Getting This Captain Fantastic Pinball Machine PLAYABLE Again!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening. We have been working on this gentleman's Captain Fantastic, which is a fantastic Bally electromechanical pinball machine from back in the day. This one is probably one of the nicest ones I've ever seen, and we did a video where we kind of looked through it. It had some issues where it wouldn't start up. We figured out why it's doing that, and that was that video. Tracked it all down. It does have some damage on the playfield there, but tracked it all down, and now we're to the point where we're going to do preventative maintenance on it and get it where the thing is nice and reliably working. So that's what we're going to do. So the first thing that we're going to mess with is we figured out in the previous video that the coin door is all screwed up, and ultimately the problem ended up being this disconnected wire, a Jones plug that was installed incorrectly, some fuse issues, but I think the next thing I'm going to attempt to do is replace these two coin switches. This one has a leg broke off. If I can solder that to the piece of the leg that's left, I'll do that. If not, we'll see if we can put another one on there, and then they put these little jumper, these little, I'll tell you what we used to call them. Now I do not condone doing any kind of illegal things. I personally don't, but we used to call these roach clips back in the day, and they'd have a big feather on it. I won't get into all that, but if I've got another coin switch, I'll see if I can replace that where we can solder these back in place on the bottom of the switch here. So we'll do that first, and then we're going to clean through the bottom of the cabinet, get all of this stuff serviced, clean the switches on the relays, make sure everything's working properly, and we'll go from there. I see this one's got the wrong light bulb in it too. We'll talk about that here shortly, but let me see what I can do with this wiring on the coin door, and then I'll, if you didn't see the previous video, I'll point out why there's a problem with that. Okay, so I put the wire back on that one, put the three wires back on this one, and put a new one on, and it works properly. Tied the wires back to the door so that it closes, and they're out of the way, and don't get screwed up. So we figured out on the last video that you can't, you know, the thing is set on free play, I believe, but even though it's on free play, you have to leave the coin mechs wired up, the coin switches wired up, because if this red wire is not connected to the white wire, and if over here the red wire is not connected to the yellow wire through the switches, the game will never start because they've got the start button wired through all of that. So you could just remove those two wires and short them together, but it's, you'd have to look all that up. So some of these were disconnected, and we were able to fix that. So that should get us where we're starting. I think next up, I'm going to vacuum out the bottom of the cabinet. Now the way I do this is, I look in, and if I see anything that's original, like for instance, this little c-clip probably goes on something. There was this little nut that goes on something, and then there's a little sticker that says out-hole kicker assembly, which maybe goes right here somewhere. That's the out-hole kicker coil. Maybe it goes up above on the top of the of the playfield, but you know, might as well keep that instead of throwing it away. Worst case, even if we don't put it back, we just lay it back in here. It's not really something that you want to go out of your way to throw away. And I'm looking under the, looks like it's just, oh nope, I see a screw under there. Please don't electroshock me! It's one of those cool bally screws too. So these are thread cutting screws. See how the tip is the little conical? This is what they used to mount most of their flipper stuff. So it's one of those right there. The one may be missing off of something. So if we need one, it will be right there. It may be under the chimes there somewhere. Okay, so I don't see anything else. Well, there's something back there. I'll grab whatever that is, then I'll vacuum all of this out and get it a little cleaner. At least get rid of all the dust and we'll go from there. Okay, so I've removed the playfield to make it easier to vacuum and to work on this bottom board, but I wanted to show you something. So there are little pieces of broken glass in the back of the cabinet. What are those from? Well, it's probably because at some point the playfield glass got shattered, which we kind of already knew because all those scratches on the playfield. The thing's in really nice shape, except there's like these gouges on the playfield. And I was kind of thinking, well, maybe somebody broke the glass and when they hit it with whatever they hit it with, that's when it scratched up the playfield like that. And so you can clean that up and this thing's very clean and been obviously well taken care of, but you can't ever get all that glass out. So even after we vacuum the glass out this time, a few years from now, somebody's going to find some more glass in here because it just goes everywhere. You can't get it all. It hides under every little part of the game. And then when you take it apart and stand it on its end, like we did this one, when they moved it, more of it falls out of somewhere and you just can't get rid of all of it. So we'll get rid of a little bit more of it. Okay, so I vacuumed it out and now I'm going through and cleaning the relay. So I'm using a small file and cleaning all of the contacts on all of the relays. And I'm up to the delay relay. We showed this in the previous video a little bit, but what jumps out at me is that's the wrong light bulb. So the delay relay and also the over-the-top relay, they both have a light bulb installed on the relay. Now what's the purpose of that? It's in series with the power going to the coil. And the reason is because they're using it as a timer. So the bulb that goes in there is a 455 light bulb. So a 455 bulb blinks. It'll come on and then it heats up as the element has electricity passing through it and as it's illuminating. And after about three seconds or whatever, it will turn off because the element is designed in such a way that when it gets hot, it moves and it disconnects the circuit inside the bulb. And then it cools off and it bends back where it reconnects the circuit. So if you put it in where a regular bulb goes, it will blink. It'll be on and then off. And then after it cools down a little bit, it'll be back on and then off. And every three seconds or so, and it kind of varies, sometimes it'll be off for five or six seconds and then it'll come back on. And it's just this neat old school way of making a bulb blink. So what they've done is they put one of those in this relay. So when the delay relay turns on, which is caused by tilting the game basically. So if you hit the slam switch or you shake it too hard or whatever, this relay comes on. And when it does, it kills a bunch of stuff on the playfield. So the slam switch sends power to that relay and turns it on. So it kills stuff on the playfield. And then it lights up that bulb because the power is running through the bulb. The bulb stays lit for about three seconds or whatever. And then it opens up. Well, when it opens up, it opens the relay back up. It kills the power to the relay because theoretically the slam switch or the tilt switch is no longer closed. And then that makes everything on the playfield start working again. So theoretically you can tilt the game while the ball is at the top of the playfield. Everything will kind of go dark and do what it does. I don't know if it goes dark, but everything will stop working. And then by the time the ball gets to the bottom of the playfield, it may actually start working again if that bulb has turned itself off in the bottom of the machine. So they do that with the over-the-top relay, which is this one. And they do it with the delay relay. The over-the-top relay, what it does is whenever you score 100,000 points, so you can only score 99,990 points. When you score the next 10 points, it's going to say 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. So they have a switch on this last score reel. When it turns from 9 to 0, which would be what happens when you go to 100,000 points, it turns on the over-the-top relay. The over-the-top relay comes on and is used to light up a special light in the back box that says 100,000 points. First player, 100,000 points. And at the same time, it also turns on this buzzer. So there's a buzzer over here. And it goes, and then the light bulb heats up enough that it turns itself off. It kills the relay, kills the buzzer. And the 100,000 point relay up here at the top stays on leaving the light on and all that because it latches. So all that to say, both of those bulbs are supposed to be 455 bulbs. If you put a 47 bulb in here, what's going to happen is if you tilt the game, it's just going to lock that coil on and it'll never go back off until you turn the game off and back on. Or it might blow the bulb and then the delay relay will never work again until you put the right bulb in it. So it's supposed to have a 455. So I'm going to ditch this and put a 455 in it and keep cleaning through the relay. Okay, so I cleaned through all the other ones. Everything seems to be fine. And I got to the very last switch and I was the only one that seemed to have any kind of issue. But I figured I'd show you. This is actually very common. So this score motor here is a whole bunch of cams with a bunch of switches on top of it. And if you look down through the front here, you can just see how it is. They stick up above everything else. So what happens a lot is at some point in this history, people will shove something in the game like the manuals or something. And it's real easy, especially on this first stack, to hit the switches with it. So if you look at that top switch, it's all mangled looking. The two behind it aren't that great either. But look at that one. I mean, just look how it's all twisted because it's been hit by something. So I'm just going to straighten that out by hand and the two behind it and make sure that they open and close as the cam turns around. But that's real common actually because something gets shoved in there and it just hits that switch that's sticking up. So if you're having problems, that might be your problem. Now, didn't we look that up on a previous video and figured out what that switch does? I might do that again. But the top switch doesn't look like it's working quite right. Okay, so I bend it back flat and then I turn the cam to where this is down in the hole on the cam. So when it drops, this big blade should hit that switch under it. Not this one. This is the top, that one under it. And I don't know that it is. See, it's sitting like that. It's not actually touching, so that needs adjusted a little bit. So I believe it's 1E on the schematics, which is the one, it's the make or break switch that's involved with the start sequence, the start button. But it's also involved with the home, it's the home switch for the score motor. Which I think that was probably working fine before because, you know, the thing, well, I don't know, where it was just sitting, it's not, it was open. No, it was closed. Okay, whatever. I think it's the home switch for the score motor. And I believe that was working properly. So it was probably fine. But now it's definitely fine. So next up, we've done all the relays, we did the score motor switches. Next up, we've got these two stepper units. One is the coin unit, and one is the ball count unit. So let's see if either one of those are seized up. I'm going to guess that they probably work just fine because everything's so clean. I don't know that anything's going to be seized up in this particular game. But let's see. So one coil advances it one way, and it has seven positions on it, which is the same as the freedom that we just did a series on. We already looked at that on that. So it's actually working pretty good. It could still stand to be cleaned though. So these rivets here, they get tarnished. You can see it's kind of bad there. Oh, I always go too far. It's kind of bad there. Is electricity getting through that like it's supposed to? Who knows? So we'll clean that up a little bit. Let's check out the coin unit. So this one is involved with playing a one-player, two-player, three-player, or four-player game. My prediction is the same. I think it'll probably be fine. Four-player game, one-player game. So one-player, two-player, and it'll reset. Three-player, and it'll reset. Four-player, and it will reset. But it's the same thing. Are those clean enough that electricity is properly passing through them? Probably not. So I'm going to clean them up. The way I clean them up is I use some light sandpaper, 200, 400 grit, something like that, to clean up the brass pads and get everything nice and shiny. And then I put a little bit of super lube synthetic grease on it. You want to use dielectric synthetic grease so it doesn't short everything out. So that's the front side. On the back, there's also a switch too. We'll look at here in a minute. But let me clean both of these up, the fronts, and we'll go from there. All right, shined up the rivets, cleaned the contact on the finger, and it's moving nice and smooth. Same thing here, shined up the rivets, cleaned the contacts on the fingers, and it's moving nice and smooth. And this is the grease that we put on it. It's very important. It's the only thing that's important. Dielectric. If you don't use dielectric, dielectric means that it won't conduct electricity, which sounds strange to put on something that's contacts that conduct electricity. But if you were to spread something on there that did conduct electricity, it would short all of the contacts together, which is several different voltages sometimes, and burn stuff up. So don't do that. Very important. They put that stuff on there from the factory as well. So it just helps it glide a little bit. If you want this stuff, you can get it at the hardware store usually. If you want to buy it from us, we sell it too on our website. You can go to lionsarcade.com. There's a parts page, and there's a bunch of links on the parts page to Amazon, just different stuff on Amazon that we use in our videos. If you buy any of that including this wonderful super lube for your pinball machine, it gives us a tip. So we appreciate everybody that does that. Okay, so that's that. Let me show you the back of it. So down on the bottom, we go over this over and over again. It's the same stuff in a bunch of them, but there's an important little switch right here on the coin unit. So like usual, it's in the wrong spot. So I'll show you what's going on. So it's closed right now. You see it on this bar. It's closed right now. We're at position one. Okay, if I move to position two, it's still closed. Position three, it's still closed. And position four, it's still closed. That's not how that's supposed to work. If there's a switch, it should open at some point, and it should close at some point. That one is always closed. So what that switch does is, I'm going to just do it with my hand. It opens at the fourth position, and the reason that they have it like that is so that it will... I hope I did that right. We'll look just to make sure. It opens at the fourth position because once you have a four player game going, you don't want to be able to start a fifth player game. So once that switch opens, you can't hit start anymore. When you hit start, nothing happens. And they did that just so it doesn't steal your credit. So let's see if we've got it adjusted or if we need to mess with it. So you're starting the game. It's at player one, and you go, wait a minute, my buddy Rocky's here. Good old Rocky. So since that switch is closed, see how I'm moving the big blade and the small blade's moving? It's because they're closed. My buddy Rocky's here. He wants to play too. Bam! Two player game. Now the switch is still closed, right? Here comes Rachel. Hey Rachel, haven't seen you in a while. She wants to play pinball too. So we hit the start button one more time. We're now playing a three player game, me, Rocky, and Rachel. Ronnie, Rocky, and Rachel are all playing. Is the switch still closed? It is not. So you see the problem here. If I was to hit start again, Rebecca's in big trouble. She can't play. Rebecca cannot play with us because that switch is misadjusted. So what we're going to do is we're just going to bend the switch a little bit farther back so it takes a little longer to open it. Okay, so let's try this again. I'm starting a game, playing a game. Here comes Rocky. Hey man, want to play pinball? Sure do. So we hit the button. Two player game. Now me and Rocky are playing pinball. Along comes Rachel. Hello, let's play pinball. Okay, cool. So we hit the button again. Three player game. Now, still on three player, right? And it's still closed. So here comes Rebecca. Hey guys, I'd like to play as well. Okay, Rebecca. Four player game, right? Guess who's coming along? Rob. We don't really like Rob. Rob wants to play pinball too. And we go, hey buddy, look at the back glass. It's a four player game, Rob. Not a five player game. You're always in the way. And so he walks over and he hits the start button, trying to start a five player game. But he can't because that switch has opened at the fourth position. Rob, B to F-O one more time. So that is shown on the schematics as the coin unit limit switch. And it shows it normally closed. So the schematics are drawn as if the game is in gameplay. Ball one, player one. With the ball sitting in the out hole. And I believe the game unplugged, right? So the coin unit limit switch is drawn as closed because it's a one player game on the schematics. So why is any of that important? It's because they have this set up where they don't want the game to reset when you hit it the second time. So when you hit the start button at the beginning of the game, it resets everything. Well when you hit the second player start or the third player start, you don't want everything to reset. Mainly because you want the player up unit. You're trying to control that coin unit so that you can use it to control the player up unit. It needs to know how many players are playing. So that's just what they call it. The coin unit limit switch. Okay folks, it's viewer mail time. That's right. Viewer mail time. We haven't done this in a while. Today we have a gift viewer mail from Al. Al emailed me and told me he was going to mail me something. You are not going to believe how generous this guy has been. So we got it in. Let me pull out my packing here. Air savers. What do you think it is? More packing. What do you think? What are you expecting? Look at this. I love this. This is like my favorite thing that people send me. Is this type of stuff. So what he did was he updated his pinball machine and he put LED displays in it. Which I like the LED displays. I have put together several sets of them here on my channel. But you know what? I also like the original displays. And so from time to time on a Williams, we try to save the original ones. And let me tell you a little secret. This glass part of this display. So this is for a Williams pinball machine. So something like Black Knight. Black Knight might actually have seven digit ones. I can't remember. But something like Williams flash. Williams contact. I think he told me he had a contact. Contact. You know those early Williams games. This will plug right in. But if you get in a pinch and you desolder the display. The glass from this PCB. You can actually use this glass in a Valley game. Valley, Stern, Williams all had the same. The actual glass. There's slight variations. Like some of them had a comma and some didn't. But it don't. You can use these in any of them. So these are actually really cool. Even if I don't use them in a Williams game, I can use them in the glass to repair some Valley displays. We may do that in a video at some point. But wait, there's more. There's not one. But two displays. Ha ha ha ha. Three. Three displays. Ha ha ha ha. Four. Four displays. Ha ha ha ha. Did he laugh at the number of displays that he had? I can't remember. And the master display. Let me see if that's it. Oh, I believe there's a note. All right. So we get to read it together. Hi Ronnie. Thanks for taking the time to create your content. I enjoy it. Here's the displays I told you I would send. I hope they can bring another old relic back to life for those who can't afford to upgrade to an LED set or wish not to. Ow. Thank you, Al. I appreciate that. And I will add these to my collection of vintage parts that I pull out in these videos. You've probably seen when I'm working on something, I'll pull out some extra stuff and try to get the thing fixed. Every once in a while, you have to swap something out and use another version of something or whatever. That's a nice clean master display too. Looks great. Hasn't even been hacked up or anything. Very cool. These get really hot. See how the board started to heat up a little bit. So that's very cool. So I appreciate that. I've actually had several people do that over the years where if they have extra parts that they know they're not going to use or they have stuff that they've replaced and they've got the old part or, like on this, maybe one of the displays didn't work and he decided to get a new set of LED displays. So some of them work. Some of them don't. I've had over the years, several people mail me their old stuff and I really appreciate it because I keep them all together. I have a bunch of Williams parts, a bunch of Bali parts, and a bunch of Gotland parts that I keep in separate boxes. I have a box of some Williams displays, but I think the last time we worked on one, I think I didn't have a master display that worked if I remember correctly. One of the segments was out or something. So I keep them all separated and everything. If down the road, and it'll be 80-90 years from now I'm sure, but if down the road something happens where we're not working on them anymore, we'll have a collection of them together that we can sell to somebody, give to somebody, or whatever. So they'll stay out of the dump. If I end up, you know, for whatever reason, I'm not working on pinball machines or anything, and I've got 20 Williams pinball displays, well somebody's either going to get them gifted to them or somebody will buy them as a lot or something. It's not like they're just going to get tossed or whatever. So by sending these to me, they'll get in something even if I don't do it myself. I probably will though because I like these Williams games and I love whenever I can actually get the displays working again. I know you can just put new ones in it, but I actually find it pretty fun to try to track down what the actual problem is and repair it and put it back in the machine. And then I enjoy when they look like an aged version of how they looked originally. I just think that's cool. So whenever we fix one up, I'm never trying to make it look brand new or make it look modern. I'm trying to make it look like a nice, clean, well-working example of the original machine. So these were designed in I think 1977 or 78. And even if it's got a little wear on it or, you know, one of the digits isn't quite right, when you put that in the machine and you get everything cleaned up and nice rubber rings on it and the play field is nice and waxed and everything and you've got wear here and there and you've got the displays aren't quite right, but it looks right. It just looks like how the pinball machine is supposed to look now that it has 50 years of age on it. So I just love these things. So I appreciate it, Al. I will put them to good use. Now, back to this Captain Fantastic. Okay, so we've got everything in the bottom board cleaned. I've got the Jones plugs that run to the back box cleaned. I cleaned the score relays and the score reset relays in the back box. What we haven't done is done anything on the top of the play field. We haven't done anything on the bottom of the play field other than the Jones plugs that plug the play field into the cabinet. And we haven't done any of the score reels. But I believe we figured out that the score reels will reset on their own in the first video. So we're going to see if this thing will cooperate at all. And the place that we're at, you can see that's up on one to four can play. It's up on four can play. So that should reset to one. When I hit start, the score reel should reset and it should kick the ball out. It also should reset the bonus unit. It's probably already reset. Let's see if it'll work now that we've got the coin door a little better. Very cool. Okay, so it did reset to one and it says ball in play one. The bonus is at a thousand and it kicked the ball out. It did not reset the score reels properly though. It says I have six thousand points. So that one score reel stopped at six instead of going all the way to zero and it kicked the ball out. Now why would it do that? It's because one of the switches on it is misadjusted and opened up before it got back to zero. All right, so let's see if there's anything obvious on the play field that needs work. Flippers work. It did open the gate, which saved me. Still got some chime issues. Pop bumpers are pretty snappy. Okay, ball in play two. Bonus seemed to work properly. Ball in play three. Oh, missed it. Ball in play four. It did kick the drop targets up, so that's pretty good. Ball in play five. Game over. And remember we looked at the thing in the first video where it should kick that up even when the game over relay comes on. Okay, cool. It plays all right, but I can definitely make it play better. I mean it's got issues, several things wrong with it, but we'll get that all sorted out and we'll continue working through the back box and the stuff on the bottom of the play field in the next video. So I hope you enjoyed it. We will see you on the next one. Have a good evening.