna have to do what we can do I'm gonna clean this up the best I can but I don't think there's any way I can get it where it even like that right there is about as good as I can get it for that part I mean I can't leave it like that but I'll keep cleaning with magic eraser we'll see how clean we can get it and then we'll see what we can do I guess I mixed up some pink and started painting in some pink it's kind of a pinkish purple but I think it's a pretty decent match basically I'm trying to leave her skirt alone and repaint all this to match the skirt that's not the original color that it was but and it's more of a faded look you know but I want to leave these I don't want to redo these and we'll redo all of this but I think it's coming along pretty good so as you can see I've already done all this part I cleaned it all off as good as I could got all of the loose paint off and everything and now we're putting it in I'm gonna try to make it I'm gonna try to I mean I may not even touch up the yellow I wanted to look worn because all of this looks worn you know so I kind of wanted all to look to all look evenly worn but that pink was just freakin ridiculous I mean we couldn't have left it like that so someone keep putting that in and we'll see if we can I don't may be able to leave this to like in the parts and the mountains some of that blue needs to be redone though but hmm so I'll just keep I'll paint down to the mountains and then we'll see how it looks after that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I did all of the pink I think it turned out pretty good really I think that kind of saved it because that was the only part that was just completely unacceptable the rest of it still looks pretty good now there's a lot of where right there a lot of this Blues missing so I'm gonna do some blue too and it'll allow me to touch up some of the blue up there where there's somewhere so I'm thinking I'm gonna touch up this blue I'm gonna touch up a little bit of the blue up here if I can get a real good match and then I'm going to try to make this look a little better and then we're gonna leave it alone I might do some of the black lines I also use the pink to redo the numbers on the inserts okay so I got a mix of blue and it's all the same color it's all the same so I'm just gonna try to mix the blue it there's not really that many colors on this is there there's red and yellow there's a cream there's a pink and there's a blue so I think I guess there's five colors another six colors cuz this is this is um like this color here is different than that color see the contrast between the so there's white but it's not too not too complex so I will I'll see if I can mix up a blue that's pretty close so we can get some of that back and that's supposed to be like mountains where you're looking up a canyon or something or those I guess they're out he hauling it and the the desert stretch is often in the background you see the mountains but that's that's pretty worn right there this right here like this yellow worn I'm gonna leave that I think because I can't make it all look perfect there's just there's problems everywhere but that's pretty bad and I think I think if I do that since it's isolated from everything else it'll be pretty easy to touch up so wish me luck so the mountains are starting to come back and you can see how we got it kind of half and half it's really kind of cool the way they designed that so of course we had to finish the left side a little bit and touch up the right side a little bit but we're about there people about got it now after that I need to re-ink some of the black lines here and there but and do that but uh we're definitely getting there so just a little bit more blue paint and we'll do the black all right so this is what we ended up with I sprayed clear coat on it and yes I sprayed clear coat with the very targets still installed they move I don't want to move because then they stick back but check that out man I really think it came out pretty damn good really it's a lot better than I thought it was gonna be I thought this thing was gonna be rough and I wanted it to be decent because we repainted the cabinet everything you know so I wanted to look pretty good and I think it's going to it's just coming together pretty good the secret is people don't use glossy clear coat if you use glossy clear coat you can see every little thing but it doesn't on the older games that they weren't high gloss yeah I'm pretty happy with it it's a lot better than I thought so we'll let this dry and then we'll wax it and then we'll start putting stuff back on and I had to order a bunch of parts so when they come in we will we'll put it all back together and make it look good pretty cool yeah I'm happy with it definitely for show I looked at a bunch of pictures online of the some of them floating around and wild wild west too because it's the same art or close to the same art and all of them the Pink's faded so I think I think it's gonna look pretty good once we get all the pop bumpers back on it and all the lights on put the arch back on the talked about the paint that arch we have to repaint the apron and all of that yeah I'm really happy with how the touch-ups came out I think it looks a lot better than I thought it would so here's what we ended up with after we cleaned and put everything back so we waxed waxed waxed you can see this machine from the lights on it a little bit see how the wax came out looking pretty uniform and good even up here on the top get new flipper plastics on it those are actually new old stock I've had this for a long time of course new rubbers new light bulbs everywhere new I mean these are original but cleaned cleaned cleaned cleaned new pop bumper caps clean those are actually the original lane guides even though a couple of them are darker than the other ones I kind of just liked how they were vintage and patent cracked or anything yet so I cleaned them up as best I could and put them back there real cheap doesn't only like a dollar if you have to buy new ones say yeah I think it's looking really good so we need to get our metal back on so the arch at the top needed to be repainted the apron at the bottom needs to be repainted the shooter gauge I think that's going needs to be repainted but I think repopulated it looks pretty good oh yeah you can see that you can see the sheen there pretty good you don't want it real glossy like in modern pinball machine cuz that's not how they looked it kind of looked like that so we got it as clean as possible there's a little bit of we're here from the kick-out hole a little bit of we're here from the kick-out hole just whenever the ball kicks out it lands right there and causes a little bit of damage but it's got some clear coat on it now it's got wax on it so it won't get any worse and that Center pop bumper lights up to there's a there's a relay that goes back and forth and so either those are lit up or that one's lit up that's how it works I think it's a much a big improvement over how it was originally and I kind of liked a little bit of where that's around the bumpers because it's just enough I know a lot of people like I'm perfect but I like it where it looks a little worn and it kind of hides that we redid all this you know I like it I think we we struck a good medium there so we'll do the let's do the apron you get that all on there so the next thing we're gonna do we're gonna fix this apron thanks just destroyed it's got surface rust all over it all the paint in the art as a cotton messed up so I'm gonna clean it up a little bit and then I'm gonna start sanding it and we're gonna repaint the whole thing so we'll get started on that so good we can make it look so we sanded it down get rid of all the rust that we could and then cleared it I mean I sprayed it a nice white you can see on this it's not quite thick enough to hide everything but that shouldn't matter for what we're doing but it looks nice and clean now and so we ordered these a while back because we've had the chance for a while from pinball rescue so pinball rescue is in Australia pinball rescue net and they make some stuff that you can't get other places which is why you had to order it from Australian so says instructions for fitting pinball rescue decals prepare the ball cover by repainting it in the original colour a high-gloss finish is preferable check check the position where the decals are to be applied you can mark the position using plastic tape me3 wet surface with water Oh I'll skip one and sheer surface is clean and free of dust polish or oils three wet surface with water use a small amount of detergent about the same strength you would use to wash dishes so in other words use Windex this will enable you to position the decal and assist in removing air bubbles from underneath the decal for place decal facedown on a flat surface and remove backing sheet being careful not to soil the adhesive on the decal a black decal to wet surface and adjust into position squeezie squeegee gently with the squeegee and slowly to remove any excess water and air bubbles from beneath the decal lay a piece of paper on top of the decal while you squeegee this prevents scratching and the edges lifting allow several hours to dry overnight is preferable no in some climates fogging of the adhesive will occur this will dissipate after a few days in warm conditions all right so basically we're gonna get this real wet then we're going to carefully put the decal on it and slide it to where it goes and then we're gonna squeegee out all of the all of the air but what I'm gonna do is this ball shooter cover first because I've got two of those so if I mess one up I can use the other one so we'll do it first and see how it comes out so here is what it ended up looking like with the decal on the apron it's still not dry all the way but it was dry enough to put on there that's the only way to fly people there's no way you can repaint that sometimes if we've got one we're like a little bit of it's missing will repaint in the part that's missing but man you need to put those decals on it just makes it look nice and then the arch up at the top we had to repaint to usually I don't even do that unless unless it's just all rusted and you you don't have any choice so I didn't have a choice in this instance so I went with it but there you go so we have got the playfield done so now what I've got to do is I need to film another video of us fixing all the electronic stuff we've already started filming it but we'll edit it together so that there's a separate video of electronics of course we still have to do the back glass and the cabinet a little bit but the electronic stuff we'll do on a separate video so we'll end this here it's getting pretty pretty long anyway but leave your comments below about how you think the playfield turned out I think it looks really good make sure to give us a thumbs up for taking the trouble to film it all for you because we didn't have to do that folks it slows us down a little bit you know but we do it anyways because we want to keep our viewers with fresh material right so leave your comments below give us a thumbs up make sure to subscribe to us if you haven't already and we will see you on the next video so the next video we'll be doing all the electronic repair on it we'll check some of that stuff out