This 1980's BIG CHOICE Claw Machine Was Vandalized... Let's Repair It (And Bring It Back!)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool claw machine repair video for you this evening. Some people call them crane machines, claw machines, grabbers. But this is a big choice claw machine. This is one of the older styles with just it just has a button button back and a button to the right. A lot of the newer ones, you know, that have the joysticks, you can go up, back, side to side, diagonal, anywhere you want to go. This one, you only get one shot at it. You hit this button, and as soon as you let go of this button, you're done with that direction. You can't go back and go further back. It's just that's it. then you can only go to the right. A lot of people don't really like this style. They like the joystick style better because you can, you know, be a lot more picky with where you go before you can drop it. But some people like this style, too. I know Jonathan, my friend, he says he likes this style better because that's the style that he grew up with. But, uh, like I say, this is a big choice. This thing's in pretty rough shape really. Um, the top is just kind of sitting on there. Don't know what the heck happened there. I think somebody dropped this thing at some point cuz the glass, you know, we're missing something here. This whole glass is gone. And what's kind of frustrating about this deal is I had a few of these machines two, three years ago and I had some extra pieces of glass for the side. And you know, I was cleaning up one day and I was thinking, well, I'm not going to need those glass pieces, you know, cuz I'm probably not going to buy a crane that the glasses broke out of. And if I do, it's probably going to be a different different kind. So, here we are two years later. I've got the same exact claw machine, and I wish I had those pieces of glass, you know, but it is what it is. You can't keep everything. Normally, I wouldn't buy a claw machine that had the buttons and had broken glass, but this came in a a bundle with some other machines. So, this was kind of a freebie really cuz I bought three or four other machines and this one was included. So, I'm considering this a free machine so far. So, I don't Well, I know what's wrong with it. I know what's wrong with it. I know what you're thinking. Well, Joe, you haven't even touched it yet. You don't know what's wrong with it. I know exactly what's wrong with it. It's broke. So, There's not too many things to this. So, believe it or not, you've got this little circuit board here with those three relays and those capacitors. And that little thing is is running this whole machine. It's also got a couple motors up here. Sometimes those go bad. One of the motors goes back and the other motor goes to the right. So, that's really all there is to it really. I haven't I haven't messed with it at all. So, I guess we're going to plug it in and see what happens. Actually, I think I want to put this up on the uh the rails before I get too far along here. I think it goes that way. Not entirely sure. I'm pretty sure this is the right way it goes. All right. So, let's plug it in. Here we go. That doesn't sound good. Oh, this coil is locking on. Watch. Let me zoom in. Maybe you can't really leave it like that or it'll burn up the coil. Watch the claw. All right. So, [sighs] that's a one issue. Let's see. How am I going to unplug just the claw? Goes in there. I guess I could do it here. Let me zoom back out. All right, I'm going to attempt to just unhook the claw, the power to the claw. So, because I don't want to burn up that coil, and then uh I'll plug it back in and try it again. All right. So, I'm going to unscrew the power wires going to the claw. See? So, now we should be safe to plug it in and see if it'll do anything else. [snorts] All right. All right. So, our lights on up top. We'll try to add some credits and see if it'll do anything. Nothing. Nothing so far. Well, we're not getting very far here. I will admit, I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't work on too many claw machines. I'm more of your arcade game guy. So, I think my next step is I'm going to take this board out, make sure those fuses are good, and I'm going to clean those relays and put the relays back in. and make sure I don't see anything obvious going on. So, there's basically just three relays, couple fuses. That's really about it. So, let's get that out and look at it. All right, I got the board out. This is what runs the whole machine other than the two motors up top. Both these fuses look good. I think I'm going to go ahead and change these capacitors. This resistor is a little burnt looking, but you know, sometimes that's totally fine. It may still be fine. Let's see what it's saying. I'm going use my little tool here. See if this will work. Well, that resistor may actually be open or these These aren't closing tight enough. Somebody sent me these. So, I was just trying them out H. That may actually be the problem. Let's see. Sorry, Don. I wanted to try it the old way. cuz I'm stubborn, I guess. It does appear to be. That resistor does appear to be open. Let me check that out with two hands. I'll be back with you. Something's going on with that resistor. But I don't know what value that is. It may be the same as the one next to it here. So I'll have to investigate that further. And these these are actually all the same, these little relays. So I'm going to move them around. Change these caps. I'm going to check out this resistor a little bit more. See if I can figure out if that one next to it supposed to be the same. And then we'll try it again, I guess. Change the caps. Move these uh relays around. I may spray some of this uh contact cleaner down in those sockets. Like so. I go crazy with it. I know I probably don't need that much, but I spray the heck out of it. But uh let me play around with this a little bit and I'll be back, I guess. All right. So I changed all these capacitors. This capacitor down here which is next to the uh this is the claw strength adjustment. This capacitor was basically doing nothing cuz it it fell apart whenever I took it out. The positive lead was stuck in the board. So this cap was definitely bad. All the other caps, you know, they're made about the same time, so you'd have to think some of them were going bad. I swapped a few of these. I moved these all around in different spots after I sprayed them with the contact cleaner. I determined that R2 is burn up. Uh there's R2. Nothing. Let's see. I've got it hooked on my leads with the alligator clips. Nothing. So, I'm going to have to figure out what R2 value is. I'm thinking it may be the same as R1. That's R1. That was R2. Or [snorts] was it R2? That may have been R3. Cuz that's R2. R1, R2. [snorts] It's definitely not R3. Okay, we're we're not getting anywhere here. Maybe [snorts] it's R4. What do we think? So, I'm going to have to do some research. Yeah, that I think that is a four. Yeah, you can kind of see the four. You see it? The line's coming down and then there's another line there that's probably connected like a four. So, I'm going to have to see what R4 is supposed to be. And I'm also going to clean all these pins because they look pretty tarnished. You see? I don't know if that's coming out on camera. Then the bottom's pretty tarnished, too. So, going to clean this. Clean that. I got to try to figure out what R4 is and then we'll put it back in and hopefully that'll get us somewhere. But, [snorts] you know, a lot of times if a resistors burn up, something made it burn up, you know, so we'll have to keep a watch on that. But I'll be back whenever I figure something else out, I guess. All right. So, I found a post from like 12 years ago where Ronnie was telling somebody about these resistors. And apparently those resistors only run the lights on the buttons and he said they're 68 ohm. So, I found a 68 ohm and put it in there. And this one here was a 68 ohm. So, he must have been right. I checked all of these dodes. All the diodes seem like they're fine. So, the diodes test fine. I changed the capacitors. The fuses are good. These two transistors test fine. Really, the only thing left is the relays. I don't have a good way to test those other than putting them in there and seeing what happens. I guess I moved them around. I cleaned all these connectors. So, I'm going to put it in and see if we get anything different. So, I remembered I had power up here because remember this was trying to close when I first plugged it in. And I looked at the fuses down there, the holder, and it seemed to be fine. So, I hooked this back up. And then I finally figured out which direction this switch goes. down sends the power to the claw. And then I started playing with a switch. Let's see how to do it. So that tells me that the motors are good. And it's going to keep wanting to push that way because this switch here is not adjusted right. It's supposed to goes further and it opens that switch in the back here, right here. And that's when it knows it's all the way forward. So, we actually know that our side to side motor is good and our front and back motor is good. So, that helps. This switch here, it's not pulling up the claw. number one. So, that's going to be one of these switches. Isn't quite right. It may supposed to be on the other side of this switch. I'm not exactly sure yet. Remember, I don't really know what I'm doing. It still won't coin up, but that's probably because the claw is down. And it's still it's still stuck on. You know, it's supposed to be like that. It keeps closing. So, I need to get this I need to get it to pull the string up. So, I'm going have to mess with this a little bit more. Uh, I'll play around with this. Well, I think it may have. Did it come off the roller? Yeah, it's supposed to be on this roller here. Supposed to be on the middle roller and it's not. Maybe, maybe not. I think my string's all messed up here. Did that get it? I don't know. I might have to keep playing around with it. The string, I don't think, is on the right rollers. I'll mess it a little bit. All right. So, I decided to take this back cover off and I saw this little red wire here and I couldn't quite tell what was going on. Then I took the cover off and I saw that wire. Somebody stole a switch off of it. There's supposed to be an extra cherry switch here just like this one that I think's going to start lifting up this string. It doesn't know to lift the string because the wire the switch isn't there. What do you think about that? See, I've got these two extra wires. And I done cut myself wide open. That's all right. I wonder if I bet if I connect them together, it would probably raise up the string. What do we think? It's kind of an oddball switch, though. So, I don't know if I'm going to have one of those. I'll have to look around. This lever is probably supposed to move and hit that switch and do something or another to raise the string. All right, so I stripped back the wires. It didn't start raising the claw machine, the claw. But watch this. You hear the relay kicking on down there? Now, let me twist them together. Hold on. Give me a minute. All right. So, I got them connected together. And now, watch this. I can add a credit now. This moves. Yeah, buddy. Let go of that. It won't let me go right though. But at least it's coining up now with that switch. I'm making progress here. I need to get this thing. Uh I don't know. I'm gonna keep messing around with it. I think I got this switch about right though. See how it didn't keep going? So, I'm making progress. It is still broke, though. I need to get a switch up here to get this how it's supposed to be. So, I'm going to dig around and see if I can find one of those. I'm looking through my parts drawer. And I need a special switch. And this is the as close as I can find. It may work. It's got to have that little roller on there. So, I got my switch mounted in there. I only put one bolt in it just for testing purposes. And I found a video from us like I don't know five six years ago and it told me where to put the the [clears throat] wires on the switch. So got them set up right. Luckily Ronnie made the video of the last one. Now watch what happens when I plug it in. comes back and stops like it's supposed to. Let me finish plugging it in. The cord's all messed up. All right, check this out. Add a couple credits. It's going back. Going back slowly. We may have to work on that motor. And then it goes to the right, but it never drops. And I told you wrong earlier about the motors. This is the front and back motor. This is the right motor. And that motor on over there is the motor that actually picks it up. So, we're thinking that motor's bad. And Ronnie just found some more motors in the parts room. So, next up, I'm going to swap that motor back there that I think is the one that picks up the string. Well, I know it's the one that picks up the string because we were we were turning it earlier and picked up the string. [snorts] But, I'll get that motor swap and uh we'll try it again. All right. I've been trying to change this motor. It's not as easy as you would think. I've been messing with it for an hour just to try to get it off the bracket because the gears in the way and it's all stuck together. But anyway, look at this motor. It don't really look all that great. It's the inside of it. Now look at this one. This one looks a lot better. So, I'm gonna swap that and I'm hoping that's going to fix our issue. All right. So, I got the mo the motor swapped. The strings down. I think if I plug it in and it's working, it should pick up that claw. We shall see. All right, let's see what it'll do. Fingers crossed. Come on, baby. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. I think we're going to make that money. We need to make some adjustments. We still need to make some adjustments, but we're going to make that money in the long run. Okay. So, just everybody be patient and just wait for that money to roll in. All right. So, now we're going to try to play a game. See if I can grab my diet Mountain Dew over there. All right. It goes back a little slow, but I think it'll speed up over time. Uhoh. Oh crap. Did you see what happened? It rolled up the string backwards and tangled everything up. I'm not exactly sure why I did that. But I'll have to mess with this some more. We ain't making the money quite yet. Okay. Not yet. But I think we're on the right path. I'll be back later. Well, basically what happened was I've still got problems with these two switches. the string fell down to get the animal and [clears throat] it was supposed whenever this goes down, it's supposed to hit that this switch and it didn't hit it quite right. So, it didn't know to touch those two wires together to bring the claw back up. So, what happened was it just kept spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and then it it grabbed the string again and started it basically wound it up backwards at that point and it was still pulling on the string. And that's why I had to turn it off real quick because it would have either broke the string or it could have burn up the motor again. And that's probably what was wrong with this machine all along. You know, somebody stole this switch. Maybe that switch switch went bad and uh burned up that motor and they couldn't ever find a good switch to work for it. So, if you're following me, I've put another good motor I've put a good motor in it. I've put the switch back on it how it should have been, you know, 20 years ago. I didn't have it adjusted quite right, though, because this wasn't hitting it. I only had one screw in it before. I've got another screw in it now. And I think I've got it adjusted right. So, we'll try it again. See how it goes. All right. I think I got everything adjusted how it's supposed to be. Add a few credits on it. I think it's getting better going back. It's much faster. I think it's working the kinks out. Oh crap. Well, I think that's actually working. It's just getting caught up on this spring here. I might have to zip tie that up a little higher. Let's see if we can get it to do it, though. Couple more credits. Yeah, I got to zip tie that spring. Hold on a minute. All right, we're going to try it again. I don't know why that spring is so long on this one, but whatever. Add a couple credits. I've got me a little stuffed animal in there. I'm going to try to get I guess I could Well, we'll try it like this first. Think I went back too far. That's why the spring was that long. I cut I zip tied it too too short. Let me try again. All right, we're going to try again. Almost. We put more money in there. Now it's against the glass though. Am I going to get that far? Yeah. I need to work on my Hey, I got that piece. Yeah, buddy. Oh crap. I almost had it. It took my money. I wasn't even trying to do that. Yeah, I got my uh my spring zip tied too tight still. All right, I'll be back in a little bit. Let me try some more. All right, I think we might get it this time. All right, see here. Nope. Didn't go back far enough. I need another 50 cent. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. We getting somewhere now. We're going to make that money. We're going to make that money. >> [laughter] >> I finally got my Star Wars toy. My $2 Star Wars toy that cost me $10 in the crane machine, but we're not going to talk about that. I finally won. So, now we just got to do a bunch of cosmetic stuff. We're still missing the whole side here. And then lots of little cleaning. We got to clean all that up. yada yada yada. But these are minor details. We got to fix this door. We got to put the bottom on it. We got to get our little twinkly lights up here working. But I'm going to get all that. Don't worry about it. I got this zip tied back here. Remember when I picked up the claw the uh this piece with the claw a second ago? That was the world telling me I needed to put that on there. So, because it had a little zip tie spot right here. So, I put that on there where it's supposed to go. Zip tied that there. Now, it'll go all the way across. I think next up, I got to start working on this plexiglass here. See what I'm going to do about that. So, I changed one bulb. These take a special bulb. These are 10T5 130 volt made in Taiwan. Fancy fancy. So, I changed one bulb and it's flashing. Believe it or not, it looks like every single bulb has burned out on this machine. A lot of people don't change those, but those little things like that really add to the whole end result here. So, I'm going to go through and change all the bulbs. All the plexi they have is pretty thin other than this one. I like the looks of this one. It's about a/4 inch thick. It's awful expensive though. But it is bigger than what I actually need. So I think I can get a few marquees out of it also. So that'll kind of justify it. Um I think this is going to be enough to do the claw machine and probably two marquees on a Street Fighter. All right, I got my plexiglass back here on my workt, also known as a trash can. And yeah, I'm only going to need about half this piece. So this is good. I can get a bunch of marquees out of that. So now I don't feel as bad about spending $83. And you may be saying, "Well, Joe, why didn't you get a smaller piece?" Well, they didn't have any that was a quarter inch thick that was smaller than this. Believe it or not, they had two foot wide ones by like 4 foot, stuff like that. But the problem is I needed 27 and a quarter this way. So I couldn't get any of the smaller ones. All the other ones were two foot. So we're going to make this work. And I'm going to have a bunch left over from mares. I use plexiglass all the time for marquees. So it's not it's not really that big of a deal. So I've got it marked. I'm going to cut it with this little crappy plexiglass cutter. They're not very good, but it gets the job done eventually. You just got to score it. I'm going have to score this one a bunch and then I'm going to take it out on the counter out there and I'll I'll lay it on my showcase. Then I'll snap it. That's just how I do it. Funny story about the trash can. I've worked off a trash can for so long, my entire life. This has always been like a workbench for me that I built a really nice garage at my house and I had a trash can like this in there and just out of instinct, I needed to cut something and I grabbed the trash can and I started working off the trash can in my real nice garage that I just built just out of habit. I started I reached for the trash can as my workbench even though I built a big nice workbench over along the wall that I could have used. Anyway, poor folks got poor ways I guess. But uh I'm [clears throat] going to cut this and we'll see how it turns out. All right. So then you line it up on the showcase and hope you scored it enough. Then you hold it down like so. Wham. Didn't think I was gonna do it on the showcase, did you? Then you got to cut this little film off of the razor blade. And that's how we do it. That's how we roll. Now I got a bunch left over. All right, so there's the process. Not that anybody probably cares the process, but I figured I'd show it. All right, so I got my plexiglass cut to size now. And I'm going to paint some stripes on it just like the other side's got. So I'm going to do black, red, black, red, black. Okay, let's go look at the machine in case anybody forgot. There is white on the machine, but I don't have white paint and I just don't care enough to add all those little other colors. Okay, I don't It's fine. It'll be fine. Okay, black, red, black, white, black, red, black, white, black. We're not going to do that. We're just going to do black and red. Okay. You can't look at both sides at the same time. Okay. I can't see it. There's no way that you'd ever be looking at both sides. It's impossible. Okay. Maybe you can be over here and somebody else can be over there and then they'd come over here and look at this side and you'd go over there and look at that side. But you would never be looking at the same side, both sides at the same time. It's just not going to happen. Okay, I'm trying to make it an eight. Can we make it an eight? All right. So, just bear with me a little bit. It'll be fine. All right, folks. It is viewer mail time. We have a card. It looks like this is our address. Joe's Video Games, 139 Caldwell Street, Rock Hill, South Carolina 29730. If you want to send us viewer mail, this appears to be from Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was sent at the beginning of December. It has a 1775 to 2025 stamp on it. That's pretty cool. Let's see what it is. I think I know what it might be. All right. So, I'm going to put this on camera because um they got our address from these videos, so they know the the deal. So, I don't think they'll have a problem with it. It is a Christmas card. Heck yeah. This is our first Christmas card we've got this year. So, we have [laughter] the little pups are being very polite around the tree. They're at attention for the picture. That's pretty cool. They're dressed up in their festive best. It says Joy in the background there. No, it says Joey, doesn't it? Look, it says Joey back there. That's pretty cool. And here's this little guy. Boy, they take good pictures. They're very photogenic. It says, "Have a merry Christmas." Boy, they're cute. [laughter] The jester's color. All right. And it says, "From our house to yours, Ricky, Janie, Foxy, and I can't quite read that. Prowess I'm probably getting that wrong. Maybe it'll sound I might have to call in for a second opinion." So Foxy and Prowace are probably humans and Ricky and Janie are probably the two dogs, I would guess, right? [laughter] Merry Christmas to the Lions brothers, Joystick, Rick, and Janie, Cheryl. Why, thank you. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. We will hold on to this. We never throw away Christmas cards. But I still got all the old ones. So, we really appreciate that you reaching out to us and having the kindness to send us a Christmas card. Merry Christmas to you and yours. Now, back to the video. There is a little board in here that uses three relays and it runs on 48 volts and 24 volts. It doesn't have 5 volt, right? So, it uses special 24volt bulbs. Um, and so we've been messing around with it. It just uses those relays. We've been messing around with it trying to make sure everything works right. So, we've added a credit switch. When you hit the credit switch, it turns off the coin door bulbs and turns on the back arrow. Again, it's doing all this with relays. If you hit this button, it doesn't work. So, when I hit this button, it turns the light off. And you saw this one immediately came on because now this is the button you hit. And if you hit this one, it doesn't work anymore. These are still off. Now, if I hit this one, when it gets all the way back where it's going, it turns the lights back [laughter] on. What a brilliant design. All with relays. Relay logic. >> All right, I got it all finished up. What do you think? There's how the side turned out. Not too shabby. Of course, it looks a lot better with the front door on it. Got the little lights working. Little twinkly lights really add a lot to it. And I don't know if you noticed before, but there was a there was a hole here. I'm not sure why that hole was there. And there was and this bolt was through the side here. Yeah. Well, this machine doesn't have a free play. So, I decided to take that bolt out of the side and it fit perfectly here. And so, then I had a hole here that I put my credit switch in because we're probably going to sell this to somebody for their house. For the longest time, we didn't feel like really working on these um and selling them because we thought, who would want a claw machine in their house? you know, you could just open the door and get the stuffed animal. It kind of defeats the purpose. But we started getting requests for them, you know, and we got a couple of them and sold them and got a few more and sold them. And we figured out people really want claw machines in their house. The kids are obsessed with them. So, this is the last one of these that I have in storage. So, I figured I'd get it out since it was close to Christmas time. Work through it. A lot of people probably wouldn't even have fooled with this one, but it was in pretty rough shape when we started. The glass was gone. Everything was broke. But I got it for basically free. And you know, I spent a couple hundred on it. So, I think I'll do pretty good with it. But this is the one with the buttons. And I'll show you how it works. We'll add some credits. And now it's telling you to go back. And you only get one shot at it. So, you got to be good. Once you let go of the button, you can't go back any more. Okay. I guess I'm going to try to get that duck in there. You see that yellow duck? So, you go back once you let go. I didn't go back far enough, I don't think. Can't go back anymore. Now you got to go to the right. See, I didn't go back far enough. Now I got to put another 50 cent in it. Add another credit. Am I going to get him? Yep, buddy. Make it all the way. Sometimes it'll drop it halfway. There we go. I got my little duck. Quack quack. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next one.