Saving Gottlieb's Great JACK IN THE BOX Drop Target Pinball Machine!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today. This is Gotlib's Jack-in-the-Box pinball machine. We had a customer bring us this to repair. He picked it up somewhere. I've had this game before. I can't remember if mine was a Jack-in-the-Box or the two-player version. I can't remember what that one's called, but this is a really fun game and it has a really cool backlash. So we're going to do a little series on this and then play it. What do you think about that? So the cabinet is in pretty good shape, but it's, you know, got the typical yellowing and fading. I don't know where he picked it up, but he got it and brought it straight to us basically. I think he said he messed with it a little bit and then brought it over, but that's what we do. Now the one I had before, I had to paint pretty extensively up on the top of the play field and I bet this one's got the same thing going on. The front's pretty good. I'll have to see if he wants me to touch up the play field on this one. I think I'll do it a little easier than I did the last one. There's some white paint lipping up on the bottom and maybe they repainted the edge of it and then it didn't yellow like the other part or something. I don't know. So it has a tax sticker from here in South Carolina from 1977. I think it's a little older than that. I would guess this is about 1973. Someone has put a new power cord on it. I believe he mentioned that to me whenever he dropped it off and I told him I would look at it, so I should be able to make that a little better. We're going to get this sucker running. So we got to put the cord how it goes, but we can test it with it like this. The last one we did had a cord like that too. It's actually a pretty good cord. It's nice and long, which means it's long enough for me to put it down in there where it needs to be. So here is the beautiful back glass. It's faded a little bit, but they kind of, most of them do. This is a game that's a big enough deal that they make a reproduction, I'm pretty sure. So you could buy a brand new one, but the customer and I share the opinion that it doesn't have to be perfect. Look at how this is faded. So the reason that that is that color is because I think that's the original color. Like the green pants, I think is original. What's going on there is on the back of the playfield in that area, there's going to be a piece of foam, which is either distorted the colors or has saved the colors. That's weird. I'm pretty sure that her, her shirt was yellow originally. So for whatever reason behind the foam, it didn't fade and the green faded completely to blue. That is nuts. Look at this girl, same thing going on. Her yellow hair faded completely away, but where the foam was, it didn't. And then again here. Pretty wild. Look at the art. This back glass is almost illegal. Gotlib's jacking the box. So this jack in the box pops up out of the jack in the box, out of the box. Now the drop targets, this game is a heavy drop target game. So it goes with the theme. Drop targets drop, but they pop back up too. Very well drawn. And we have eight women on the back. Eight women. Seven wasn't enough. So we've got this one here. She seems pleasant. I can't describe these. We had one viewer that left us some comments before that said that he's blind and that he liked my videos because I described the back glasses. Buddy, I can't describe this one. You got to see it to believe it. Okay, here's girl number two. She looks very happy. Here's girl number three who is wearing flippers, flip flops. Girl number four, I have no clue what she's doing. Girl number five, not sure what she's doing. Girl number six got to the party late. She's headed that way though. Girl number seven and girl number eight are just watching for the moment. Wow. Okay. So really cool art. Oh, look at this girl's feet. Imagine you're an artist and you know that you're going to draw a girl standing behind the score window there. Notice how he drew this girl on top of the score window. So they created the whole back glass including the score window. Imagine you're going to draw that girl. You know you're going to put a girl there and then you go out of your way to make her feet crossed backwards underneath the score window. Pinball art. It's something special. Very cool background. Okay, so here's the wear that I was sure would be there. I did one of these many years ago. It's one of the first ones that I really repainted a lot of and that wear was so bad I ended up painting like I think all of the pink or something on the whole thing which was a big pain. But what you could do, pink is really hard to match and to get the cover. So what you could do is you could paint it and then here at like this spot, break it. So like paint it pink and then put a line or something like right there. And it would look, if you did it the same on both sides, it would kind of blend in where you couldn't see it. Since you're looking at it from the bottom and the ball flows that way, you might draw the line like this way. You're basically, you don't want like the, so if it's all just theory stuff, you know. If you're looking at the the paint where you touch it up, you don't want a line like right across this because it looks like a barrier. Like your eye will notice it more. If the line is like this, you won't notice it as much. So same thing here. Unfortunately it's worn pretty far over, but if you could make a line like from here to here, it would be very hard to even see it. We'll see what we can do. So it needs a little bit of that. The plastics all look to be in pretty good shape. Maybe. They're kind of dirty, but oh no, there's a broke one. We'll get in touch with him and see if he wants us to find him another one. A lot of times if you've got like one plastic that you need, if you look on eBay, somebody's got one. Now on a lot of games, the same plastic breaks over and over and over again. So it's hard to find that one used because they've all broke. But this one, I don't see any reason why that particularly should have broke. So I'll bet there's some of them floating around. So yeah. Okay, so let me pull off the, let me find the keys and I'll pull the glass off and let's look inside this sucker. Okay, so we got it all open. Um, what the heck is that? It's like orange cellophane. Oh, it's really old cellophane tape. You know, tape. Scotch tape. Um, there's the huge 10 target drop target assembly. A little target bank down there. Score motor. I will say that this thing smells like a rat. I wouldn't be surprised, or a mouse. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a dead mouse actually in here somewhere. Because you can kind of smell it. Um, it's still got the labels for the relays. We've got the relay bank here. Still has the plastic cover. A lot of times they don't have that. Or maybe they do on these Gotlibs. I don't know. I haven't worked on one in a while that had the bank right here in the front. Last ball score control relay. Second player relay. Third player relay. Fourth player relay. First ball relay. Game over relay. Last ball relay. Reset control relay and reset control switches. And two big coils to reset it off. Same thing on the drop target unit. Two big coils to reset all 10 of them at the same time. That's nuts! Gotlib was the king of drop targets there for a while. Right. And uh, just kind of a mess down here. I've taken the back door off. Let's see in there. I found the key for it inside. More evidence. Player unit. 16 score rails. Reset rails. Point relays. Replay unit. And a match unit. All right, cool. So everything's complete. I don't really see any big problems. He wrote, he told me whenever he dropped it off, that the ball would get stuck. The thing halfway play is the ball would get stuck in the kick out and not kick out. Sometimes the, like it would just be stuck on ball three all the time or the game wouldn't end or something. Just a bunch of stuff like that. So it's the typical problem. Basically what's going on is this thing has sat for a long time and there are several of the switches, who knows, might be that one, that one, and this one have all gotten oxidized where they're dirty and so electricity net no longer goes through the contacts. And so it's as simple as that. That must be a variable plug because it's in the wrong spot. Yeah, you can adjust it. So let's see here. I'll give you an example. So this bonus score control blah blah blah. So is electricity passing through that? Maybe. Is electricity passing through that? Maybe. The old timers used to say to clean them with a business card, but you know when they're this far gone you can't clean them with a business card. Let's see if I can scratch it with my finger and show you. Right, so you just, you've got to get that cleaned up. So basically we need to go through and clean every switch in the game. And as you do that you can check the operation of the relays, see if you've got any coils burn up, see if you've got any broken switches, all of that. And theoretically whenever you get them all clean the thing should work fine. So that's what we're going to do. That's the service that we provide typically. So I'm going to go ahead and remove this play field. It unplugs back there with those three sets of Jones plugs and then we can clean out this bottom. All right, so got the play field out and vacuumed it all up. I took these three bolts out, they're screws really, and I didn't take the whole board out. That just allows you to move it around a little bit so I could vacuum under it a little bit. You can lift up that side pretty good whenever you do that. To remove it from the cabinet, back here you're all right because that actually unplugs. But up here you have to take this board off and the flipper switch off. And over here you have to either unplug all this or take all that off. I guess you could unplug it, it isn't too big of a deal, but then you got the power switch you still got to mess with. So I don't, I usually don't take it all the way out. So I was able to get under it and I was able to clean it pretty decent with the vacuum. And then the little labels were coming loose, so I stapled them back down where they go. There was one over here that said tilt that I, that someone had added that I accidentally sucked up in the vacuum. But that's not really the tilt, that's the the slam switch I believe that's called. It doesn't tilt, it's like a one-off switch. It doesn't tilt the game, it's the, it's a, it just completely kills the game. I guess it works the same as a tilt button. But whoever added that, it's gone now, accidentally. The, that little clip they've got on there just so that the thing never comes open. So one of those blades has a weight on it, and so whenever it shakes, it will actually shake open. It's just one of the things that helps if the game gets slammed. Because it's not tilt. If the game gets slammed or tilted or vibrated very rapidly, it will pop that open and you will lose your quarter. Okay, so I sprayed, I cleaned it up, it smelled better after that. I did not find a mouse. There was a mouse bait in there, a little mouse hotel. I threw it away. It may have been occupied, I don't know. I didn't see anything in there. It may have been that's what I was smelling, I don't know. It's, it's definitely a mouse smell. But I don't smell it as much now, and I sprayed some Febreze in it to try to lighten it up a little bit. So, and again, this game has recently been played by the owner, so it's, it's not as if this thing's been sitting a long time. So I don't think that, you know, we're probably just smelling mouse pee, but I don't think that it's anything too bad because the wires don't look eaten up. So I'm not too worried about it. So I think maybe next what we'll do is we'll fix that power cord. What do you think about that? Now, the power cord is tied up in this loom, and it rides up to the top, and then hops off and comes out of the game. So I'll kind of show you what it does. That wiring is these three Jones plugs. So if I unplug these three Jones plugs, there's nothing holding the, connecting the head to the bottom other than these four bolts. Okay, so the power cord comes up that same loom, and then it jumps out right there, and it comes out the back of the, the box. This looks like, I mean, this is obviously damaged, but there actually was a hole there originally. See it? That's factory. It's just this piece has broken off, probably because of the cord. So the way you can fix it, you don't even have to take the head completely off. You can loosen these a little bit, and it'll make a little crack here, and then you can slide it through. But the way you can fix it is you can just cut the wire, the original wire right there, and then cut it down at the other end, and leave it in the loom. And the reason for that is because there's all of this wiring, this, this catgut wrapping, right? So yeah, you can, you can pull all that out. You can unwrap all that, remove the wire, put the new wire in it, but then you can't put the catgut back. So you're going to end up using zip ties or something. You can do this back, but nobody's going to. If you do, I say bravo. Good for you. But I'm not going to. Most people aren't going to. So we're just going to leave it like it is, and then put the new wire down, and just run it beside this same thing, and just zip tie it. Because you know, it would be zip tied if you did it the other way. So there's not really a perfectly clean way to do it, unless you're going to redo the catgut. You can see just how much of it there is. It's like every inch or so. So cut it loose here, cut it loose at the other end, and then run your new one down around it. Solder one wire to the transformer, and one wire to the fuse. Now I know what some of you were thinking. You're thinking, that's not grounded. Well, I'm an idiot. Don't listen to anything I say. But none of these damn things are grounded, and it's a scam for them to tell you that it's grounded. It's not. None of these are grounded, especially the old ones. They just didn't make them grounded in any way. If an item is grounded, that does not keep you necessarily from getting shot. Yeah, that's what I said. You heard me. All that a ground does, is if there is a short from whatever is grounded to electricity, it will pop the circuit breaker in your fuse panel. That's all the ground is going to do. There's not a situation where people have it in their head that if this isn't grounded, you'll get shocked. But if it is grounded, it'll take the power away, and you won't get shocked. It don't work like that. If you're getting shocked by a part of metal on the machine, you got serious problems going on. For instance, this metal here, it's not touching anything. It's just touching the wood. Right? So there's no way in hell electricity should be up here. Now on some games, they have metal buttons, and the metal button is touching the metal blade, and the metal blade is going to and the flipper has 40 volts on it. So whenever you touch it, if things aren't right, the fish paper's screwed up, you'll get buzzed with 40 volts. If you grounded the machine, that would not change. It would still do that. So if you look at a lot of things that are grounded, they just run the ground wire in, and then tie it to a bolt or something. It's just the dumbest crap ever. Don't ever look inside something that's been grounded. It'll amaze you. Now, the more modern ones, yeah, I'm sure they're grounded. But these old ones, you can't add a ground to this and make it any more safe. It's just not a thing. Now, I'm an idiot, so don't listen to any of that. Certainly don't sue me if you kill yourself doing that, but that's my stupid opinion. Don't follow me, though. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Joey! I need a grounded vacuum cleaner! Okay, folks, I'm going through and I'm cleaning all the switches, one by one, working through every relay, making sure they're all clean. And so far, they've all been adjusted properly or close enough. And then I got to this one. So this is the add player unit relay. So this pulses whenever the... I think it's when the ball kicks off of the... kicks out of the out hole is about the time that it pulses. But as the ball is traveling from the out hole back to the lane, at some point, the add player unit relay pulls in. And so there's several switches on it. There are four. Maybe it's three. There are three normally open switches that close when the player relay comes in. And then there are two normally closed switches that open when the player relay comes in. And there is one here that is just mangled. Always a little too far. That one. So you can see, you don't even need to look at the schematics to tell that that's off. Not just because it's bent, but because this is what you're looking for. See how it's open? The two contacts are not touching. And then when the relay pulls in, it just opens more. So that can't be the design, because you would never design it where it's open and it just stays open. So it must be designed where it's supposed to be closed, and then whenever it pulls in, it opens. Right? So that switch is all bent out of shape. So we need to bend that to where it's closed and then opens. So this one up here is the same way. But if you look, it's closed. And then when the relay pulls in, it opens. It's hard to see. See the air between the two contacts? Closed. Open. This one should be doing the same. And that's just the main thing that you need to figure out on the relays, or on any set of switches. If it's closed the way you're looking at it, whenever it changes state, it ought to open. If it's open whenever you're looking at it, whenever it changes state, it ought to close. So it doesn't even matter what it does or which ones are normally closed, which ones are normally open. All of that's irrelevant. You can tell just by looking at it. That one's open, and when I move the relay in, it stays open. So that ain't right. Right? So that's what you're looking for. So what does that do? Well, it's on the player. It's on the add player unit relay. So it's normally closed, and then it opens whenever that pulls in. So when you move from player one to player two, or you move from back through to the next ball of player one, this pulls in. So that's going to step up the player unit. So let's say we're on ball one right now, player one. It does that. Now we're on ball one, player two. Three, four. Ball two, player one. Ball two, player two. Ball three, player one. Right? And it just keeps going. Now, if you play a one-player game, what it does is, let's say we're on ball one, player one. It moves to player two. It has a short designed into it because there is no player two. It moves to player three. It has a short designed into it because there is no player three. It moves to player four. It has a short designed in it because there is no player four. It moves to player one, ball two. So it'll go, on a one-player game, it'll go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. On a two-player game, it'll go tick, tick. And then at the end of this one, it'll go tick, tick, tick, tick. Right? It'll skip real quick through the ones that aren't paid for, basically. It keeps track of who paid. So every time you change player or you change ball, that pulls in. So why would they have a switch on it that opens? It's because it's wired into features on the play field. So it just depends on the game, but some games it's, like on this one, you've got all those drop targets. So whenever you drop all the drop targets, it may light up double bonus or something like that. And so the double bonus relay comes in. Well, they wire the double bonus relay through that normally closed switch. So whenever it changes the ball or it changes the player, that comes in and opens the switch and turns off the double bonus. So whatever is on the play field that is only good for that ball is permanently working right now. So maybe we'll leave it like that and then figure it out. What do you think? So that switch being open makes it where something is going to hold over from player to player and from ball to ball whenever it should turn off. It may be, it's probably something to do with the drop targets. So I think I'll just leave it like that. We'll make note that it's like that. We'll come back and fix it later, but it'll be interesting to see what that actually causes to screw up in the game. Okay. So I misspoke on that. Actually, if you think about it, if the switch is stuck open, what that's going to mean is that hold over things like bonus and stuff like that aren't going to happen at all. They're not going to work right. So we'll figure that out. So I went through these and cleaned all of these on the relay bank. You've seen me do that a hundred times. It's the same old thing. You're just cleaning switches. None of them were misadjusted, it appeared. And then I did the score motor and it's got the most common problem that you're going to run into on a score motor. You'll see this all the time is that the break is broke. Hey Joe, the break is broke. He's going to love that. Hey Joe, guess what's wrong with this pinball machine? I got to point to something and then you can see, let's see if you can tell. Now look at this. This is the score motor. Now I want you to describe what's wrong here. That is called the break. You know what's wrong with the break? What? It's broke. Yep, the break is broke folks. So that is used to, when this gets to, when this stack here on this platter, as this turns, when it gets to that hole there, you know on the edge of the cam, those are all going to close. And the one opened, right? So when it does that, it's at the home position. And so you need this to stop right on the home position. So the problem you can have is that it overshoots it a little bit. So like maybe it turns it off and then it rolls over to here and then something's stuck open that it shouldn't be, right? So it should stop right at that spot. That's what this does. There's a little bar, a little spring switch piece, very similar to this, that sits down in there and there are, there are bars inside of this stack that that rides on. And it, that will actually just kind of help it break at the exact spot. So if you see this rivet here and the rivet here and the rivet here, that are three posts that connect this top platter with the bottom platter. And so that little break goes in there and touches those. So as it spins, it will tend to stop in certain spots because that break will be dragging on that post, right? And it's just the, it's just the way the thing's designed. So that thing has broke and it's very common. So I've got some replacement ones, I do believe. So we'll pop one of those on there. All right, so this is what was left in there and this is a replacement one. It's actually like a reproduction of the exact same thing. And I think that blade is bent properly, but there are different types. Like this one's been a little different. You know, so some of them are to actuate the switches, like on the top that we were looking at. And then this one is to break the thing. So they're, they've got a little bit different bend and length. I think that's the correct one. So we'll put it in and just see how it plays with that in there. And that'll be it for the bottom of the cabinet. I'm going to clean the Jones plugs and reinstall the playfield. We won't clean any of the switches on the bottom of the playfield yet, but I want to see if any of the bonus stuff and the holdover things are working on it with that switch open. My theory is, is that it wouldn't be. And so if we figure out that's the case, we might be able to close the switch and see if it fixes all of them. That might be kind of interesting. So let me put this break in. Okay. So I've reinstalled it. I better not take you upside down. Let me walk around and see what I'm talking about. So it sticks in there and it's, and that little bar goes by, it hits it. Right. So what's going on is, like I said, this is the home position when this not this top one, when this has landed in the valley on that can. Okay. So that's where the score motor stops. And there are three of them. So it spins around, it'll run, run, run, run, run, and then bam, it'll stop at the home position again. But if you look, there's play in the home position. All of that is the home position. But it kind of matters where it is because of mainly these switches. So all of this is the same, no matter where it is in that spot. And it's the same over here, except for this can. I mean, this, this little switch stack. So see how it's on the edge of that little thing. So when I move it, it matters if it's there or there. Right. But the worst one, and you've got the same thing going on here, but the worst is that one on the bottom. This one, watch this. If it's there, well, I went too far. We'll get it back to the home again. It's where we are. That's the home position. So if it's at the beginning of the home position, this is open. But if it's farther in the home position, that's closed. So it kind of matters where in there that is because of those switches down there. So this brake helps stop it in a particular place because it simply drags on that bar. You see it kind of moving. And then once it gets power to turn again, it overcomes the bar and it pops past the pops past it. So that's just how it works. So we need to watch to make sure that that ends up in the correct place and that it's the right length brake. I got them mixed up. If I would have kept them with the part number on it, I would still know. Okay. So I'm going to clean the Jones plugs on the play field, slide it back in, and then we'll try to rig up a game and see if any of the AX, the BX, and the CX relay stuff, whatever that does, the bonus and stuff like that, if any of that stuff actually works. All right. So I plugged it in. So the whole thing is I haven't looked on the schematics. This is just my theory of what's going to happen. All right. Did you hear the score motor run for a second and then stop? The reason it did that was because it wasn't in the home position. We'd been messing with it and turned it and then it went back to the home position. The play field lights are out. I don't know if on these you can hit the left button or not. Nope. Okay. So they're on on the back box, but it's tilted. So I think it's designed like that. I think these will only come on whenever we start a game. It says we have zero credits, but maybe it's on free play. What do you think? So we're just going to mess with it a little bit and see if we can get any of the... My theory is the bonus when lit, 500 points when lit, I think that stuff won't work right. It'll probably come on and then go back off. So let's see. Well, it got there. Okay. So it reset everything to zero. It does not have the score lights lit up, but it does say ball and play one, player one. Really though, this is how many players... This is different than this. So this is telling you how many people are playing the current game. And then when these light up, it tells you which player is actually playing at the moment. So since those aren't lit up, it very well... You know, we haven't messed in the back box with the player unit. It very well may not score on the correct player right now. So the ball is out here. You have to hit this runway switch usually for certain reasons. So we hit that. Nothing seems to happen. It says 50 points or 500 points when lit. So the way that's set up, it must be on an alternating thing. So that's just going to go back and forth. You've also got lit hole scores, 3000 points and lights 10 times bonus. So that's not a thing that you have to earn. That's just going to alternate back and forth. So let's see if we score 50 points. Nothing. 500 points. Nothing. So what's going on? I think it's because the player unit isn't clean. So it's not scoring on the actual player, which is why that's not lit up. So that's going to screw us up trying to get our... figure out our little problem. These lights here aren't on. Fourth player is now lit up. So just for giggles. Nope. Nothing. Well, we can't test our little issue. So it gave us the 3000. So that part's working at least. 50 points or 500. That's the up there. So that probably won't work. Yep. Won't work. Okay. 10 times bonus value when lit. My whole theory of the, of the, that stuff not being able to work doesn't seem right. Let's see what happens when we drop some drop targets. That turned out to lane. Yeah. We just got serious issues going on. This game would not be very fun in its current state. Most of the stuff doesn't score. Yeah. So we just got issues. Okay. So now that we've got that, let me go back in there, fix that one switch, and then let's try it again and see if that brings any of this stuff back. Okay. So all I did was fix that one switch that we had found. We'll see if anything different happens. Was that on before? That was about the same as it was before. But once again, we don't have the, this lit up. Now it could just be all those bulbs are lit, burnt out. So let's see if this scores at all now. Nope. That's doing the same. This was scoring before. Okay. Yeah. So it did score on the first player. They're just not lighting up. So this game, in my opinion, is pretty sick. I mean, it just needs a lot of work, but we'll get it. So these are doing the exact same thing. Got one 100 points. All right. These are lit now. I don't know if those were lit before. Um, yeah. So it's just, it's, it's limping along. Basically, it's not doing hardly anything. So you saw it go real quick. Ball two in play. I think he was saying that ball three was getting stuck. It was getting stuck on ball three. That wasn't right either. Was it? It didn't. I guess we don't have the, we didn't have the, uh, play field down far enough. Uh, and he said that it was getting stuck in the, the left kick out hole. Let's see if it's the right one. Yep. See it. So basically what's going on is you've got several relays just dead on the play field because of some sort of power issue or something with, with running through another relay. So, uh, yeah, basically it ain't doing crap. Won't score. Probably won't go to the next ball. Yep. Just dead in the water. Okay, cool. Well, now we know that the thing's seriously crippled. So, uh, next up we'll have to work in the back box. We'll have to work on the bottom of the play field. We're just essentially going to have to go through every, every relay, every switch in the game, but we should be able to get a nice working game out of it. It's, it's good seeing the, what the customer's seeing, what's functioning and what isn't and, and all of that. So leave your comments below. Let us know what you think. We've worked on one of these before, but I don't think I've filmed a video of it. It was quite a while back. Um, but this era of Gottlieb is just awesome. I love these. That back glass is awesome. So if you want to see us work on a similar game, not this exact one, I'll put a video of it up here until we get to the next version of video of this one. See you on the next one. Hope you enjoyed it.