Electromechanical PinBall

[Electrical Rod]

A Williams I restored. Game is about 1967.
Rodney

[neil29]

Looks like a nice machine in good shape. but do you have any internal pictures?.


Cheers
Neil.

[Philips210]

Looks great and a good project to undertake and they're a lot of fun to play. Being electromechanical the sound effects are genuine. If I had more room then I'd like to own one.

Regards
Symon

[Refugee]

Those are lovely machines if you have the space.
I had a fruit machine for a few years and it was fun but a little noisy at times especially if it was paying out 80 coins for one win.

[Electrical Rod]

A little extra information on this machine. This one is as original as you can get except the paint job, which I did and like ok.
I drove down to Florida 5 years ago to pick up this machine; it was really a basket case and nothing much worked. The good news was no fuse was blown and some of it would light up.
I spent 9 months in the restoration process with a lot of cleaning before I could even start with the electrical/mechanical stuff. Several coils were burned out and a lot of switches were bent or not even making contact, or stuck closed. Many adjustments had to be made over this time period.
I ordered a good many replacement parts out of South Carolina. Me and the wife play it often on the week ends. I have never been able to beat this game, nor has anyone else. The bells are loud, but I like the loud bells.
I kept some restoration photo`s for a couple years but eventually deleted them.
Rodney

[Electrical Rod]

Another photo of this machine at night.

[John10b]

What a great machine, I have always admired the design engineers behind these and other game machines.
I can not offer any technical advice but I would like to congratulate you for getting it going.
I used to look after various machines and juke boxes for a friend who owned an amusement arcade, for extra cash to keep my car on the road, and I always smiled at the tricks the public would get up to try and play these machines for nothing or defeat the trembler sensor, lots of time spent getting rid of candy floss sticks etc etc happy days.
Cheers
John

[Refugee]

When I worked with postage stamp vending machines we had special coins that the banks gave to us that had been made from brass plated soft solder to test the machines and program the firmware in the coin mechs.
Most other things used to just block the slot up.
They also had a change float and manager system in them that were stand alone or not provided at arcades.

[philthespark]

It is indeed a thing of beauty, some years ago I did a bit of work for an amusement arcade company, I ended up getting a tabletop space invaders machine, and after repairing it I spent many happy hours playing it.
I was also involved in the development of a tamperproof coin mech after the firm fell victim to a gang who discovered that by inserting a straw into the slot where the coins went in, then blowing a mouthful of liquid into it, resulted in one of two things happening, either the machine just spat all the money out, or it gave you unlimited credits.
My solution was to remove the pcb from its location inside the coin mech and attach it to the outside,so when the liquid was blown in it had no effect, eventually, this idea was adopted by the manufacturers.

[emeritus]

Me and my friends used to play on a machine of this type in a local pub in the 1960's, but I haven't seen one for years. The "Pinball" game on my laptop is not bad, but not as good as the real thing!

[Electrical Rod]

Glad all of you liked it, I haven`t seen many of this game around, but a few were years ago, but lots of others were collected.
I had a more modern semi-conductor game from around 1980 and it kept blowing voltage regulators and killed the mother board so I decided to purchase a real car that you can fix.
Even though this game is clean, we just played it several times (perfect), I opened up the coin door and it still smells like old technology inside, the same with the back box.
Rodney