# TNT "Six Million Dollar Man" shop job! **Source:** Pintastic New England **Type:** video **Published:** 2018-07-14 **Duration:** 123m 10s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehPBeacQYTA --- ## Analysis Todd Tuckey and Frank from TNT Amusements present a live seminar at Pintastic New England demonstrating a restoration/rebuild of a Six Million Dollar Man pinball machine. The presentation covers board-level repairs, capacitor replacement, socket changes, battery upgrades, playfield restoration, and rubber replacement. Todd also discusses his upcoming pinball book project (30 machines across 10 planned volumes), a potential Travel Channel reality show about Americana, and Randy Senna's upcoming arcade in Wildwood. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Valley system games from 1977-1984 are the most stable and best-designed early arcade systems — _Frank (TNT co-host) explicitly stated this when explaining why they chose Six Million Dollar Man for the seminar_ - [HIGH] Todd switched to lithium coin cell batteries in 1999 after previous battery problems with customers — _Todd stated directly: 'in 1999, Frank, I started using lithium batteries'_ - [HIGH] Todd has produced almost 1,400 YouTube videos and crossed 23,000 subscribers — _Todd stated: 'Most of them are high-def. We're just crossing the 23,000 subscriber line. Last night I think it was 22,955 or 955'_ - [HIGH] It takes 20-30 hours to fully rebuild a pinball machine — _Todd stated: 'It takes 20 to 30 hours to rebuild a machine'_ - [HIGH] Todd's pinball book will cover 30 machines in volume one, with 10 volumes planned covering 300-350 machines total — _Todd: 'I've written 27 stories so far. We're probably going to hit 30' and 'We plan 10 volumes. We're thinking that 10 volumes will cover, if all goes well, 300 to 350 machines'_ - [HIGH] The publisher has invested approximately $30,000 upfront in the first volume of Todd's pinball book — _Todd stated: 'he's invested about $30,000 invested in this first volume'_ - [HIGH] The pinball book will have a first run of 1,000 copies, with volume one targeting publication by September 1st at the latest — _Todd: 'The first volume is going to have a run of a thousand' and 'at the latest, it'll be September 1st'_ - [MEDIUM] Randy Senna's arcade in Wildwood is scheduled to open by July 4th after receiving unanimous approval — _Todd: 'So Randy's arcade is supposed to be open by the time of July 4th' and 'he received a unanimous approval to open the arcade'_ - [HIGH] Socket replacement on Valley system boards must be done one at a time to properly diagnose problems — _Frank demonstrated this methodology: 'You do the sockets one at a time' because changing all at once makes it impossible to identify which socket fixed the issue_ - [MEDIUM] Dick White rubbers are more elastic and lively than Shane Black rubbers but both are priced the same — _Todd stated: 'Dick White rubbers, A, look better... number two, they are definitely more elastic and more lively... They're actually the same price too'_ ### Notable Quotes > "A correct repair should look like nothing was ever wrong to begin with. That's how you properly fix a game." > — **Frank (TNT co-host)**, N/A > _Core philosophy of machine restoration—professional standards and craftsmanship_ > "It's a great system. It's a simple system, and it has a lot of expandability." > — **Frank**, N/A > _Assessment of Valley system design quality and why it was chosen for the seminar_ > "The test menu is perfect. You push the button once, it takes you to a lamp test. Push it again, it takes you to a display test. And it stays in that test." > — **Frank**, N/A > _Explains user-friendly design features of Valley system_ > "I've been pushing free-to-play arcades for 30 years." > — **Todd Tuckey**, N/A > _Todd's long-standing position on arcade business models_ > "Each story will be designed for toilet reading. So you go to the bathroom or a dump or something, you can read one story." > — **Todd Tuckey**, N/A > _Describes the format of the pinball book—short, standalone stories_ > "Without him, we wouldn't have this legacy. He's left this wonderful collection of games." > — **Todd Tuckey**, N/A > _Tribute to Tim Arnold who runs the Pinball Museum in Vegas_ > "I said, just make everything free. Flat charge to come in." > — **Todd Tuckey**, N/A > _Todd's preference for free-to-play arcade model over quarter-fed machines_ > "Especially if the ground is broken off. Right. This one is okay." > — **Todd Tuckey**, N/A > _Safety concern when replacing power cords on old machines_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Todd Tuckey | person | TNT Amusements co-host, pinball content creator, restoration expert, book author; speaking at Pintastic New England seminar | | Frank | person | TNT Amusements co-host, technical expert on pinball repair, demonstrated board-level restoration techniques during seminar | | Randy Senna | person | Arcade designer/operator opening new arcade in Wildwood; formerly worked for Disney managing Main Street; subject of Todd's viral video | | Tim Arnold | person | Operator of the Pinball Museum in Las Vegas; praised by Todd for preserving pinball legacy | | Andrew | person | YouTube fan from Kaneda Pinball Podcasts in Vancouver; book publisher and sponsor covering all expenses for Todd's pinball book project | | Cassandra Peterson | person | Original Elvira performer; mentioned in context of pinball game production involvement | | Penn and Teller | person | Magicians met by Todd in Vegas; expressed love of pinball machines | | TNT Amusements | company | YouTube restoration and content creation company run by Todd Tuckey and Frank; specializes in pinball machine restoration and educational videos | | Pinball Museum (Las Vegas) | company | Museum in Las Vegas run by Tim Arnold; holds significant pinball collection; recommended by Todd as must-visit destination | | Wildwood Arcade (Randy Senna's) | company | New arcade opening in Wildwood, NJ by July 4th; subject of Todd's viral video that led to approval reversal; uses free-to-play model | | Six Million Dollar Man | game | 1970s Valley system pinball machine; subject of TNT's live restoration seminar; chosen for demonstration | | Valley system | product | Pinball hardware platform used 1977-1984; described by Frank as most stable and well-designed early system | | Pintastic New England | event | Event where Todd and Frank presented the live Six Million Dollar Man restoration seminar | | Pinball Expo Chicago | event | Major pinball event where Todd plans to present seminar on arcade video games; publisher plans to have booth | | Travel Channel | company | Network executive approached Todd about potential reality show featuring Americana; interested in Todd's content | | Kaneda Pinball Podcasts | organization | Podcast based in Vancouver; listener Andrew is sponsoring Todd's pinball book project | | pinballbuzz.com | website | Publisher's website for Todd's pinball book project; hosts free game room photo uploads and advertiser directory | | Pinfest | event | Pinball festival in Alabama; Todd filmed nearly 4-hour video that is pending post-production/editing | | Cameron Silver Ball Museum | company | Pinball museum in Asbury Park; operates on flat-rate admission model | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball machine restoration and repair techniques, Valley system pinball hardware (1977-1984), Todd Tuckey's pinball book project and publishing, Battery replacement and electrical safety in vintage pinball, Playfield restoration and rubber replacement, Board-level diagnostics and socket replacement methodology - **Secondary:** Pinball museum and arcade industry trends, Free-to-play vs. quarter-fed arcade business models ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.82) — Todd and Frank are enthusiastic and encouraging about pinball restoration. Strong passion for preserving machines and educating the community. Positive reception of book project and upcoming ventures. Some self-deprecating humor and jokes about industry politics (stickers on machines), but overall tone is constructive and celebratory. ### Signals - **[industry_signal]** Travel Channel interest in Americana/arcade content signals crossover appeal of pinball and vintage arcade into mainstream entertainment; Todd in discussions about potential series featuring pinball episodes (confidence: medium) — Travel Channel executive interested in Todd's content, wants him to explore Americana, plans 6-8 episodes, Todd negotiating inclusion of pinball episode - **[business_signal]** Todd's book publishing venture backed by external investor/publisher (Andrew from Kaneda Pinball Podcasts) who committed $30,000+ upfront investment; first print run of 1,000 units; licensing and advertising revenue model (confidence: high) — Andrew covering all expenses, $30,000 invested to date, 1,000 unit first run, flat-rate advertiser model, pre-sales already underway - **[community_signal]** Todd and Frank providing extensive educational content on pinball restoration at live seminars and via YouTube videos; emphasis on knowledge sharing and community building (confidence: high) — Live seminar at Pintastic New England, 1,400+ YouTube videos, detailed technical tutorials on repair methodology - **[community_signal]** Pinball museums and free-to-play arcades gaining visibility and community support; Randy Senna's Wildwood arcade achieving approval reversal due to viral content; Tim Arnold's Vegas museum receiving pilgrimage visits (confidence: high) — Todd's video of Randy's arcade went viral leading to unanimous approval; Tim Arnold's museum described as 'wonderful legacy'; multiple free-to-play model arcades mentioned as successful - **[community_signal]** Educational content production demonstrating strong commitment to operator and collector education; live seminars and video tutorials providing detailed technical guidance (confidence: high) — Live restoration seminar format; 1,400+ YouTube videos; detailed socket replacement, board reflow, and capacitor replacement tutorials - **[event_signal]** Pintastic New England as major regional pinball event with live seminars, auctions, and attendance of several hundred; part of broader network of pinball expos and fan gatherings (confidence: medium) — Auction scheduled during event, multi-hundred person attendance implied, Todd joking about buying all games at auction - **[market_signal]** Todd's pinball book positioning as lifestyle/hobby guide with short stories designed for casual reading (toilet reading), plus celebrity interviews, history sections, and collector spotlights—diversified content model (confidence: high) — Todd: 'Each story will be designed for toilet reading' and book includes 'celebrity interviews', 'Collector's Corner', 'pinball history', 'employee page' - **[product_strategy]** Todd's pinball book project includes 10 planned volumes covering 300-350 machines, with volume one targeting September 1st publication and volume two for Christmas; book includes themed volumes (Magic era, etc.) (confidence: high) — Todd stated: '10 volumes will cover 300 to 350 machines' and 'Volume two will be out for Christmas' and themed volumes like 'magic is one year' - **[technology_signal]** Lithium coin cell (2032) battery adoption with integrated protection boards replacing older problematic battery solutions; represents standardization of battery technology in restoration practice (confidence: high) — Todd switched to lithium batteries in 1999; uses simple 2032 coin cells with diode protection; mentions customers no longer need to call for replacements --- ## Transcript The star of stage, screen, and play field, Todd Tuckey. Hi, Dave. It's good to be back. We were here last year. How many of you were here last year? Some of you. Most of you. That's good. So you liked it a lot when you came back. We had a couple of newbies here. This is their first time here. We're hoping not to bore you. we think I'm going to move this up just a hair so I don't have to bend over but we think that this seminar will be both rewarding and fun we have zero practice on it, we only got the chance to see the six million dollar man about 30 minutes ago, but what we did which is unusual is when Dave said we've got to come up with some kind of a seminar idea I asked Frank, I said, what do you think we should do? And Frank says, why don't we rebuild a machine? But there's not enough time, not in two hours. It takes 20 to 30 hours to rebuild a machine. So we decided we'd do it a different way. We're going to speed it up because we have a $6 million man, Frank's favorite system. I think we said that in the video, too. This is the Valley System, Valley Streams from 87th. 77 to 84, I think, are pretty much the most stable, especially in the early games. And these are very easy to redo if you have 20 or 30 hours. But we had a $60,000 man at the shop, so I asked if you guys had one. And they said, yeah, we do. We have one that's on shop. And, of course, yesterday I had this terror. I said, where's the $60,000 man? There's only one that's in the play area, and it looks beautiful. I said, that can't be the one we're doing. And we thought it was until late last night, and we realized it was one stolen somebody's truck that we were going to build. Not even. What we did is we shot the $6 million man over a period of five days at the Yante, filming at different times. So you'll see our clothes change, that sort of thing. but try to make it seamless. And Frank frequently stopped during the show. We haven't tried this interactive video yet. There's just no time. It took Frank and I 50 hours to make what you're going to see and put it together and edit it and add all the goofy stuff. We like goofy stuff. If you watch our videos, we're almost at 1,400 YouTube videos. Most of them are high-def. We're just crossing the 23,000 subscriber line. Last night I think it was 22,955 or 955, something like that. But we're still trying to do a reality show. My most recent endeavor is not quite pinball, but a high executive of the Travel Channel contacted our reality show guys that made the original show that goes back seven years ago. And she fell in love with a video I made, you may not have seen, on a reproducing piano. It's a player piano made in 1920 that reproduces the performance of the person who recorded it. There's virtually none left in existence. They stopped making them in 1936. and Frank and I made a one hour video it took us about eight hours and in my home that's where I have this machine and we played three roles explain it the piano appears that somebody there's a ghost sitting on it and playing it because the pedals move as it was recorded we heard something by George Gershwin who loved the player piano the reproducer and he himself recorded five or six hundred songs. And it sounds like somebody's sitting there playing. But all the pianos you've heard, they're just mechanical and they bang out the melody. Bang, bang, bang. Just relentless. You can sit at the piano and push the pedals and change some of the expression, but these pianos did this. One of them is this lady, fell in love, from Travel Channel. She wants me to travel the United States and explore America, which is great, except I don't know a whole lot about Americana. So I sent her some clips. If you watch my videos, I have some travel videos where I do the Pennsylvania State Fair, the film shows I do down in Wildwood, but special stuff like the Randy Sanna Arcade, which apparently because of my video, the township, the Wildwood borough, who had given them a zero and you can't open them. Thank you. That's Obie. Obie is famous for buying the Cybernaut pinball machine. And that's the one where my wife's head floats around and aggravates me. But thank you, Obie. I'll catch you later. Thank you. Anyway, the getting back to the videos, she wants me to shoot more footage, so I'm going to, next week I thought I can't do anything until this next week we're going to go and shoot some video about a merry-go-round that's nearby that's about 120 years old I don't know anything about it I know where a merry-go-round is, I know it turns, there's a motor that runs it so I have to do some research, and I'm also meeting up with a man that has the whole history I'm going to have to learn it real quick. And then I have to appear. Wow, this is amazing. Can you believe this thing is 110 years old? Now, it runs by this old motor in the base here. Let me show you that. So I have to make what they call a sizzle reel. And to see if she thinks it would work. And we have a segment. We do six or eight episodes. And I understand they're 22-minute episodes. This is a 30-minute block. And it may go, where I'll be able to do Randy Senna footage, then he'd reopen the arcade. I kind of dropped you off the planet there. Randy Senna's arcade, to finish up, he was designed an arcade. We made the video. The video went viral in the Wildwood, I guess, tourist section. They posted the video, and they got a lot of letters written. and two weeks later Randy got a unanimous approval to open the arcade. So it went from zero to hero. So Randy's arcade is supposed to be open by the time of July 4th. Randy Senna is an amazing man, possibly the smartest man I've ever met. I've never seen anything like it. He loves old games. He loves bibles. He worked for seven or eight years. He ran Main Street at Disney World. He ran it. He was in the center and as the crew used to say, it was, what do they call it, Senna Avenue or something. I can't remember. I don't know. It's in one of the videos, but you'll be able to see that. It'll be like pimples, arcade games. That'll be really nice. We're going to go down and film the video once he opens it up. So maybe that Travel Channel thing will click and I'll be able to introduce Pimble. I told her we were going to do one episode on Pimble machines, so she can have a problem with that. we'll do a Randy Sennett episode if he gets that place at the moment so that's coming but on top of all that I was approached by a YouTube fan in Canada, Vancouver, Canada who was sending us boxes of coffee and candy, this is not Mark in Canada but Andrew in Canada I have another one didn't buy anything from him but loves the videos and he has a company that kind of runs itself and a staff and he said they're bored they're making all this money they do virtually nothing he says i've been watching your videos maybe you should write a book and i said well we used to joke about it i used to tell people when we were giving gifts out birthday presents and stuff and we'd hand them a present and i used to say it's a book it's a copy of my memoirs they always got a great laugh but this guy was serious and he said why don't you get all your memories here Your ideas, everything you've encountered over the years, both good and bad together, put in a book form. So I said, well, I can certainly do that, but what books do I, what games do I pick? So what we did, unlike other books, pinball books you've had, there's a lot of great books out there, and now I understand they're trying to get this certain history book out. That book's great. Books are not easy. You need a crew. And this man said, I will pay all the expenses. I'll cover everything. He even flew my daughter and I out to Vegas and put us up. We had a great time. We shot pictures. I think a lot of you may have seen it. And he's paying for the book all up front. He's paying to design it. The book design, so far, he's got in labor because he has to pay his seven employees. He says he's got about $30,000 invested in this first volume. Now once we get the first volume running, we'll have it down pat, we'll be able to knock them out a little better. The cost of the books, just to print them, is going to be 200 pages, full color, high gloss. And they'll be about an 8 by 11 size, so it'll be about this size, maybe a little smaller. And I'm writing the stories, I kind of say, each story will be designed for a toilet reading. So you go to the bathroom or a dump or something, you can read one story. So that's what he decided. But what we're going to do, I've written 27 stories so far. We're probably going to hit 30, 30 pinball machines that we'll cover. And the experiences I've had with each individual model, we're covering all manufacturers except brand new stuff. I knew I was going to need some water. at some point. So, the books will cover favorites and some unknowns. Circus World here is covered, for instance. But so is Big Game. Really good ones and then more obscure titles. And we're going to stop at 200 pages. So, there will also be a whole section on each individual manufacturer and what we found the most important things you have to do to the machine. Now it wouldn't be tailored to like Star Trek, I was just telling somebody earlier, Star Trek Next Generation has a specific mod, I covered that in this, you have to put that tie back wire in or you're going to blow your board up. You have to. And half the machines didn't have it from the factory. It's actually in the manual, but the machines didn't have it. and of course other things that are important particularly for that game changing the wires that go to the two towers that spin but basic stuff will be there so if you have a WPC game what should we absolutely do to get our WPC the Pindoy will be a section for just that era WPC 95 will be a section for it the system 3 to 7 for instance the Valley Stern our favorite system from 77 to 83, 84. So you'll be able to flip the book open and reference it. There's also a whole section that's going to be, but not a section, but we're going to cover two game rooms, collector's game rooms, in the book, in each book. But our website, which is pinballbuzz.com, as a matter of fact, I'm going to pass this around. shameless plug, but this postcard has a space that I can sign later for if you want. The postcard directs you to the website, pinballbuds.com. This is the publisher's website. It's not mine. I will actually not have any books. They are handling all the sales and they collect all the money. Then I get paid per book that sells. The website has a free spot where you can upload up to five pictures of your game room, and they'll be up on the website and the information about your collection, whatever you want to divulge. But we were hoping that if you do send pictures, have at least one or two pictures of you in it or the family or whoever's playing. So it'd be kind of fun. There's another section for advertising. And he sent me a little thing. this is probably a great opportunity of course for a supplier to advertise and it's going to be on an even scale the listing for advertisers will be exactly the same size as each person it will have what they sell in a few words their name, their website, their phone number and address it's going to be a small ad it's not going to be somebody buys a full page somebody buys a quarter paper. It's going to be all nice and even. So that section is handled by him. That's where he makes his money. And you pay a flat charge, and you're in every edition of the first volume. The first volume is going to have a run of a thousand. We're going to sell a lot of them. We've had pre-sales up there. If that continues, when we get closer to the publishing time, which is at the latest, it'll be September 1st. We're hoping to have it out sooner. the, we'll add this extra to the printing order too. So volume one is on schedule. Volume two will be out for Christmas. We were kind of shooting for the Pinball Expo in Chicago. I'll be doing another completely different seminar there. Actually not on Pinball, he asked me to do it on video games, arcade video games. So hopefully maybe you can come out to that one. But we hope to have a pinball, we won't. But the publisher is sending a crew out, and they'll have a booth there with the book and such to sell and sell future volumes. So we plan 10 volumes. We're thinking that 10 volumes will cover, if all goes well, 300 to 350 machines. We're asking you to put suggestions in those games that you'd like to see. Each of the future editions, each of the future volumes will cover different eras or themes, magic is one year. We met Penn and Taller while we were in Vegas, and they were telling me about their love of pinball. We were out at the pinball museum. Oh, that's wonderful. If you go to Vegas in ten minutes with an Uber from the district, you'd be absolutely foolish not to go. We just had a great time. Tim Arnold runs it. Tim is a very unusual man. But, without Without him, we wouldn't have this legacy. He's left this wonderful collection of games. And it's just wonderful. And he runs it his way. When you run a business, you have to run things your way. I think of Flat Raid as the future. I've been pushing Flat Raid arcades for 30 years. Okay, as you go, I just don't think you'll experiment on games you've never played. You just walk. You walk right by them. You can play it, try it. I don't know. I think you'll do better. But that may change. At Randy's Center, it's the same way. You just pay as you go. I said, you're bothering me with these stupid quarters. They get stuck. I lost my quarter. I said, just make everything free. Flat charge to come in. But the Silver Bowl Museum in Asbury Park, if you've been there, that's a flat rate. there's also several others the game ball the spot rate there's bringing up everywhere you can see that people like this they like the classic stuff they like it presented in a certain way let me keep an eye on the time in case we don't want to run late because I know you want to go to the auction yes you've got to go to the auction bags remember that game oh man I wonder if they have another bags at the show I think they have an infinite supply An infant, what an awful boy. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Well, the auction is at 12, so we're hoping that our thing will be over 1130, so you'll have time to go to the bathroom, pick up the sandwich, and head over to the auction. It's going to be so much fun. I'll make sure it's fun. I brought a big truck, a 400 square foot truck. I'm going to buy every game in the auction. It's under a dollar. He's upset with me. Dave's upset. He's flustered. I'm going to leave something for the other bidders. I don't know. I'll wait and see. Anyway, so each copy of the pinball book will have tips to extend your life for your pinball machine. As I mentioned, we'll have some celebrity interviews. There'll be stories, which is what I'm writing, The Collector's Corner, which is what you'll provide. He's going to do micro pictures, sort of like, can you identify what the game is? A real super close-up of stuff, and then there'll be a team card at the end. I think this first one is kind of simple, but I said, come on, you can come up with better micro pictures than this. Give them something obscure, like Black Sheep Squadron or something like that. But there'll be a pinfall history, too. And then other things that we pick up as we go. We'll have an employee page. That was just added. We didn't want to have employees in there. I said, well, they're part of the thing. Frank is part of it. You are, right, Frank? Well, with pizza. I saw it on my statement. It was my idea to shop a game. I wanted nothing to do with it. He didn't want to do this. I wanted to shop a game. Like, oh, really? Great. We have to do it quick. We have to make the struggle. Well, that's why the video speeds things up. Yeah, we're going to do that. Which is true. And, uh, can you switch to full screen? Yeah, Frank's going to be talking. Yes, Frank's going to need a mic. Yes, let's get him set up with a mic. While you set him up with a mic, I should play the opening title. So if you could switch to full screen. And the music cuts at 29 seconds. the old oh there and look this is me preparing for six million dollar man so I spent hours training so you could see me well I had to stop the car I spent hours uh I had to put that in no nice flat top hair cover you like that scene that when I was filmed I think three or four years ago, but I said, you know what, I've got to put that in. It's in the $6 million man video that we've done in the past. I said, I'll just borrow that clip. So now you know we're doing the $6 million man. We kind of threw this idea together to see just how much we could teach you in a video, but the nice thing is, Dave's going to have it on their site, the video, and I'll have the full frame version with the direct HD video that I filmed on our regular YouTube channel at some point. I still haven't finished the Pinfest video. People are upset. The Pinfest video that I filmed at Alabama is almost four hours long. And it takes so much time to edit. And I've just been busy with this in the book. But anyway, we are ready, I think. What do you think? What do you think, Frank? Sure. Well, I always try to think we're ready, but we always have to ask our counterparts if we're ready, because they never quite know for sure. Are you done? We want to get started here. I mean, we want to get started. Thanks. Frank, here it is. Can you tell everybody why we chose this particular game? I guess for a value game. And the reason why is because I love this system. In the early games, it's the best. It's better than everybody. In the seven years or so that it's been used, it's been relatively unchanged, with the exception of adding some additional lamp boards and tons of sound board variations. Otherwise, it's very simple. It's elegant. The test menu is perfect. You push the button once, it takes you to a lamp test. Push it again, it takes you to a display test. And it stays in that test. You don't have to wait for the lights to flash once or twice and hope you catch it. It's all right there. You can check it. You can fix everything. It's a great system. It's a simple system, and it has a lot of expandability. You can play games like Medusa. It has tons of lights and all kinds of stuff. It's just a really, really good system. It is. And then they came out with this 6803 system. Oh. It went downhill with that. So I asked for a value. They gave me a $6 million man. It just so happened that we had one. And we sold it. So we're kind of killing three or four birds with one stone here. Yes. And you get the chance to see the one below. We'll cover both things. Frank, I think it's important that we start with this machine, and then we'll switch to the below machine. So what we're going to do here is the far extreme of what you can really do to restore your game. If it's your own game, it depends on your budget. It depends on your skill level. It depends on how much time you have, what you want to get out of it. If you're not familiar with the game, meaning you've never seen it powered up, you just got it in, you're going to want to go over the whole thing from top to bottom. First thing I check, I usually replace it with a power cord. Even though if it looks okay, it's almost 40 years old. Replace it. For a few bucks, it's not worth the risk of fire, getting shocked. Especially if the ground is broken off. Right. This one is okay. uh... lottery tickets you never get this lucky okay let me take the class out will get this out of the way someplace where it will get back and you know you're full surprise me uh... what about the little or do once called how he's part of our just kidding did we did we stop you I'm going to pick up Mr. Camera so I can show you up close what we're doing. Right, Frank? Yep. Okay. So we open up the machine. We already know right off the bat there's a boatload of stuff that's just going to get done regardless of anything. This is going to come out. We're going to replace the capacitors here. We're going to re-solder all of these pins. Sometimes you have to re-flow these transistors, too. We actually had a situation where a game didn't work right because the transistor wasn't reheated. So targets weren't received. I don't remember the game. You'll have to look up the video. Soundboard, same thing. Caps, reheat. Lampboard we're going to take out because we're going to put in there the LED board. Logic comes out. This is the board that's going to take us the most time. This is relatively clean. It does have a little bit of corrosion around the edges. To really do this board right, obviously you put my battery board in there. You clean it. You reflow all the pins, and you've got to change these sockets. This is a great system, but it was problematic. These sockets are almost 40-some years old. So many problems can be repaired just by changing the sockets. The other thing with these boards is if you have a really funky problem, you change every chip on here, and it doesn't work, it's these traces. These traces, they can get that tiny little break in it. You'll never see it. I can actually show you some pictures that I took of some boards that I took. It was working perfect. Change the sockets. You do the sockets one at a time. I'm showing the pictures now. The Williams gains, like a System 3, 6, 7, whatever, you can take all the sockets out, you can roll them one time, put the board back in, and it'll be fine. You change all these at one time, and the board doesn't work, you're screwed. You do one socket at a time, because if it doesn't work after that, then you know the problem is right there. And usually sometimes these pads get a little bit of oxidation. A little tiny starter blob will jump two lines together. Do them one at a time. If you're not comfortable doing it, then don't do it for an all-tech. I noticed that the battery board has a code on it. What year was it replaced? I can't make it out three. Look at that. I can't even see the numbers. Well, I put the numbers on the screen. But you know why? That poor battery probably didn't leak much. But this was one of our games, Frank. We sold over 25 years ago. When did you switch to the yellow and white stickers? That was years ago. That was before the iPhone. It was years ago. So this was a trade-in. So back then, of course, I was using that battery. In 1999, Frank, I started using lithium batteries, and boy, did I get ripped. It's not original. It's a good thing. Well, people learn their lesson. Well, the other thing, too, is when we were switching to a weird battery, it was a half of a AA, had leads, and it put ends on it. When it died, the customer would have to call us, and we'd have to send them one. So we started experimenting with coin cells, and then that's when I came up with the idea for the battery board so we can do it here. and somebody wants to do their own game at home can do it there. And the nicest thing about my battery boards is, it's very simple. It fits right into the existing hole in the game. It has a diode on it. The board on this game has an iPad battery that was rechargeable. So somebody put a remote battery pack on here, which is nice, but it's a pain. You have to take the board out of things, walking around or if you disconnect it, then you lose all your settings. But as I've seen at the... All right. Can I take over, please? All right. So anyway, before I was rudely interrupted by myself, yes, I do have a bad report, so come see me for that. So that's what we're going to do. We already know we have to do all that stuff. This guy here, we have to put this cage here. You don't want to touch that. I'm not going to do any cheesy shock trips. Oh, please. Please do a cheesy shock trip. Just once. Go ahead. No. Oh, they were expecting it. Take this out, replace the bridges underneath, replace these resistors that have these. Nine times out of ten you've got to re-pin these connectors. Re-pin the headers here, change the pins on the board. It really depends. If you look in here, you can see this one's a little bit brown. Frank, I just thought of something. You could write a book. Funny you should mention that. I was planning on it. Basically a book that will cut... I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to do it. The initial book will at least talk about the basics of gain repair. I'll probably go into some really great detail. One of the things I want to talk about is parts. I spent a lot of time over the last several years looking up parts, replacements, part numbers. People always call me, where do you get this? How do you replace that? Put it into a book form. Talk about things like connectors, the proper way to repair connectors, not these half-assed repairs that people do, the stuff that keeps me up at night, the right tools, how to do it. A correct repair should look like nothing was ever wrong to begin with. That's how you properly fix a game. Hello? Hey, guys. Can you let Frank and I show you inside of our game here, please? Can you do that? Thanks. Okay, Frank, why don't you take over? So back in those days, you have to, when we used to put the lithiums in, you'd have to change that resistor right there, which is right here, and put a diode in. Because if you try and charge that battery, that sometimes will explode or catch fire. We've actually had that happen. But my board has it on there. All you have to do is just take the old battery out, solder this in, you're good to go. Same thing with the WPC. The little die insured out. We've actually had people come call the fire department because the die insureds try to charge the battery, it explodes. Why not use a super gap? You know, 1.5 pair of a super gap. There's so many things that we're doing. Right. There's NB RAMs, there's all kinds of stuff. This is the cheapest, simplest thing you can put in. And that's coming in early, whatever they want. Caps can leak too. The lithium batteries only can really wire you switch the lithium. If this battery dies, you run it down to Walmart, CVS, grab a new one, pop it in, never have to call us again. And even if you have to replace batteries in the next 20 years, it'll still be cheaper than that in the end. It's a 2032 battery. Yeah. The one that opens your car. Right. So this game is actually in pretty decent shape. It make the owner an offer on it 100 bucks Yeah I see they put in here the upgraded power supply unit So we really have to do anything with that These newer units have the VE here bridges, which is really nice. The little ones overheated too much. The people didn't. There's a heat sink compound you got to put in there to see if people leave that out. But it just destroys the board because it gets so hot. But this is working in the same thing, the caps. All the pins will need to be reflowed. Soundboard doesn't have an issue. I'll talk about that a little later, but I think this board has a different problem. You know, all the slave will have to be in service. The play field itself is actually very clean. It's probably not very aware of the new arcade. We'll cover the play field later, though. Okay. Yeah. What do you think, Frank? I'm going to come back to you. Come back to you? Oh, okay. Well, now it's time to tackle the play field, isn't it? Is that okay with you, Todd? Who cares what he says? Well, what do we have here? I'll tell you what. Let me get the camera. We'll do a close-up. Well, same thing. There's standard stuff we do in every play field. First of all, everything comes off. You don't have to do everything in one shot. These older games are much simpler. You can take lots of pictures. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches later. You'll be glad you did. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Obviously, all the rubbers need to be replaced. Back in the day, we were using the black rubbers. Somebody replaced them with some white ones down here, as you can see. We have some broken pop bumper parts down here, the rings, the skirt rope. Replace as much as you can because when you have all new parts, the game, everything's cleaned, as many new parts as possible, this game will play like it's brand new, and you'll probably never have a problem with it as long as you live. Well, you know why we originally used the black rubbers. As a matter of fact, pinball manufacturers use them too. The black rubbers, like, never break. It's amazing. Why do these break? These break because the white are bleak. No, I mean, why weren't the black ones the one here? I don't know. But it could be we put the... See, white rubbers, A, look better. They look a lot better. And number two, they are definitely more elastic and more lively than the black rubbers, Frank. Ultimately, it comes down to whatever you want. It's your game. Put on their weight. They're actually the same price, too, Frank. Now, I noticed this quality seal of sticker. Well, that ruins the game. So if you see one of those, keep on your game. All for at least $3,000 less. Well, let me tell you, we don't put stickers like this on anymore. Thank God. But we do put a foil sticker. This will get a foil sticker either here or here just to annoy the people. There's a few people out in that audience right out there that hate me. They hate me, Frank. Not as much as I do. Oh, we've got to get more thumbs down. How can we get a thumbs down in this seminar? Frank! I threw you thumbs down in the video. What about the magic of editing? Well, listen, listen. When we sold this game, Frank... That's what I think of that sticker right there. Oh, no, it's the wrong sticker. When we sold this game, Frank, it was only $6.99. Are you still spending the money? Yes. Well, we didn't do a lot of things. As a matter of fact, Frank, you knew this straight off the bat. What do you see here that's drastically, horribly wrong? This is blasphemy. This got me. Yeah, no. On top of that, these boots are from... I had a lot, a lot of fun playing the game. Well, the creeps, the people that owned it before they traded it in, they said it was a dream. They were happy they bought it from me. And look, Frank, I think that could be their score. That's actually mine. I just did that tonight. Frank, why don't we go down below and see what's going on with the play field there. This play field is actually in much better shape than the one we had. As I say, pop bumpers are broken, the caps are burned, that's from the fault. That's why we like to do LED, it helps keep that stuff from happening again. There's very, very little wear on this. And these rubbers, it just needs a good cleaning. Are you done? We want to get back to you. No Frank, that's a miscue. Nobody to blame but yourself. No. Yeah, I mean this is a really nice plug for your native computer, but probably you can put in your job targets and all the switches need to be cleaned. You feel the contacts will just play great. You really never have any problems with it. You can do the star roller over upgrade and everything. You can do the This is a really nice plug-in for your ATV, but it's probably renewable. You can put in your job targets, and all the switches need to be cleaned. You can see all the contacts, so it looks quite great. You can really never have any problems with it. You can do the star roller over upgrade like you do, put the clear ones in, and put a color or color change bolt behind it. If you want to go get carried away like I do and really take these pop bumpers all apart, take these apart so you can clean everything up, all new parts, sleeves, and we don't have to do all that. at least do one of the points, clean the plungers, and that would be good. Yeah, the play field is very involving, and you never know quite what you're going to encounter as Frank knows. And so we always struggle to try to do each piece. Are you done? We want to get back here. You have nine options. What a fact. Yes, you are, sure. Oh, but that's my alter ego. That's it, it's safe for your face. All right, let's take this logic board out we'll get started with that. Yes? Frank? Well I'm not going to take this logic far down but we already did look at it and you saw that it at least needs to be the battery mod done. I'm sure it should be restored in the back. Do the sockets. Like I said you gotta do these sockets one at a time. These boards are real touchy. I've actually done all the sockets I just had the board running and it started acting weird. I actually played with Harry Tracer in one of these chips. And it wasn't for a game. It was just a board that I had that I fixed and I'm gonna set it aside. If I toss it off the side, I get pissed off for a while and come back to it later. I have a tester, something called Fixit. I can put it on top of here. I was looking up the Bally AIM tester in two minutes. They might still have it. It's a great tool. It fits on here and you can use the onboard RAM, ROM and reset circuit where you can use one of the testers. all the games over like an off-site board. So you can use the permanent solution or it'll help you troubleshoot. Well even with that I was getting really weird problems. So instead of this I was taking apart and looking and I started tracing off bus lines and even though I had been preparing to one trace it didn't take. So I put a zero resistor on the backside of the board to fix it. So these traces were really scary. So the physical where people bring me a board and they replace every single chip on it. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. Do the soccer saloon work. Fix this to the board. The copper is so thin. I don't even know what they have there. I actually wanted to fix a couple other traces. There's only one or two. I've replaced many, but it's really up to what you want to do with it and how much it must do. Frank, why don't we do the underside of the play field first? Ah! Let me stop. Well, here's the bottom of our play field as we're starting out with it. The nice thing about the older games, flip it over, it makes it so much easier to work on. All right, so you can see the bottom side doesn't look too good. Pretty much what we expected for a game that's got this much wear on it. All these need to be taken apart, cleaned, and rebuilt. Same thing with the slingshots, flippers, of course, on the stroke switches. The plunger links are going to get replaced. We take this all apart and clean it up. You've seen in other videos how I take these apart and clean these up real nice. Once everything is cleaned, it will work perfect for a long time. These caps, this is a pretty big funky cap here. I like that. Yeah. This means you can reach your neighbors off of that cap. But the caps make the switches a little bit more responsive, which is important for switches where the ball could just tap it. Something like this, where the ball could just tap it quick. Something like a roll star rollover. The drop targets where the switch stays closed for a long time, or something like an out lane or return lane, where the ball doesn't go over it too fast, it actually has some time it doesn't really need to catch. You know, Frank, I was surprised that Bally didn't do a revision to the logic board that would have added those switch, these capacitors to the switches. Well, that's the nice thing that they didn't change those boards. Those boards didn't change much over the years, so they didn't really need it. It was just as cheap and probably even easier to just put the caps here. And by the way, my book will have the port numbers and where to get them. Got to shamelessly plug myself there. I need the money. You don't need the money. But I need the money. You spend all the money, so it doesn't matter. The pop bumpers, you don't need them. And if there are caps on there still, break them off. You don't need them. They just cause problems. Especially something like this where I've seen shorted caps will cause the pop bumper to fire a whole lot, burn up the transistor, burn up the coil. Don't need them there. Take them away. All right, so this is the board that I took out of the game. It's got a lot of stuff on here. So I'm going to start sanding this rust and corrosion off. It's going to be a few hours. If you want to get some coffee, take a piss, whatever. But, Frank. I got another board. So this board was on the shelf. It was marked locked up. Now, I serviced it. I took some pictures of it, so it was marked locked up or locked on. This is a newer board. This is a 133. This was in the Granny and the Gators or Baby Pac-Man. There's only one mod you've got to do if you're going to use this in a regular pinball. You've got to change that diode to a 2K resistor, which somebody already did. So the problem that was wrong with the board was the reset circuit had a failure. So I have this tester. Let me go get it. So this tester was from TwoBits. I don't know if they're still available. This is probably about the best $150 I ever spent. I fixed tons and tons and tons of these Bally boards with this. The beauty of it is it has all the games on one ROM, kind of like the Alltech Logic Board. You turn all the dip switches off, it'll have a test menu. You can get a keyboard, which I bought, and then you can step through all the different tests. But the best part about this board is it'll work on any of them, even the MPU-200s. Which is the sterns. The sterns, right. It fits over these pins, which tend to always get bent up. And if you're servicing the sterns and you have the stern soundboard, like, say, a Flight 2000, you can still connect the soundboard. It pins right to that. But the best part of this is it will isolate the RAM, the ROM, or the reset. So you can put the jumper to the left to use the onboard components or to the right to use the fixer components. So this tool, you kind of have to be smarter than the thing you're effing with. It's an old mechanics term. So what you can do is you take, what I did was, because I had a reset problem, I switched it over to the reset one to fix it, and nothing happened. But then the game started powering up, and then I realized, well, there's no flashes because the LED fell off. Put an LED in. These two transistors, the one transistor was bad, I just replaced them both. It was in the reset queue. It was at one and five or whatever. One's a 44 and three, the other's a 39 and four. Swapped them out, fired right up. These ROMs, the RAMs, processor and PIAs are off of the other board. So I've switched everything over. I actually clean the board. I take it to the sink. I wash it with some simple green water, blow it all off. I like working on nice clean boards. I don't like dirty boards. So the only thing you really have to do to this now is, now that it's up and running, we'll reheat all these pins for the four main connectors. We'll clean out the tabs of the old battery, put my battery board on, and we'll throw it back in the game. Any questions? Any questions? Yeah, you guys don't emphasize ESDs too much in these videos. I don't know if these people do electronics or not, but they know anything about ESDs. You don't have anybody ESD, right? The only time I ever had an issue was I dropped the transistor before, and I went to the post, I picked it up, I discharged through the transistor, and I invented the transistor after it was a little bit. I've never had a problem. I mean, all my products are sensitive, but it's not as sensitive as like you're taking an iPhone apart. You certainly can do it. We just don't do it every day. Do you know after we problem when you do IC chip changes without being, you know, with an ecstatic wrist guard and all that stuff on? In over 20 years, I've never used a wrist guard, ever. I'm not saying that it's a good idea. I just, some things work in theory, not in practice, and vice versa. If you feel more comfortable doing it, then certainly do it. Well, I use a wristband when I go to Disney World. The block bag. You can wear the airbag, Mike. We have to make sure your solder is full. That's what we're doing. So why are you cheating? Do you want to try all the flash codes? Well, there is. I don't know exactly what code. One is for the 68th, and the other is 51-1. Then there's one for each of the PIAs, and maybe one checks the wrong answer and the last one is your 43 volts. It's a terrific test. I look it up. I don't remember. There's nothing anywhere buying my paycheck. So I just pull the book out of my phone and I look it up. I'm curious, why not replace the connectors? You said you reflowed them. Oh, you can. Well, that was an accident. Sometimes they'll take and every cloth and I'm standing down on the side, but they're all mangled up, I throw them in your side. Now with these, most of them are the oxidation. You'll know if you're reheating the pit in the back. So you touch the socket, it'll ball up and the pad will be black. You can't get that solder to stick. Take them all out and you take either fiberglass, erasure, or any other. Every cloth, clean them up to the right, shine both sides, put a new one in, and you're good. And that's what happens with these sockets. That's what gets them. As soon as I see them fall off, I'm like, this is gonna be a problem. But a lot of times, they push them at the board and it starts working again. You want a solid connection. And I don't know if we mentioned in the video, we use the lead-free solder or silver solder because our guys are hovering over these tables for two or three hours breathing in this stuff. So lead-free, lead solder is fine. Rosincore solder, lead solder. It's fine if you're just soldering a wiring or flipper. You're occasionally doing the soldering. You don't have to pay two or three times the cost to buy rolls to solder. I spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on solder every year. but my guys are still here nobody's going to have that stuff in their lungs and it seems to work well so remember, if you re-heat every pin in every board it takes a long time, especially if you have to take sockets out which you're going to see further in the video back at your cue it's in blue ok, let's continue the game but let's talk There's the old lamp board. Unplugger. One at a time. Unplugger. We'll clean up the tabs of the old battery for my battery board. Unplug. One at a time. There's the old lamp board. Unplugger. One at a time. Now you may be able to sell the old lamp board or you just keep it as an emergency spare. Parts? Parts, yeah. We're going to take this out. Now the other four tabs are easy to remove by squeezing these little white plastics, But if you have a puller, that's even better. You just press that in and pull it just a little bit. Keep your finger on it so you can pull it off a little more. Needle nose pliers will do it too. This one's being trouble. I may not be able to put the board in after all. Frank, you didn't even leave the board over here for me. Zero work. We already put another one in this. We're not using this one because Frank said he had it made ready for this game because we happen to use this board. Oh, I almost lost it down in the center. We use it on every game we sell because we are putting LEDs in every game. But not everything. I guess we had one out of 100, Frank, that don't get the board put in. It wasn't that quick. Now the last step after plugging these in is, in fact, attaching that wire. You see, if you don't put the wire on, the lamps will flicker. You don't want that. That's the whole purpose of changing the board. Now Frank does it fancy. This is his connector, and he wires it into the connector with pins and all. You do not have to do that. You can simply plug this in like so. Okay. It's a tight fit. . Oh, Frank. This end of the wire has to be soldered to one of the computer-controlled lights. The power for the computer. That's right. Now, let me show you something. You see here, this is the general illumination. You can always tell that in your stern or valley game because it's bare wire. And they loop all the wires together, and here's the in. This brings the six volts in, sends it all around the board. The lights you need to look at are the ones that have this same bare wire, but the other side has a single wire on it. That means the computer is turning the lights on and off. this ground wire here has to attach to the ground power the power I'm sorry the pack right here that's I that's right well not to this side to the side say now Frank has done it up here already see look he's tight it all in so it looks like it's literally factory but you don't want to do that you could you could thread it through here if you felt like it you could also cut it too and then you'll solder it right there and all your problems will go away in terms of your computer like splashing. Now, we have not changed these LEDs to display field yet, but that's next on our agenda. Now, I want to show you something because this is general information. Most of these games have a ground strap. I'm going to teach you a little trick that has nothing to do with that lamp driver board. This ground, see how somebody installed it like this? This wasn't us that came in this way. You see, this loose wire, if I close this door, okay, and that loose wire encounters the computer-controlled lights by some chance, it will blow the fuse when your light transformer, your transformer in the back, the computer-controlled lights, blow it. And I remember we couldn't figure out what was wrong with the customer. He took it to Florida. He couldn't figure out why the fuse kept blowing. He would be fine an hour later if the fuse was blown. So he thought the driver bore was great. He said it turned out that when he put the screw in after he got to Florida, he put it in in such a way that this part was up just enough, and it occasionally countered the light socket, depending on how he shook the game while playing it. So, make sure that part is safe. when you're kept you install your new port now the auxiliary lamp rod word is just as easy some games use the smaller board all text cells to they sell the regular size in the long one and they using now I here I think it could be over here pens you have to tie them ground into the same place any computer control late circuit Home free. Now, wasn't that easy? A child could do it. A child could do it. How many times have we rehearsed doing this? 15, 16? So it isn't that easy for you, at least. But McCoy said he could. How uninteresting. All right. Well, the board's in. Let's put a little sticker on it. I write the date on the battery, the month and the year, because it should last you about a good five years. So if you know a couple years is going by and you want to pop a new one in, you can. So the board's done. It's in. Battery board's on, obviously. We have the lamp board installed. It's stomach through Todd doing that. I'm not going to plug the power in until we have the LEDs on yet. We don't need it. We'll deal with that later. The only thing I recommend, though, is that if you use the Alltech one, it doesn't have any kind of shielding around it. So maybe put some shrink tubing, wrap some tape. If you're going to be powering the game up before you're ready to make that connection, you don't want it to shorten anything because then you're going to blow that fuse out of there. So now we'll pull the soundboard out and start working on that. Board's out. We're going to take it over to the sink and wash it up. It's already been reheated, but we're going to do the caps. I don't like dirty boards. It's more professional looking when it's clean. It gets all the crud off it. You can see any other potential problems maybe. So let's take it over to the sink and wash it up. Oh, good, Frank. We get a chance to see you washing. Yep. A little dollar, two-and-a-half-inch paintbrush from Simple Green. Slather it on there. Yes, you can do this. People ask me all the time, it's electronics. Can you wash it? Yeah, as long as there's no electricity going to it. So put your logic board. Take the battery out, obviously. The only thing you really need to be careful of is that it's very dry before you plug it back in. So you can do one of two things. If you have compressed air, use compressed air and a hose and blow it off. Get all the water out from underneath the chips. Or you can let it just sit, let it be propped up, let it sit for a couple days. Or even in the sun. Or sometimes even what I'll do is I'll just put it in front of the fan. We have a box fan in the back. Just stand it up in front of the box fan. it sit there for a little while and that's usually enough. And if you're unsure, let it sit for a couple days. It'll be fine. Board is clean. It'll run a little cooler. It looks better. Looks like a more professional, complete job. Well, I'd wash your hair, but the chemicals required to clean that rat's nest is so strong, I don't have the proper licensing in this state to handle those types of chemicals. Sorry. All right, so the sound board's in. It's capped. If you listen, maybe put the camera down by the speaker. Hear the hum? If your game is doing that or it's making noise, it's because the soundboard doesn't like to be grounded. So you can take one of these ice washers or a similar plastic washer, put it between the soundboard and the bracket. So put the little plastic washers just to keep the backside of the board from touching the ground plane. If you put the screw back in and you see that it does it again, you might have to ream the hole out a little bit just because there might be contact between the screw itself and the metal. And then that will take care of your humming problem and the board will still be secure. One thing I want to talk about is this big cap right here. This is a 100 microfarad. This is a 250. I took a picture of the one in the board before I took it out. It's a 100 by 100. A lot of sound boards have big caps, usually 4700 by 35 volts. trying to help me out one day, put a 4700 by 35 volts in, I reached down to turn the game on, I saw the flash of light and heard the bang and the cap exploded because it wasn't rated enough. Don't forget the soundboard gets 43 coil volts to it. The caps, as a rule of thumb, need to be at least double the working voltage. So if there's any power spikes, it can absorb it. My point is, be mindful of when you're doing this. I did it on a black night I put a big cap in 100 by 100 backwards and that made a hell of a mess. Don't feel bad about sending a part to an untimely death because if you're not blowing shit up once in a while you're not doing anything. Just don't get hurt, don't be too close, just remember that. Don't get hurt. That's a big cap in there and when it explodes it's going to make a mess and you don't want to lose your eyes. Does anybody have any questions at this point? Okay Frank, so how about the soundboard there? You want to look at that soundboard? Well, we think it might happen. All we have is a humming problem. It hasn't put as much issue to the slide. Let's speak to the board. It was playing the tone constantly, so that's not the same problem. So you have a sound platform. Turn is the same down, Frank. Okay, now start the game and see if it plays. We'll need a credit. Text. There it is, see that? Text. But this doesn't have that problem. And they don't always do it. This one's screwed down to the level. So we just have to find a way to see if the game does or not. It's also possible once the caps are changed, they're 40 years old, 40 years old that that's the thing you have to be adjusted but that's why they put it there that holds the extra tone a little longer the game doesn't sound quite the same but it gets rid of that concept tone so I think that will work well okay I think we'll continue with a video now let's look at the driver board Alright, so the driver board's out. I'm going to take it apart. Of course it's going to get my cleaning. First we cut the caps off. Cut the wires. Cut the straps. Now, one thing to know about this board if you're going to clean yours is that water will get stuck underneath these heat sinks. so you gotta take them off. I take them off anyway. I like to clean the contacts underneath. And this board, this is why we reheat pins. These over here are why we reheat pins. I've seen people just reheat a couple of pins and leave the rest, which is ridiculous. So, basically, Frank, right around here is the cold connection. Can you see that little on. If you wiggle the pins. And these are your flippers. Your flippers aren't going to work. This one up here is a bit more obvious. This one right there. So cold solder joints. Frank, remember for years they told me it's foolish. You don't have to do it. Now one other thing about this before I pulled this out we're going through coil tough make make sure everything works. Everything didn't work. The problem was this didn't fire. This didn't fire because the coil is physically broken. The gate didn't work. This fired twice. This fired twice. These didn't fire at all. So usually you'll suspect the driver would put another driver in. Same thing happened. Pulled the logic board out just to make sure none of the pins were splashed together, which for me to do that is very, very rare. Swapped out the PIA. Just took a guess. That fixed it. So what I did was I took the PIA, threw it over here into my little tester, NeoLock. They have a couple of test kits. These things are great. And we bought this at a show, didn't we? No. We bought a memory one years ago. I got this for myself for Christmas. My kids got it for me. And it does PIAs. It does the Riot chips for the Gottlieb games. It'll do RAMs. This will also do the 4116s and the Williams games, it'll do almost every chip you could need RAM and PIA wise, but it tests okay. So what's the point? The point is the part can test good and still not be good. So when you're troubleshooting things, you've got to be smarter than the thing you're wrestling with. Remember I told you that. Don't always trust it 100%. Swap in a known good part, because a lot of times that's what you're doing. Test procedures aren't foolproof. Sometimes You got to put in a new and good part. Use your head. First, you start off by saying that I hate you. Good. All right. So the power supply is all done. Change the two big caps. I changed this little guy, too. It's a 2. I put a 2.2 in there. No big deal. As you can see, it's nice and clean. I washed it. I take the heat sinks off to make sure you get all the moisture from underneath. Somebody blobbed a bunch of solder here. You usually don't need to do that, but somebody must have really, really torqued these screws down, and the washers actually cut the trace, so it wouldn't make any good connection there and there. reheated all the pins, actually I changed these pins because they were all mangled up so I put fresh pins in there, reheated it, cleaned all the flux off nice and clean, the high voltage sticker was coming off so I put a new one on measured all the transistors, usually sometimes you have to reheat these so just take a peek at them, wiggle them if anything feels loose, reheat them, we'll throw it back in the game ok Frank can you show the stages of that transformer in the game now Well then since that replaced we can point out all of its flaws So instead, we will continue with our transformer replacement. All right, so we got the transformer unit out. I already took it apart, pulled all the old bridges out. Somebody had reheated this before. They actually did it sloppy as far as I'm concerned. I like to clean all the flux off, but that's just me. This is a really simple board. There's not much to it. You've got two resistors, bridges, you've got a varistor, fuses, and header pins. The only thing I don't like about this is that you have to work on it like this. Everything's tethered. The Black Sheep Squadron, the Astro, was great because it unplugged. You could take the board away and not have to work around this. And look, the original transformer. Notice there's no cage around it. Because the ballet one, all the tabs were open. Well, Astro chose a transformer where all the wires are sealed and it's safe. so there's no way you can get a shock. So the only way to get a shock is... Yes! Okay, I squeezed it in, Frank. I squeezed it in with your camera right there. Loser! I'm trying to make these things, these events happen. They're not... So everything, we replace these two resistors, which I have here. These diodes are for the high voltage for the displays. I already have them pre-bent. This little lead forming tool is very handy. So after we do that, we're going to change those. We're going to change these two resistors. The header pins are okay. Sometimes you have to replace them all, especially if somebody comes in with spotter wires to them. That's the stuff that makes me crazy. Nobody did that here, so these are okay. Actually, a little bit of emery cloth so you can clean them up, make them nice and shiny. You could also use the big eraser. Yeah, but this is easier because you can't get to the back side with the eraser. So you can't get to this side very well. So scuff it up a little bit. We'll change these. This resistor is part of that circuit for the high voltage, but you don't have to change it. That only goes to the test point. And the only reason that's there is to prevent you from putting a meter on or something that's going to draw too much current and blow in the side. That's all that resistor does. You never have to change that. All right, so I have the diodes are in. One thing about these boards is sometimes you need to clean these off. For some reason, they sometimes get this weird oxidation. If you try to solder, it doesn't want to stick, so just hit it with your fiberglass eraser, all the solder points, and then just drop them right in. I mount these a little high because these do get hot, and letting some air circulate around them will help them hopefully live a little bit longer. But even more importantly, not burn the board, which is what we want. You're going to push it through, bend over the leads. Same thing with this guy. And what I do is I blob some solder on the back and on the top side too, because sometimes it doesn't always flow all the way through. Alright, so now we're ready to set this back on the post. We'll put the bridges in. There's no markings on the back, but the negative is always the bottom left, the positive is the upper right. If you ever, sometimes the Marc Silk screening wears away if you have to clean it or it gets burned up. You always tell the negatives because they're all tied together. The negatives are always in the same spot. Just before you put it on, just double check all your wires because sometimes something will stop working because a wire will pop off and you might not even see it. such a mess under here. So the Astro Gaming Corporation had a slightly better idea for the bridge. Well, they called ahead for service. And I also knew that Stern, a Black Beauty shuffle alley, also had a plug on that board. So that was in 1984, so I guess if they continued using that system, they would have had plugs on them. We're going to clean this old goop off of here. This is pretty crusty. We'll just wipe it off and put some fresh stuff on. Lock it in there. Now I like to put the screws in and tighten them down before soldering, just to make sure, because it's easier to do. The bridges are soldered and they're slightly off. The holes might not line up and then it's just going to be real pain. So screw everything down first, solder the leads on last, and you're good to go. All right, so the transformer is mounted back in. One of the connectors is burned. Got a couple of burn pins, so we're going to go ahead and change this. See there, the housing is actually starting to break off. So we changed the whole housing. Already got one ready with a key in it. And you can get them from Marco and other suppliers. I get these from Mauser. My repair book, the parts book, is going to have all of this information. It's going to have pretty detailed information for parts, repair procedures. You want a good set of ratcheting. Crimpers. Seat the wire in. Crimp it down. Nice clean crimp. Just go down the line one at a time. And that's a tri-eurocon connector. Yep. And I noticed you're sliding. You're not doing them all at once. You're doing one at a time so you don't screw yourself up. Well, you can because you're going to leave a little wire, but it would be foolish to do it that way. Just do one at a time. Take your time. This isn't something that you rush, especially if you're not, you don't do this every day. Plus you could even blow up the damn thing. Right. So, this is fine. Seed it in, crimp it down, nice clean crimps. And we'll go ahead and finish these up. Will it work or we'll have flames? Where you putting your money? Nothing. Frank, nothing. It's not working. It's not working. We love doing that. Don't we? Now, look. Look here. We started LEDing it, but everybody got kind of bored. Frank, this should have been done. Why are you guys supposed to be doing it? Okay. Now, it looks like all the boards are done now, Frank, except what? What did I do to the displays last time? Uh-oh. I thought I was right. I wanted out. All these displays are junk. Junk? Dead or burned. No, we'll sell them to somebody, people who don't know any better. You can sell them to yourself. It could be you. I know. Frank, we'll put them up on eBay as untested. So I've got two here. These were tested. And, of course, like boards, I washed them, too, so you can see the difference between a clean one and see the difference with one that I haven't cleaned yet. Just one thing with these, obviously you have to reheat the pins. Give it a digit out, nine times out of ten, if it's not the glass, it's going to be one of the first six odd numbered resistors, R1357911. If you do have a digit out, you put the resistor in and it's fine, then change the other ones. These odd squared off brown ones tend to burn out, so I'm going to just change these. I've got the tool heated up. You have a tool? I've got a tool already. The one holding the camera. I've got a bunch of resistors already pre-bent. Ready to go. Pre-bent? Who bent them? I did. I'm going to bend you. You're going to look like this. Except not that skinny. You mean you sat there. Let's bend some resistors. Well, of course. I mean, you've got Johnny's on Facebook, or Scotty drawing pictures of Kurt on the whiteboard. I'm going to waste time, too. What's everybody else? I'm going to bend. Oh. On my time. Actually, I did it on my phone. All right, so pins are all reheated. Remember I showed you the resistors. I had to digit out and just replace them all. Don't waste your time. You got the thing out on the bench, do it on time. It's all clean, ready to go. Pop it back into the game. So all the displays now are done. Let me show you from the back. You can see they're all clean. They're all stickered. I see you put our sticker on there. and then we can tell when we did it. So that way... Yes, that's another way. The stickers don't come off, they're permanent. That's bullshit. Well, also now's a good time to show that I did change the power cord. Need some light in there, buddy. I took a few pictures of it as I worked on it. So what I do is, they just have some crib connectors. I put a connector in here so this way I can take the whole thing to the bench and service it. I put a new barrister. I take a length of wire and put a connector on it here. So this way, there's a cord joint as long as the old ones. And this way, you can just change it down the road. If your cord breaks, we can just put an end on it. Do we have a new? Three prongs, Frank? No, I break the one off. I break this one off. So that's done. I replaced the barrister too. It's 40 years old. And I see the panel's been cleaned. All the crud from the light bulbs, yes, Wolf did this earlier, builds up over the years. And that's all been washed clean with Simple Green. So now what we're doing is we're going down the line and cleaning all the switches. I put a little black mark on it so I know I did it. So I take the switch off. The ones that get caps have all new caps. I take the switch out and I clean all the contacts with a little eraser. That's this little cap here. and then also you can get them from where, my parts book will have all that information in it. So that makes the switch closures more sensitive so the game reads them. Well, some of the switches, the switch isn't as closed as long. Like these rollovers, the switch will be closed for a little bit of time for the computer to check it every few cycles to make sure it's closed. But these are just a momentary tap. Same thing with these star rollovers. So these need taps too. I'm always amazed, Frank, that they didn't put that on the updated board. When they went to the 6803, they still didn't have anything for the switches. No. So now, because you came over and interrupted me, I don't know where my little eraser got to. So anyway, take the switches off and clean them. They have a long blade and a short blade. Bend the long one, because this is the one that gets activated by the rollover, so it won't hurt it. If you bend this one, it'll be back out of the way and it won't make contact if you fiddle with it. just take the fiberglass eraser it's tedious work but if you do all this more than likely you will never have any problems with your switches, not unless you have the game and you're still alive to play it in another 30 years how about me Frank, will I be alive in 30 years? in heaven you said heaven heaven for us on earth but you'll be gone you'll be a celebrity on the official website Do you hear that? Do you hear that, Frank? You're making fun of me on screen and now... Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Look what he's doing to me. He's a mean person. Frank, you're just taking advantage of me repeatedly. Well, listen, how about if we do the bottom play field? We'll need some little ass assistance to flip over Mr. Field. So, we did go over it before. We did show you how to flip it again when we're trying. And this game does have the catch in the pop-up. But we're talking about you taking out the pop-up for switches. So, this isn't my game. I don't know the owner. I'm not going to mess with it. But like I said before, at least we can stay closed a long time. the plane, the ball takes a few seconds to roll over. So the first is something where the ball just has to stand in place, very captive. They're funny. Yeah. It's a 0.1, 50 volts. Most of them. I think that's a cat. Frankly, medium is still. So we have come. Yeah, I think I have it. But anyway, you just point one. I can't just, you gotta be careful. Cause some of those are really crazy. the leads are really short so we're trying to stretch it out so make sure that they're a little bit bigger than what you need and this way you can put it in through the holes and trim off the excess frank why don't you point out the flipper condition and the switches you can see you've really got to get in there you can see the paint with the contacts yeah that just turns out one side to the other and it breaks down over time But also, when you turn your flipper to full power, it's the plug you're in link. So you've got to make some... That white button should know the difference, too. That's right. The kit comes with everything. Some of the kits come with little screws. For $50 or whatever, you have the kit, the lights, everything. The flippers are always your weak link. Wouldn't you think so? Well, not only that, but if the left flipper doesn't work, you can't play the game at all. The switch doesn't work, but you can't play on the feature, but at least you can find it all around a little bit. Well, I guess. any let's see the little pop-up breaks we're going to go over in detail there they're probably all right yeah this is in better shape than when we have yes I mean definitely we do in the top of services replacing everything being everything putting it on reports look great the action will be phenomenal okay well Todd are we ready okay we're back again Frank what have you done here Hate you. You hate me? We're all the LEDs in got them in the backbox here all the displays are done I rebuilt this one slingshot so far so you can see What the difference we want is full so I had to replace this arm. It was broken But we take it apart this coil was actually broken So tab was broken off so just found another one Quilts don't go bad, not unless the transistor shorts and it melts it or something mechanically breaks. Other than that, quilts are never going to go bad. But I took the bracket apart, cleaned it, cleaned the spring, cleaned the plunger and link. I take the switches out, I clean them, put everything back together. And this one hasn't been touched yet. So you can see the difference. Yeah, there is. Very nice. Very nice. We'll get started on the flippers, the pop bumpers, and we'll be ready to wrap it up soon. Now that you're done underside the playfield, can you show us? I took all the pop bumpers apart. I got pictures that completely took everything apart. Even washed the coils. Took the switches out, desoldered them, cleaned them, cleaned and adjusted the contacts. Everything up top is replaced. We'll show that in a minute. The brackets are cleaned. clean the spring and replace the bakelite and the metal bracket because they were pretty worn. So put new ones in. Same with the flippers, new plunger and link, and the stroke switches, fresh wire for the new end of stroke switch, new spring washer. I see you also put the heat shrink here and you need that so it doesn't cut the new end of stroke switch. Yep. So do you think this will last the person another 20 or 30 years? Well, these things should never have to come apart ever again. In a private home, definitely not. 12, 13 hours a day, or unless a transistor locks on and melts a coil. Do you have close-ups? I've got a few. They're $8 each if you want them. Plus I can pay. No, they're $8 each if you want them. 50 picture minimum. How about if we show them up here? Actually, no, no, right here. Wait a minute, we're on the big screen now. I'm not going to see the pictures because you didn't come up with them on here. I can do it right now. Okay. Frank, because we probably won't have time to show it, can you share some of the new supplies that you have, that you brought, that you normally stock with? In other words, before you start on a project like that, you have to have certain things in the things we brought here. We weren't sure how we were going to do this, and since the machine has had a lot of work done to it, it wasn't necessary. Rubbers, obviously. You always get a kit. Flipper boot. Yes, if you don't stock or do a lot of games, you can buy a specific kit of rubbers from where you get them from. Just replace all the sleeves, buy a set of them. That's all you do. That would make a big difference. Flipper boots, even if they clean up, they crack. Change the boots. The shaft boots usually got wear and it doesn't grip well. Flipper rubbers, of course, comes in your kit. we do the clear star rollers and we've been watching the videos there's a piece of it you're going to knock out and then you get the yeah the point is that the $6 million man comes with red star rollers and they lid it with a 44 bulb underneath well if you put a clear one in, a brand new one first of all it works beautiful because everything is nice and clean and you can choose whatever color you want to light it with from underneath so you don't have to go with just red and it was never lit before you can light it That's right. We light a lot of our rollovers now. Color changer or fire or whatever you want to do. And you can hook the light up to a computer-controlled light if you're using LED. See, the original transistors, most of them only support one bulb, sometimes two. That's the difference between the two rows. The little tiny ones are for single bulbs. The bigger ones in the middle are for two bulbs. When you're driving, right? Yeah. Another thing is the barrel spring. A lot of people forget that. Either it's broken or it's just crusty. Your barrel springs are all rusty, for sure. Some people are hating them. LEDs, your multi-colored ones that you would use for your jewels. I mean, you tell people, like, ah, you know, I like the original bulbs, but the original bulbs do so much power, and that's what burns those connectors up. The 20-amp fuses, the 20-amp circuit, you can cut the fuse, you know, the amperage by half. So just use warm light. On the older games, the warm light looks original. You're saving power. You're saving heat. There's really no reason not to do it other than cost. It is so great. Now that means that you should change that 20 amp fast flow fuse to a 10 amp or less because it won't blow out as easily because obviously with LEDs it's not going to grow anywhere near 20 amps. If you're really going crazy, new posts are always loose. I mean if there's a few sums of meat, just patch a few extra bucks, you're taking the whole thing apart, you might as well do it with match sticks. When the holes get egged out, you break them. Wooden match sticks. They're great. See, you have a hole and it's screw-proof. You can just put a little bit of tape on it and it's done. You can just put a little bit of tape on it and it's done. You can just put a little bit of tape on it and it's done. You can just put a little bit of tape on it and it's done. wooden matchsticks. They're great. So you have a hole and a screw will tighten. You stuff a matchstick in the hole. You snap it off. You try to stuff another one. It's a Valley 2 player game. Yeah, I got that weird smell. I've had GM50s in there. Yeah, speakeasy. There's a blank matchstick. It's a plastic playfield. Yeah, thanks a lot. These are the little caps, some zero resistors if you have to do any board repairs. Contacts from here, this is what we call the blow off. This is great to get stickers off, like residue. Like guys use a goof off, and that takes some time off. Be careful with this. You can take sticker residue off, clear the flux off, and it won't damage it. Now we've ordered that. It's actually really cheap. That big can is under $5. You can get it from AVW in Florida. Florida. A delivers ABW to buy a case. They give you a special discount. We always order four to six cases at the time because we use a lot of it. It's great stuff. The most important stuff part about that is it dissipates. It disappears. So it doesn't leave any kind of coating behind. Don't spray it on the mechanical and then turn the game on. You never spray anything on the mechanical because as those wheels start to turn and all the sparks go, you're have a safe plane. It would be just like that guy with a barbecue with a match. This is a power cord area. You put an end on it. It's always good to put an end on it when you're doing it so you have to change it later. You're not messing with that one solder. That's really pretty. It covers a lot there. Well, we do have some stilts, too. But you should always start with as much stuff before you start taking your game apart. One of the things, the way to pledge. Actually, James, who's watching the video, he's a guy who's doing all of our games. He said to me a few years ago, he's been playing the older games, and it works because it's a different, with different coding. The newer games, you know, they have the five-inch blade or whatever. He likes to use GoJail, like a simple green to clean everything off, and then hit it with some flesh. We have our differences, but John Sheehan worked for me for many years. He's a creep. I actually quit at 89 years old because our mandatory retirement is $100, but he left at $89. I couldn't keep him there any longer. But anyway, he taught us to go-jo rule. They've been using it since the 60s, since when he got in the business. It's the original formula, only the original formula. You buy it at the auto parts store. Think Canada. It's great because you can dip your fingers in it. You can slop everything all over. And when you're done, it's like you just put lotion on your hands. But wait a second, old guys like me will know that Gojo and the 60s, 70s, and 80s is not what it is today. It's like a lot of products. It's still very good. It's a great product. G-O-J-O. You'll really like this stuff. And then your fingers. It's still just a pumice. Yes, right. That's not the original formula. It says it right on the thing, the original formula. So that's what we suggest. The pumice means you can clean dirt off your hands and the pumice helps you get all the crud off. It's a little mechanic that's been used for many years and it works great for the play-cube. Obviously you wipe the whole play-cube clean and then you can put the lemon pledge on it. You can pipe them with wax too, but lemon pledge... But the pledge is really enforced under the real wax. Yes, it really does. Some people will outmaneuver other... When they go out and sell it to the family, every play-cube sells me that. Yeah, it works out well. I'm trying to think if there are any other tips on the app. Well, you cover the batch fix. You stuff as many in as you can and then break them off. Your hole is fixed forever unless you're playing a game every day. You know, a lot of people are putting these machines back into commercial use. They're going into barcades. So they will require repair. I mean, I've been in the business for years. You put a brand new pimple on a location, it gets hammered on for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's gonna break. That's just the way it is. So there is one good thing to show on this machine. Yes. So if you were here earlier, you can see that the one player is just sliding. Look at two. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. The glass also sometimes gets cold solder joints. I noticed that in . I tried to reheat this and it didn't heat it up enough. That's why. You get power around, but it's not getting data. That's why it's . You've got to take it to something, get it hot enough, make sure the solder flows. fiberglass eraser or you can use obviously the emery cloth. No, I was talking about the backside. Somebody tried reheating it. What degree did that... Everybody tries, everybody experiments. You know, thank you, Paul. Yes, that's probably the easiest way to sum that up. Well, we have some sales to show you from our $6 million man experience, like clear close-ups. The first thing I'm going to do is show you, everybody's making custom parts for your pitfalls now. It's amazing. We've been out there. There's some great ideas. We've been experimenting with classic arcades. Jeff up at Wilkes-Barre and he came up with a great set of targets for 6 Million Dollar Man with characters from the show and we liked these particular, there's the old targets that came out of it and here are the new ones and he has characters from different episodes from the show and they look beautiful and he hot stamps them on their cheek Frank, this is your part that's a pin that many of you have seen the solder direct pins because nobody takes the time. Frank you take over. That's the big cap. That's the replacement cap. You have to make sure you check the voltages. That's where you have to clean the moisture from underneath the heat sinks. So it can stop in there. I never waste this. The only thing we can take is take it apart and see how the traces are screwed up there. So I can just put the solder around them. I can stop at any time, Frank. Now does anybody know, A varisister is what's inside a surge protector. When you buy that Apple strip, it's just that little disc. That's all it is. That will blow up when there's a surge on the line. It's designed to save your game and your electronics. Your microwave oven has it, your TV, everything has a surge, has a varisister. Varisister, I love the way that rolls up. Fuses protect, except when the input's drawn. Varisisters protect, except with voltage. So they're designed to short. That's what it does is it blows the fuse. So people say, I turned my game on and it goes bang. Smell something burning. Well, that's what happened. It's pretty great when they call and they say, oh, everything in our house got hit. And what do I do? And Jesus. And I say, well, open up the game and tell them where to find the line transformer in the valley that's out in the open. The Williams games, they're inside the little silver box. So you got that ease and things. And I said, take the box apart. And I said, look for the line transformer. and soldered right across of it. You'll see that for a barista, and you'll see a hole in it. Of course, it'll keep blowing the fuse. You just break it off and turn your beam back on, and it'll probably work. You have a 98% chance there's any new damage to the game. Obviously, you could put another barista on it when you get a chance, which you can certainly use in the meantime, or plug it into a surge protector. Now, for about $400 in your home, especially if you have a big game room, the electrician has to be done by an electrician. will install a 10-year surge protector, guaranteed. Put it right in your fuse box, in your surge breaker box. It has a little label on it that tells you it's running, it's operational. And that will catch any surges coming into the house, especially these days when power failures are now more prevalent than they were. So you break your whole house. If you've got 40 games in your house, you better do it. I had 40 games in my basement, and I had one on there. that gave me some peace of mind because remember, lightning doesn't care if the games turn on it doesn't care I remember a story of a lady that had a black knight she had three or four video games from me and a black knight could go on in the videos and they were in their bed and they had this terrific lightning storm, terrific lightning storm and suddenly the lightning came through her window of the bedroom and this lady had foil wallpaper in her house. That was the year of it. And the lightning got onto the wallpaper and went throughout her house blackening all the walls and it went into all the video games and the pinball machine. They were turned off at this time. The baristas blew up on all of them. Pinball machine effects but all the video games the electricity came out through the tube. all the video games had this colored tube. When we turned it back on, the colors were all off. As soon as we did the glossing, we couldn't fix them. So she needed three new picture tubes, which, of course, the insurance usually covers a lot of that. But it was a tough time. So that's the power. Now, in that case, the barista blew up all three games and saved them, so they still worked, but it didn't help with the video games. Anyway, we're ready for it. We're going to continue our slideshow. These are close-ups of our six-zone development before and after press. So that's the pop-up group before it took them off. You can see that their volume is just totally shot. You see the holes inside them? That's underneath, obviously. On the I just take a bunch of pictures of it, like I'm just trying to document as much as possible all the switches before I clean them up. Those are little students, don't have any holes in them, they clean up nice, clean the switch compact. Anybody who knows this thought knows that it's not a trivial task. It's an awful job. It's an awful, what an awful job. Now I will stop the video to point out we suggest that you put 555s back in the pop bumpers The old bayonet base they twist they bounce and they shake loose The 555s seem to stand solid in the sockets and you can buy the sockets the long leg ones Well, this one I had to put the 44s in because the bolts were all too tall, and I didn't have anything short enough to clear the cap. But I put in new sockets, and it was fine. Yeah, we still stock the 44 sockets, but let me get out of here. So that's just step by step as you're going back together. If you're going to do it all in one shot like I do, take pictures so you can remember where all the wires go. All the parts are cleaned. A little bit of Gorilla Pad to the brackets, clean them up real nice. You can buy the wafer and the metal thing, brand new. I would have tried to say that they were hidden real good. Sometimes it's just better to replace. Plus the parts people will love you. These are new pop-up caps that color hot stamps from the original Japanese classic arcades. We did an upside down view so you could see the side view. This is the first. Obviously, same thing. Take it all apart. Clean it up with new stuff. Sometimes, I was talking to somebody yesterday, those brackets, they're actually reversible. And I had one game where somebody drove big wood screws and they egged the holes out. So I just took everything off and switched them over and just switched left and right. It's wonderful. You don't have to buy a new bracket. Look at these brackets. They're actually mirrors printed on both sides. you can if you have one buggered and you switch it which is smart because they make one bracket you can use them for you have the stock more parking rooms yes when this did not they said I don't need much to buy a separate bracket but Bally thought ahead it's a very very clever idea we find that the 68 or 3 games in particular have drywall screws jammed in the rolling neck coils baby I remember we had a lot of them. We're all reassembled there, Frank, I think. Nice, shiny and neat. Completely heat shrink. It will work great. A little bit of extra work now, you'll have much more playtime later. That's a little one. She always wants to help. If she goes to shop now, you want to fix games. That's all she wants to do. Well, I keep her away from the cutting stuff. It's really cute, yes. Frank has two beautiful little girls. We love our kids, don't we? Especially if you bring our kids and young into this industry. This is the game and the hobby. Because if you think about this, when $6 million a man was made, it wasn't made for you guys. It was made for an operator who purchased it to make money. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything. What he cared about was when he got there at the end of the week and he opened the door, that cash can was full. He didn't care if Lee Majors was open last year. He didn't have any of that. He also cared if the game held up and worked. There was no collectability of the list. He was going to use it until it stopped making money and then dump it. That's what they did. They dumped Abbott's Town and Twilight Zone. We used to buy it for $800. We sold them for $24.99 into the home market because the vendors were done with it. They didn't want to deal with it anymore. Pop up for brackets for breaking. We said, it's time to retire it. Sort of like a car. You get rid of your car, maybe when it hits a certain mileage point. Some vendors did that. It gets three, four, five years old, they get rid of it, and get a new one. And that was the mindset, and that's the way it was. The collector market started. for me is only you know in 1984 when we discovered a lot of people one of the games perhaps they just had no way to get started out of the driveway the garage started selling the machines over 27,000 machines later all these machines out there you sometimes get them back to trade sometimes they come in in trade and something like that, $600,000, and you just saw the video 25 years ago. They got rid of it. They retired it. They got something different. But like I said, are we ready for the grand finale, Frank? It's not that grand, but, you know. Okay, we're ready. We're ready. Frank, look at it. Well, I can't take credit. I didn't do all of it. Did have the wrong flipper pads on put the right ones on We built the pump bumpers again everything here is new the rings the body underneath the main body the ring socket All new should never have a problem and the action you'll get from fully rebuilt pop bumpers is unlike you'll ever see So you take a lot of your time taking apart fully clean and rebuild everything they will work fantastic. I see there's a fire LED up here for the explosion and these were popped out and replaced with clear and a color changer under there. Very nice. The only thing left really, Steven has to do the targets. He's going to repaint them. Yeah that was the last step and he had to leave so he couldn't finish it tonight in time for our video but we wanted to make sure you saw the finishing touch. We do have our cards here but you notice down under here it's all clean yes this is lit too so the back glass is almost perfect and it's all led as you saw it's absolutely beautiful frank it really is now the question is frank is the machine down below us as nice as this oh i haven't seen it before so i mean it could be a buzzer i don't know Frank down there, what do you think of it? It's all up to you. Why don't we have a song? Let's go back. This one actually started off in much better shape, so it could be just as nice as having a nice song. How much money you want to put into it and how much time you want to spend on it. It's all up to you. Yep, it's all up to the person that's actually doing it. And you can never be sure. Yes, and good night from here back at TMC. Thanks for watching. Yes. Yes. We figured if we do a little bit of this, we have enough time for you to still get to the auction. Oh, I had the old finger in it. No, we don't want to start it again. We don't have another two hours, to be frank. No. But what we're going to do for maybe 15 minutes, and that will still give you all enough time. You can switch to the slide if you want. the questions about what we do in the overhaul we can first start with let's do it through the line up here if you have questions it will be easier he wants to do it through the microphone because he's going to put this up on their website this video on our YouTube channel the new YouTube channel that way everybody can hear us clearly thank you What do you do with back glasses that have some flaking on them? Do you do triple-tick and try to re-paint them? Could you talk about restoring back glasses? Yes. And also, I can know about clear coating and light fields too. Like after you touch up. Okay. We decided, well, a couple of things. With back glasses, Steve has been painting with us for years now. He uses different latex paints to paint. And many of them are in fact, when they dry, you can see through them. If you've been watching our videos, you can sometimes see the end results. We are by no means spending 50 hours on these glasses. Some people go all out. If the glass is really bad, it's time to replace, get rid of. What we've found is that you can feel them If you paint them, you can use clear coat if you'd like. You can use spray-on gloss. We've been doing that for years, and we haven't had any backlashes from it. We haven't had no further problems. Some people like to use a piece of clear, heavy mylar instead of the clear coat. That's an option, too. You can buy that from, we use an emporium. they seem to have the thickest and best stuff that we always call my motor 30 30 feet of it it comes in a big world about two or two foot wide it's priced by the book so that's another idea back places is just just an issue as a lot of you know certain brands seem to flake more than others and we're never quite sure the second part of the question what was the second part I just can't do it. I've seen some interesting results. They look great. Some of the machines you saw on plate out there in the room look beautiful with a clear coat. It adds so much time. If you do clear coat, you have to take everything off the plate. You're going to have to replace a lot of parts because you take those 40-year-old, 30-year-old parts off. They're going to break. There are people that do it. There's a fellow, Merlin George He charges $1,200 for a full job. It doesn't include rebuilding the playfields, just the upper part. He's trained to stab, he did touch-ups. You can find him on PIMS side. He taught us a lot in our YouTube videos too. G-K-A-L-O-S. Now he does it. I'm sure there's other people that will do playfields. We can't tackle it. We just don't have the time. time now we do overlays there's a new company that's now making it's really nice overlays I saw overlays are hit mess you have to sand the field you got to make sure all the numbers are off you got to make it you got to do a lot of preparation if you do an overlay you have to be ready and replace the plate feels great but boy you're gonna have hours and hours of joy and I know it's on joy. We will not do. Hopefully it feels. We just won't do it. I just don't have the time. I'm not hiring extra people to do it. Sometimes I just have to tell the customer or I have to say or or or or or or or or or or or or It's cold and double. I had a lot of trouble with that, so I had to introduce that. Any next questions? I was wondering if you could comment on the technique to remove the old star roller or any insert and how you reattach the new one, how you glue it, do you sand it, do you clear over it, or what the process is. I would tap it out, attach right out in a second. You don't want to put like a Phillips screwdriver on the other side. The flip side. As close to the diameter as possible. And then the thing that you pop right back in. So when you're ready to go, the star rollers are going to stay right there. Steve says I buy the most star rollers of anybody else. That's a terrible resource. He said other than the people that stock them. Steve stocks many places, many of your favorite parts places. They buy the product from Steve. because he's the only one that spends 18 hours a day at his job seven days a week. He loves pinball. The wonderful guy. I spent hours on the phone talking about it. One thing about star rollers, when you change them, you put a new one in, you've got to make sure it's washed with a clean peel. You understand the facts. Tell them what we had that problem. Eight-fold blocks, right? Yeah, we spent hours on one. Or eight-fold chain. No, eight-fold blocks. There's a star roller up in here, and the guys did a mover leg and they put a new roll over. If you shoot the ball, you never read the switch. And often ball back and forth, you read it. If you touch it, you read it. Putting the switch in, changing the logic, putting taps on it. The roll over, the slow roll of the body was just a smidge higher than the play field so the ball would jump over it. So I'd recognize if I took it off, ground it down, and had to just keep trying there until it was fine. That was our one rollover issue. My gosh, we've changed dozens and dozens of them. I think I mentioned the rollover. There's a place to understand it. Right, so that's really got to be more mindful. But even still, just make sure that it's nice and smooth. That's a good point. So if you're putting an overlay on, you may have to do that. You may have to think an extra little layer off the bottom, the inside of the rollover. Plus, you can change it if you put a clear one in. With the Gottlieb game, for instance, like a genie that has all those rollovers, or a roller disco. Roller Disco in the center there's five rollovers, they're all red. Then you put clear ones in, then you put color changers in, or five different colors, whatever. It just makes the game look a little bit better. Next question. Yes, hi. Again, thanks so much, guys. Really appreciate all the information. When you were redoing the power supply board there with the huge traces that run along the edges, I know when I was redoing one myself, I pretty much had to use two irons in order to desolder the capacitors out of it just because it sucks a huge heat sink. Do you guys recommend a certain type of iron or just something with a higher wattage or anything around that? We use those new Heiko, the FX-8880D or something. They're crap. Anything that's got a big trace on it, I can just desolder it. And I run that at about 150 degrees lower than the other one. that we usually do it so. The new ones have been good though. Well the new blue ones are horrible. The old brown ones we had, they were great. They were doing good parts. So yeah, that's the thing, they discontinued it and then they discontinued the parts a few years later. So you might want to try it. Possibly with a bigger capacity you could resort to a sonar-ing gun. Yeah, they had the big pistol grip guns. All right, that would do some damage so you wouldn't be. Well that was kind of what I was afraid of. Yeah, I didn't want to go. experiment on a junk board and say you get the feel for it. Like if that tip is bright red, which it will get, then, you know, use it up for experiment. Just take your time. By the way, I could mention something about the soldering gun if you have video games. The soldering gun is a demagnetizing coil. So if you don't have that big ring in your picture and your video game has a blob of color in it, take your soldering gun and turn it on and throw it all around the picture tube. Leave it on, pull it away from the tube. New picture, thank you. Thank you. Use it as a poor man's desoldering coil for that. Thank you. It was a joy. Next. In the video that you did, it looked like you worked on all the boards except for the lamp board, just to replace that. Well, that was a clip from doing a series of videos for Alt-Tac, for David Alt-Tac. That was because we put the LED in or these games will flicker. Before they came out with that board, they used to put resistors across all the RAM sockets and it would take hours. And that's what that board does. It just ties the load on the line so it allows the LEDs to fully shut off. Otherwise, they'll ghost and they'll flicker. They'll completely shut off. So they put that board in now and they came out with that. Now, Frank, they may now make some non-ghosting. Even though they say non-ghosting, it doesn't mean they're non-ghosting. They may make some LEDs that actually do non-ghost and you can use the old lamp driver board. It's a it's a mess. So Frank, if that if you then put in that board what is going to be the impact of running incandescence after that? I've never tried it so I'll move. If you're going to put it in, that's expected to pull that power plug back on. I would think the incandescence would work fine. As an aside, you can use the original board there's a resistor board that you can add. That's correct. We experimented with somebody who made a board that plugged into the connectors, little boards that plugged into the three edge connectors and plugged this into it. But some of them never worked. They never figured out what the problem was. I don't know whatever happened to those boards that we were testing. We test a lot of stuff for people. We were testing the LEDs for Sheffield Alley for almost a year before Marco actually produced those Sheffield Alley LED displays. want to make sure they're going to hold up a whole year over a year and they did we tried different things we're testing them people display now for one man but he made each or kind of you down there and I mean I mean thunder all he makes that great little board if you're having to reset problems on your WPC and you're kind of lazy and you don't want to change the bridge rectifiers and you just plug that little board in for 40 bucks and boom, your problem is probably solved. Not all the time, but probably. You've got an 85-90% chance you'll solve your reset problems on the WPCs. Thank you. Now we have another one. Any more questions? We're still running good on time. It's only 11.24. This one won't shut off like the interview the last night. I've got an interview in the Gizmo area. Yeah, we just posted it at this point. So we're filming you interviewing me, filming me, right? We'll get it great to the fact. Looking at this from the financial side, obviously you took that machine in and traded, so you had no idea to what extent you have to fix it. If the customer had said, just fix this for me, and had to ask you, okay, fix this for me, return it. What would have been the cost to the customer? And to follow up, because there are so many new people in the field that I suspect, unlike many in the audience, wouldn't even think of fixing their own machines, do you anticipate a lot of those people, as they get into the hobby and start buying these machines, do you anticipate a lot of trading because they have no clue that either how to fix it themselves or have no interest in learning? Yes, actually that's a great question because we're now fielding a lot of people that don't want to deal with it. They buy something on eBay and they have it shipped right to us. We have a pretty good idea, $6 million in the shop shop you sold, we charge between $2,000 and $2,500 because we don't know what we're going to find. We keep track of all the parts and such. We charge $65 an hour shop time. They came with ramps, more elaborate, going to be $2,500 to $3,000. In fact, we just did a haunted house. It came out beautiful, and we left for the show. We stayed overnight with Mike and Automated and Jersey Jack. He very graciously had us over. And after I arrived, I got a picture on my cell phone that the haunted house back was from the overhaul. It was a whole pile of little tiny nuggets. And nobody will tell me who broke it. Somebody said, well, maybe Frank did. I said, no, Frank. Frank's truck with me. Probably Jonathan. Jonathan, that little creed. He was actually down the shore. He was actually down the shore picking up an earth shaker. The lady thought she'd been doing research. I've done the research. I know what this is for. I said, well, okay. I know these are something for thousands of dollars. I said, well, if it goes craigslist, make it $6,000. As you know, make a set of 7,000. And then I said, let me wind up around the block. Pick up your earth shaker. Wind up around the block. So a week later, she calls back. Well, maybe I'll sell it to you after all. And then, of course, she gives me that lovely message. You call her phone, and she gives you, call me and we can set up a time. The mailbox is gone. No more messages. That happened. That was yesterday, actually. But anyway, that's what does happen. But that's a general cost. Now, somebody is sending us, let's see, we got an adult family. Somebody dropped that off. Some people actually drive it here. They're heading to a show where they're going to visit their friends or family, and they drop it off, and then they come back in two or three weeks or whatever. We have some machines in our warehouse that have been there for months. I hate finishing a game and then the guy tells me he, you know, he lost his job, he doesn't know he's going to have the money, and the game sits there in the warehouse for two or three years. We've had it. That happens in layaway. I think I mentioned to you, I have a game on layaway. He's still making payments since 1999. Now, I did calculations with the money he's paid, and he will have a pay off in full in 2050. I said, this is great. I said, I'll be here. I'll pick it off the rack myself. And he said, do you realize it's 32 years from now when you have this, you know, oh, I'm going to pay it off. I promise I'll pay it off. I'll leave it up on the shelf. So, MDA face-free. That's going to be an old machine by the time I get that. Game of the future. In the meantime, I didn't bother telling him that we brought the machine to the lab. I said, I'm going to go and get it. He said, I'm going to go and get it. I said, I'm going to go and get it. He said, I'm going to go and get it. I said, I'm going to go and get it. I'll leave it up on the shelf. NBA face-break. That's going to be an old machine by the time I get set. Game of the future. In the meantime, I didn't bother telling them, but we robbed parts out of it for other NBA games. I'm not worried about finding the parts because this will probably turn into, you know, never be picked up or whatever. And it does happen. Well, I've had people drop games off and I never hear from them again. Do those people get back to you and say, I can't pay for this game, can you sell this game, pay for the cost and whatever? Believe it or not, I never had that happen. I've lost track of at least 150 people that I never heard from again. I either have their game or games and then I do a three year ban. You hold it for three years, you're credited for three years and I don't hear from you. That's the end of it. You can create an advantage document. every month I sit by the shredder and off they are now they show up five years later and I had somebody show up and he says no I put money down on a game didn't even remember what game it was I said I put $100 positive on this game it was probably about 15 or 20 years ago so I don't have a slip do you have a slip no I don't have a slip I remember I was here I said okay pick out anything in the showroom and give you $100. And that's the end of it. They walk out. So, that's what happens. You know, then you deal with things like this. It's still 1130, folks, so we have some time, but I have to read you this email that came while we were doing the interview. I think I read it to you. Let me read this to you. It's his preface. Oh, well. Let's see where she is. Just stand up here and find him. She said, I'm going to keep this and read it to you folks. I'm going to find it and send it to you someplace. I get a lot of people that ask me for free advice. So I love answering the free advice division. And people with all shapes and sizes call and ask. Maybe under my old emails that we see. I can track it down. Oh, I see Dave you posted about our talk today. I just see a notification from you. I have a bunch of you here. Now, this is two sentences. And I'll stop at the first question mark. The subject line is 1966 Casanova flipper pinball. That's the subject. Here it is. I was just wondering how much it would cost to get an almost fully functional 1966 Williams Casanova pinball machine, for some reason a chalk shoe from different places, oddly, but the playfield paint is chipped up and scratched but everything on the playfield works but you guys repaint playfields and touch up back glass, right? question mark next sentence, because that means done and I can't really find the time to do it I'm far away in Ohio but how much would it cost to find out why it's shocking me to touch up the back glass in playfield now isn't that lovely I'd like to respond you're an idiot you've been missed also Why are you bothering me? Of course not. I haven't responded yet. How should I respond to that? What do you think I should say? Call somebody local. Wear gloves. Wear gloves? What day do they pick up the big garbage in your neighborhood? That's a favorite one. I just thought of it, Frank. I'll ask a few fish. So what do you have to do? Listen, go out on one of those little bass boats, and you find a good place for the bass to bite. Just tie a heavy rope around it, drop it off the side, keep you in place while you fish for the day, and when you're done, cut the rope. Float away in the boat. I don't know, I'm going to get a ton of thumbs down on that. I don't like that. But every day, I'm not kidding, I get three, four, five people. One guy emailed me, wanted me to call him and tell him why his chef's life doesn't work. Because he has eight children that are going to be in his house for a big party tonight. And he's got me, I have to tell him how it got stood by from me. The guy he bought it from probably hung up on him. This constant free of place. But that's what happened. Did I answer that okay? Oh, it was wonderful. My camera didn't even want to cut off this time. You and your cameras. anybody else have any questions last call last call questions of course we'll be around all day oh here we are you mean on the female side no I never use the IDC and it depends I mean if it's that they're green or corroded and you feel like doing it doesn't It's a pain, but it will eliminate a lot of future problems. It will. It will. It definitely does. It helps to remember, folks, take the Pimble Adventures card. Do you know where to at least find it on the website? Please register your collection. Put them up on that website. We'd love to see a ton of you up there. Any of you that have businesses that want to advertise your stuff up there, too. We'd appreciate it. The book comes out September 1st. During the show, Frank has his own cards now. I'm trading cards and I made some little postcards up about my battery boards and also the Tommy boards. I don't know if anybody would ever need to replace them, serve up a board for the Tommys. If you have a Tommy, there's 4,000 of them out there and Frank has sold a little bit. 150 of them? I have an initial one of 200. I did run another batch of 200. I'll probably get a discontinue after that. I can do small orders if somebody wants them down the road, but we'll cross-experience and get to it. The other thing is I was going to want to do a Frankenstein board. A buddy of mine loaned me an machine. Hopefully, yes, for the monster head. The monster head on that board is made, and it runs on a pick. And the pick set is that the pick that they do not interest in making anymore. There was a copyright problem with Funhaus, and the head had to be completely random because the Plum House, the pinnation, has a copyright when the eyes follow you. So it can't be that the Simpsons party pimple head, Homer, does not follow the law, because that is also a copyright thing that they threatened to seal up. Even though Williams was not open and running, they had to make the Homer head random. But there's a stupid little circuit board that runs that Frankenstein head, so the motor is usually bad and adding a little more. So Frank's with the board. It'll come with a servo. It'll come with all the stuff you need. Yeah, it'll be a complete package. That board was designed to control more than one servo. So I might make mine, so if somebody wants something custom done with their game, I can probably program the chip to do whatever else you want to do. If you want to add a servo for whatever reason or even on any other game. And for under $100, you'll be able to get your Frankenstein head working, yeah, which would be nice. That would be a nice feature. So it would be available for Frank has his cards. we're going to stay here up front for about 15-20 minutes because we want to go to the hall. Thank you. Thank you guys. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 94f0ebd9-d94d-474b-b7bc-9953de7600e9*