Repairing a 1968 Chicago Coin 'Gun Smoke' Electromechanical Pinball Machine PART 1

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening what'd you think about that we're about to get started on this one this is a Chicago coin Gunsmoke pinball machine we bought this well over a year ago off of a gentleman he kept advertising it on Craigslist and in the pictures of it on Craigslist he had it sitting out in his yard norm Kahn I don't know if he left it like that or not there's some damage and stuff to the back glass from where it's weathered like that look at this face that's not good but it may have already been like that whenever we got it this whole thing was it had you can kind of tell here see the brown so the whole cabinet was like that it was a pretty dark brown almost looked like a like a nicotine thing and so we got some rubbing alcohol and some magic erasers and went to town on it and worked on it worked on it worked on it worked on it worked on it and we got it back to where it's pretty much you know it still looks weathered but it looks pretty presentable and it we were able to save the artwork on the sides and on the back box the front the artwork was just destroyed so we did some work with some filler and just painted the front white and then we painted the coin door repainted the point door and put it back you can see on this side it's pretty decent too so we kind of did that because we had to put it back together and get it back up on its legs and now that we have it like that we're going to work through it and get the thing working ironically the playfield was in pretty good shape we haven't done a thing to the playfield yet but it looks pretty good it's not bad it's gonna clean up really nice and look great it's got a little bit of wear here and there but on these old ones I kind of like it with a little bit of wear I just it makes them look like they're the age that they are it's got the little 2 inch flippers and it's got a set up where you can't cradle the ball because it'll fall down this if you do so you can all you can do is flip but it has this ball saver in the middle and it also has this Gunsmoke feature on the back box the 50 100 200 300 500 and I believe this button is not the start button I think that's the button for that we'll see here in a little bit but this video is gonna be about us repairing the thing you can see this plastic piece here is all crinkled up from where it was sitting out in the Sun so that's a shame because you can't get those we're gonna have to just make one out of paper and strangely the flipper buttons are missing hmm so who knows what that is so I thought we'd just film a little overview of it before we get started we're gonna start taking it apart and working through it so if you've got a Chicago coin electromechanical watch this video and we'll show you how to get the thing working again now I'm not going to plug this thing in because we sell them right so even if the thing works right now I can't sell it like that because I don't it might stop working tomorrow you know so I need to go through and clean every switch look at every relay clean the score reels get everything right to where I know it's right and then whenever I sell it I get back and be confident that it's gonna it's got the best possible chance of being reliable for the customer now if it screws up maybe I'll since I worked through the whole thing and messed with everything maybe I'll be able to tell over the phone or something what's wrong with the life of a pinball repair place lately I've been playing with the zoom a lot all right so will let's pop this sucker open and see what it looks like inside okay folks so I pulled the plate filled out so that we can get down to the switches and everything and I vacuumed it out it's very dusty in there as you can see and so basically all of these switches you have to get rid of opening and closing properly and that they're clean so that whenever they touch electricity can pass through them so this is the usually they call that like a relay bank I don't know what they're called on Chicago coins but this thing somebody has been messing with so I found a bunch of hacked stuff if you look on the bottom out know if I can get a good shot with this but we'll try it you can see on that one real ace you know all of that where the see that if Ike tied a bunch of wires together and things that's not normal and on the right there's some weird stuff going on on this this one here and then they've also on this bottom switch on the GAMEOVER relay they've got the wire stripped the insulation off of it and then they just hide this one around it right a lot of these switches were been out of place where they didn't touch properly whenever it resets and that wire that's tied around it runs over here to this plug and this plug selects the three ball set up or the five ball set up and they've got it badly soldered to one of the pins and then it runs across and it's soldered on to this relay so this relay is the lock relay right so whenever you turn to game one that locks in holds in which has been restored badly this relays been restored badly in this relay which is the tilt tilt hold relay is completely missing if you look at the wiring you can see they've unwrapped all the wiring usually this is tied up in a loom and it's all loose so I get to fix what somebody else fixed so what we're going to do is I'm gonna pull out I'm gonna find another coil that will mount in there luckily it's actually got it labeled that says K 28 - 1200 so 28 is the gauge of the wire and 12 is how many times it's wrapped around the spindle so if you find something similar off another machine or that actual relay or you can actually order those relays if you go to most of the pinball places they have just about all of them but I think I've got some parts when it's laying around that I can still something if you get something close you're fine since that's a I'll look it up since that's a tilt relay yeah we'll just stick with it if I get if I get something close we'll put it in there it's got to be the right size isn't everything - of course but what we're gonna do is we're gonna look in the schematics and we're gonna see why did they put that wire like what was supposed to be on this post because if it's not supposed to be like that I'm taking it off I don't like this kind of crap where I don't even know what it's doing or why one way or the other we're gonna fix it but there's no wire connected to that so I don't know if surely there were supposed to be something on there so they may have just been replacing a wire that they pulled out or somebody messed up or something so we'll look on the schematics and figure that out I went ahead and cleaned the switches on the score motor so whenever this turns you know makes all of the hens go in and out and I check to make sure they were all opening and closing as they should basically whenever you're messing with that if you've got a switch you don't even need the schematics if you think about it so let's look at this top switch if I can get it to focus and that might be a bad one let's look at this one over here I'll write that top switch there and you can sell filthy the bottom of the cabinet is the only way to really get it much cleaner is to take all the stuff off the board but that top switch is it supposed to be open or is it supposed to be closed the way you can tell is you just set it however it'll change how are you here we'll do both of them so we'll do this one and that one right you just set it so that it changes state so like right now the top one is open and the bottom one's closed and if you turn now the bottom one is open and the top ones open it will go back so it's set up so that it's changed state so I could for instance if I had it where right now it's the top ones open well then it's never closing well why would they put a switch that never closes you know I need to close or open as they do their thing similar thing with like let's see like this relay see how that one's open and that one's open well whenever you pull it in they're both closed so it must be right right if it's closed right now if I had if I had it bent where that's closed and then you press it and it's still closed well you know it must not be right they need to open and close or close and open and you can figure it out by just carefully looking at them you don't even need the schematics or need to know how to read them you just need to thank you so you have to go through every switch like that now if they're closed don't mess with it because it's probably fine usually usually they're not all messed up so sometimes people go through one and they'll mess with every switch and get it just right and then you go to start it and it's not working because you got something screwed up so don't bend things if you don't have to you know just make sure that the things definitely wrong and it's way wrong before you mess with it if it's if it looks like it's just you know it's working but maybe not as good as it should just leave it alone just leave it how it is you do need to clean them all though so you can you can clean the contacts with like a little like a business card people use you can just put a little little piece like a slide a business card between the two contacts if they're really dirty what we use a lot of times is like a like an old flat file that's worn out you don't want to use anything that's really aggressive or abrasive because whenever you file those contacts you'll just tear them all to pieces so you need something that's just basically going to get the grit off it I mean the the dirt off of it and you'll see there's a lot of baked on dirt so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to look in the schematics that wire from over there I don't think should be there but I'm gonna see what was on that that post originally and see what it was connected to and maybe we can even figure out what in the world they were doing okay folks so I pulled out my trusty schematics for this game sometimes you need them right now is one of those times and I found the three or five ball adjustment jack which is right there on the schematics you got to look around for it a little bit and there it is so you can see that they have the the square is the the part that's in the cabinet and then you can see the two little pins on the track so one of those wires it says R - y so that's red and yellow right so that's this one so that's the one that still looks like it's factory running to the jack that all looks fun right and then if you look down here at the bottom see that wire it's hard to tell what it is because it's so filthy and then this wire it's hard to tell what it is because it's so filthy so what color would you guess your zoom in what color would you guess those are just get a good look at what color would you say that is maybe red and yellow right so what color is this looks kind of like green and orange right so basically you can move this little Jack from this side to this side and if it's on this side it's five balls so on the 5 ball one of them maybe is red and yellow that the red and yellow connects to let's see if that's right so you see when it's the one well when it's on five ball the red and yellow would connect here which should be red and white what that's white so the the pull the plug in the bottom is white and then on the other side it would be white and red if it was connected to the three thing and then this other wire our mystery wire should connect either to blue and orange or black and orange right so we were looking at that one there saying that that wire is blue and orange now look at this if I remove the jack and then you see over here where the wires have been covered up all this time I'll be damned if that wire is not blue and orange see it curl around it's hard to do this with one hand see it it actually is blue and over and that top one on this side is black and orange and the bottom one here is white and red and then the other one is a red-and-white just like it said so the wire colors are actually all correct so my point of that is whenever you're looking trying to track down wires you really got to be careful because once once they've gotten this old pen filthy you can't make it out it's as bad as how blurry this camera is right now so so we're interested in the other ones so not we don't want to mess with the ones red and yeah well it looks like it's all hook that we're interested in the other jack right so if you look on the schematics here so there's our red and yellow so the other one is on that other one right and it runs up here and connects to a blue and orange and a blue and orange and also over here to the so this says play field vibration switch score frame vibration switch blue and orange right it also connects to this blue and orange that connects to one part of the lock relay so it connects to a blue and orange wire on the lock relay and then the other side connects over to the game over relay now if you look at that little symbol there what that's telling you is that's a switch on the GAMEOVER relay and the a stands for the a switch on the GAMEOVER relay and the J stands for it's connected from the switch to the relay with a jumper so it's switch a on the GAMEOVER relay should be blue and orange and should connect to that pin and then that pin should also connect to the lock relay right and if you look I'll be damned if that was isn't exactly what they did they connected it over here poorly but they did connect it see what they did to the blue and orange wire on the lock relay and then on the other side they connected it around and that wire on the bottom of the GAMEOVER relay that we were looking at that they connected it to is blue and orange so they actually did it right now if you look right there they connected it to the remnant of a wire so I don't know if that wire burnt up or for whatever reason they pulled that wire out and then replace it with this crappy wine but it is connected right so it they just did a really bad job of soldering it so we're gonna put a new wire in and make that connection better but they did have it wired up right we just need to make it where it's reliable and making good connections so I'm gonna mess with that and I'm going to clean some more relays and then we're gonna see if we can find a coil for that that really all right folks we've been working on some stuff so I took that really ugly wire that was wrapped across the top off and soldered a new one on one to the connector and this is the the bank I turned it upside unbolted it and turned it upside down it ran over to a switch here you can see the new wire to switch on the bottom of that switch stack and then it was supposed to and then we ran a wire back over all the way to the switch where it was supposed to be instead of it jumping across and get rid of the the wires that had the cloth missing from them for whatever reason and then once we turn this stack over the relay stack what do they call this what did they call that hmm anyway once we turn this all over there was all kinds of bad stuff going on underneath it where the bed hacked it over the years and a lot of wires just twisted together and really bad solder jobs on stuff where there was saw her on it but you could wiggle it and it wasn't making contact so it took all that off put new jumper wires got the wires soldered where they're supposed to go and got all that nice and solid reading the solder on this relay we didn't replace that that's from someone else redid the solder on this one redid the solder on this one of course soldered or wire on there redid the solder on this one and then I was I looked in a parts box that I had and I actually had the exact correct coil same port number and everything in the back that we had taken off of a pinball machine years ago so I don't even it just it was off of a part like we had a base of one or something so we didn't part out any games or anything but if we didn't have that you can order them new as you can tell from this one this is actually a new coil but we actually had one we were able to get the get it mounted right get the solder back on it and everything so we're at a position now where we've got I think all the hacked wiring repaired now it may have some hacked stuff in the head I'm not sure but what I want to what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna clean all the relays so I think we talked about it earlier but basically what you need to do and see if I can get a good shot of this oh and about the cleanliness if you look at the bottom of this machine it's filthy just dust all over it we ran a vacuum over it but can't really get all the dust out another thing that you have is you have these little pieces of paper that are stapled to the bottom if you run a vacuum on that it rips the paper off so you lose your labels of what each relay is and things like that since we're since we're selling this at not a completely restored price you know I mean we're not gonna take all the time to make everything brand new we're just getting it working again we're not gonna clean all of that up we're gonna clean up as much as we can reasonably but the proper way to do it is to actually take the entire all the wiring out the whole piece will unscrew you've got some screws here this entire board will come out of the machine and then you can slowly take each relay off clean it you can even take them all off and repaint the board or replace the board and then put it all back you can even have you can print up new labels for it but that's a heck of a job I mean it takes a ton of time if you look on online you can see some people that have done that with their machines and it looks great it's awesome but we just don't have the ability to invest that much time into it and to be honest Cosmetics aren't our strong suit anyway so but what we're gonna do now is a role-playing some of that up but it's not gonna look and it doesn't affect functionality so you know there's Dustin above a game of game still works it just doesn't look nice but looking at a relay basically you can see the contacts on the switches all of those need to be clean so that they conduct electricity so you can see you've got all of your switches on this one all the different types so this one is a this is a normally closed switch so it with the power off the relay you know the bar is up which is making this switch here connected whenever the relay pulls in it opens that switch and you can see when the contacts hit each other it moves just slightly which means that it's properly adjusted now this one is a normally open switch so whenever the whenever the relay closes it closes the switch makes the contact this one here is also normally open switch same thing and then this one here you have a make break switch so it's normally connected to this outside one and then whenever the relay pulls in it breaks that connection and makes the connection under it see you soon oh I'm saying the blade is normally connected to this one when it pulls in that Center blade moves over and is now connected to this one and no longer connected to that one so that's just an example of what you have to do you have to go through each relay and make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to do so all the normally open ones need to close when the relay comes in all the normally closed ones need to open when the relay comes in and all of the 3-way switches that are the two ways which is the make-and-break switches need to be made one way and then break and then make the other way whenever the relay pulls in so I'm gonna go through and check all of those and clean all of those contacts you can clean them with a number of things you don't want to use anything too aggressive so you don't want to get like a big file or anything and go at it because you'll mess up the the points on the contact or the contact on the switches and once you do that you'll have more trouble than you wanted you can use just a like a business card some people use and what we use is we actually do use a file but we would use one that's basically worn out that's almost basically just a flat piece of metal so you put it in there and it kind of just you're rubbing the dirt off of it basically so you just want to they don't have to be brand new or shiny they just shiny is fine but if they just need to conduct electrically and you can check that with like a multimeter or something if you've done it enough you can just kind of tell by looking at it if they look really black they're probably not going to conduct too well if you clean it up to where you can see the original copper copper color it's probably going to conduct so we're gonna go through and adjust another thing don't adjust every switch so if you start if you mess with one of these don't go through and adjust every single switch trying to get a perfect cuz you'll what will happen is you'll knock a bunch of them out of adjustment it'll look like it's fine but it'll actually you'll create more problems than you solve so all you really want to mess with is ones that are obviously screwed up like if they're way off and you know there's no way it's supposed to be like that yeah go ahead and adjust it but if you're not sure and it looks right just leave it alone one thing about these machines is as they run they kind of adjust themselves like the more you play them they kind of get to a point where they're in a groove gonna I mean I know that sounds crazy but it's true and they also sum up if they're properly adjusted they clean themselves so when the when the switches make they move a little bit and whenever they move that rubbing action kind of keeps the contacts clean so don't go through and adjust every switch but we're going to go through and if we find anything way out of adjustment we're going to adjust it we're going to clean every switch kind of have to do that especially on one this filthy and we're gonna try to touch up get some of that dust up we're gonna flip that back over and mount it how it's supposed to be mounted and then we've got the score motor here tons of switches to clean on it as well if you don't know how these work as it spins around these little cams have notches in them which raises and lowers the these little riders on the cam which makes them breaks all the switches as it goes around and that's how they get action out of the the logic as we're gonna do that and then we've also got this stepper unit here that needs to be cleaned and adjusted and we've got a smaller one back here that needs to be cleaned ingestion so we're gonna get on some of that stuff and we'll come back when we get a little farther along and let you know where we're at okay folks so we cleaned it up a little bit hmm it's not perfect but it's a little bit cleaner and I found a one switch that was obviously miss adjusted so figured I'd show it to you on tape just you can see what it looks like whenever you find one I believe it's this one so here's how you check so here's our switches he's held filthy the bottom still is but so I'm pushing in the actuator which is what happens when the coil energizes it pulls that in right so look at this right switch these three see how it's touching the one on the left and then when it goes in it touches the one on the right and see how both of the this switch and the switch move so whenever it hits this when you see it push it a little bit and when it hits this one you see it push it a little bit so that's how it should be when it's properly adjusted now look at this one on the left it's the same type of switch to make her brake switch you see what's going on all of these are fine except for this outside so this one if you look whenever I barely touch it see how I can move it without the middle and moving it's because they're not quite touching there's a little bit of space between it so you just kind of bend it a little bit to make it a little closer let's see it's still not moving so a little more you kind of have to bend it down and make a little tool to do it with I'm just doing with my finger you can't have to do it down here if you try to bend it up here it'll never been alright alright so sick now let's see how the left one is moving now and you can see air between it it's opening all the way when it goes in but it's touching it when it goes back out so you have to do that with every switch all of them every freaking one of them that's on the special relay so I don't know how big of a deal that would have been it would have made something not work so next we're going to take this step or unit off and mess with it a little bit so whenever I get a tour a portal I'll thumb it again okay so we worked on this little stepper unit it's kind of hard to see it it says it's the ball count unit these are Chicago coin games I've only worked on a couple of them do you see the red mark that's there in there I didn't put that on there someone else has done that what they're doing there is they're marking the reset position so basically when one of these coils goes in it moves to the spider hard to show this just it's all inside the cabinet when one of the coils pulls in it moves this spider this way it steps it up it's a stepper unit when other coil pulls then it resets it all the way back to the beginning so in its reset position which is I believe this one that arm is against there now why do you need to mark that they mark it so that whenever you take this off you can figure out how to put it back on because if you put it on in the wrong spot it'll be turning around and hitting the wrong stuff at the wrong time so the way it works is you know a couple of arms are connected or they're connected to ground but why so you're connecting different different points on the stepper unit to itself now you'll notice two on these it's a little different than a lot of like the valleys and stuff because they'll have little rivets that it touches this has more tracks that it rides on which you know some of the valleys of Williams have that too but this one doesn't seem to have any rivets at all it just goes around on one uh tracks so basically you take this off just unscrew that and then slowly take the spider off as what this is called and check to make sure that you lay it down where you can tell exactly how to put it back on how it is whenever you're in the reset position and then on the back you have it's different on each one but you have one coil that's the reset one and then one coil here to steer these little levers are pushing down on it moving it and then whenever you hit this one it resets it because of this spring here that's wrapped around so you need to remove this it just pulls out and whatever you do there's a spring wrapped around it and so what I do is I unwind it until there's no tension on the spring and I count how many times it on well and so on this one it was four times so once you put it all back together you just wind it back four times and you get it back out wisely but we'll see on the on the front of it where the connections or the what would you call those the contacts where the contacts are you just you want them nice and shiny like that or as shiny as you can get on you don't have to go crazy with it but you don't want a bunch of corrosion on it so we cleaned it up a little bit and then we put synthetic grease on it so that the little fingers can slide better and so you'll see how whenever it's at home position that one finger is touching that good and then when it steps up the oil pulls in around to another connection it's two are on the same one for whatever reason and that's just how they've got it all figured out now whenever you hit the top one it should reset it so whenever that coil pulls in every set it back to the beginning so you you also want to make sure that if it's only been stepped up so all the way you've got a lot of tension on that spring and it resets it back but you also need to make sure that if it only steps up like one and then you reset the game that it has enough tension to bring back so one goes back you know you just want to where it'll always go back to the beginning so we got that one done and then there was another one back here this is just a little tiny one then it's just something about two quarter unit or something like that it was wherever you pull the thing in same thing on this one I had some vinyl ports here in the back which you have to put a little bit of grease on just so that that where the vinyl touches the vinyl you don't really want to put oil you want to put like grease or something so that it yeah where the vinyl touches the vinyl it won't get stuck together a lot of times whenever you're working on this these all the old grease that's on everything is just it's all nasty and chunky does he got to clean all that stuff on okay so in the bottom we have cleaned and adjusted all the relays we can we cleaned and adjusted the switches on this we cleaned and adjusted the switches on that we repaired the wiring that was all screwed up we put the one coil in that was missing we we rebuilt this stepper unit we rebuilt that stepper unit so now we're almost at a point where we can work on the playfield but the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take these Jones plugs and clean them up a little bit you can see again these have been marked with paint that's probably some operator did that whatever they were servicing in years ago so all we're going to do is we're going to clean up some of this corrosion like that or oxidation on what you would consider it we're gonna clean that up a little bit just so it's a little shinier so it makes a little better connection and put them back in we've got those two to do and we've also got there's a little one right there it is the connection for these two bells and the knocker so let me clean those up and clean those up and then once we get those we can start messing with the playfield which plugs in back here I guess there's another one here so we're gonna clean those up a little bit all we're basically gonna do is use some light sandpaper to just clean the sides up a little bit get them where they make a good connection and once we get it like that we can swap the playfield in alright folks so we got those cleaned up we pop the playfield back in it we're gonna work on the bottom of it first as you can see but look what I found when I was messing with the jacks on the side over here I need to clean and so this top one is the 25 cent chute adjustment that's how many plays you get for a quarter and then look at this one below it play field action adjustment normal or strong normal or stronger hmm which one do we which one do we want that in folks so I put that sucker and stronger and then I looked on the schematics and look at this right down here by the right down here by the transformer play field action adjustment jack so basically this little plug goes in one or the other normal is this and then the other one is strong so that's going to be cool so that adjusts the voltage that goes to the large Bell the knocker the side hole kick out the top hole kick out the total play counter the start relay though all the little coils basically pretty cool pretty cool and I would assume maybe the flippers I'll see how far it goes oh yeah see look this this line goes all the way around the top so it's also all these coils wait am I right about that these coils I don't know folks we'll try it out and see what it does it says stronger playfield action and I'm down with that that sounds awesome so whenever we get it going that's something to look forward to right so next up I'm going to work on the bottom of the playfield but guess what that's gonna have to be next week because this video is long enough so next week we will finish up the playfield and we will finish up the back box and we'll see if we can get this thing ready to go we've already got people begging to buy it but before I allow them to buy it I will film myself playing it so you guys can see what Gunsmoke was like so if you liked the video leave your comments below make sure to subscribe to us give us a thumbs up for taking the time to bring you along with us as we fix this sucker or try to fix it Wayne even plugged it in yet might not fix the damn thing but I think we have I think we have but leave us a thumbs up leave your comments below if you've ever played this go ahead and spoil it for us and let us know if it's any good considering its age and if you know anything about that little Jack we just found let us know but we will see you on the next video hope you enjoyed it