Episode 395 - Multi-Bingo Progress - New Plastics - Shows - 1935 PEO All American Football

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·25m 25s·analyzed·May 4, 2017

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Multi-Bingo progress update and detailed analysis of rare 1935 All American Football.

Summary

Nicholas Baldrige shares extensive updates on his Multi-Bingo restoration project, detailing progress on wiring multiple playfields with lessons learned about harness construction, connector management, and soldering equipment. He reports successful testing of the Shoot-A-Line playfield with flawless switch function, discusses remaining playfields to build (Galaxy, Mystic Gate, Tahiti), and previews upcoming work on 20-hole game code ahead of York. The episode concludes with a detailed analysis of a rare 1935 PEO Manufacturing All American Football pinball machine, highlighting its innovative ball-save design, electromechanical scoring totalizer with backglass marble animation, and unique playfield layout.

Key Claims

Shoot-A-Line playfield tested with 100% switch function success after harness installation
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige reporting direct hands-on testing results from his Multi-Bingo project
Building custom harnesses from scratch is simpler than repurposing original cloth-covered wires due to known wire condition from spool
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige describing lessons learned from building multiple playfield harnesses
Harness wiring should start from the plug and work backward to the playfield switch, not vice versa, to avoid measurement errors
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige detailing methodology lessons from first playfield (Shoot-A-Line) versus subsequent work
All American Football (1935) uses a Playmatic totalizer for touchdown scoring with backglass marble animation
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige detailed technical analysis of the featured 1935 PEO Manufacturing game
All American Football prevents dead ball loss through three design features: center touchdown hole, left/right kickbacks, and ball-return scoring holes
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige describing playfield mechanics of the 1935 PEO game
Approximately 16 twenty-hole bingo games remain to be coded (Double Up, Hawaii, London, Venice, Orient, Bahama Beach, Zodiac, etc.)
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige listing outstanding code work for Multi-Bingo project
Roulette games (ABC and Bolero by United) feature unique 25-hole circular playfield with center bumper instead of standard pyramid layout
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige describing roulette playfield design and gameplay mechanics
Temperature-controlled soldering iron has proven more reliable than previous soldering gun and iron equipment
high confidence · Nicholas Baldrige reporting equipment change and its effectiveness in his restoration work

Notable Quotes

“For the first playfield that I did, which was the twenty-five hole playfield, I was still laboring under the delusion that I'd be able to simply plug in these additional playfields, wire up a few extra switches, and be done with it. That's far from the truth.”
Nicholas Baldrige @ early in episode — Highlights the complexity of multi-playfield restoration underestimation
“I'm using plastic coated wires, which are far flimsier than the cloth covered wires that were used originally. That has made me question my decision to make harnesses several times.”
Nicholas Baldrige @ harness construction discussion — Identifies material trade-offs in modern restoration practices
“So, I went in and tested every switch on the playfield and there are more switches on Shoot-A-Line than on most other bingo pinball playfields. And everything worked flawlessly, 100%, which is incredible. I'm shocked that that happened.”
Nicholas Baldrige @ Shoot-A-Line testing results — Demonstrates successful completion of complex playfield wiring and validation testing
“You cannot lose a ball. There is no dead ball area at the bottom of the playfield... this game actually prevents you from having a dead ball at all by the use of three different playfield features.”
Nicholas Baldrige @ All American Football analysis — Describes the innovative ball-save design philosophy of the 1935 PEO game
“For nineteen thirty five quite a few unique features for such an early game I will say.”
Nicholas Baldrige @ All American Football conclusion — Expresses admiration for the 1935 design complexity and forward-thinking features

Entities

Nicholas BaldrigepersonFor Amusement OnlyorganizationMulti-BingoproductShoot-A-LinegameAll American FootballgamePEO Manufacturing CorporationcompanyRoulette games (ABC and Bolero)gameUnitedcompany

Signals

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restoration_signal: Custom wiring harness construction for multi-playfield EM restoration; lessons about plug-first approach, material choices (plastic vs cloth-covered wire), and connector management
high · Detailed description of harness building process, challenges with plastic-coated wires, decision to work from plug backward to playfield, use of Jones plugs requiring 24-48 wire routing
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restoration_signal: Comprehensive switch testing methodology achieving 100% function validation on first power-up after harness installation
high · Nicholas Baldrige tested every switch on Shoot-A-Line playfield with flawless results despite complexity, identified one dirty switch requiring maintenance
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restoration_signal: Transition from failed soldering gun/iron to temperature-controlled soldering iron improving reliability and throughput
high · Previous soldering iron failed and fell during desoldering work; cheapo temperature-controlled unit now working very well
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restoration_signal: Connector/plug sourcing constraints limiting playfield wiring capacity; outreach to industry contacts for specific Jones plug sizes
high · Nicholas Baldrige approaching limit of physical work due to connector availability; reaching out to contacts for specific plug sizes; constraint on further assembly work
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restoration_signal: Seeking technical documentation and photos for uncommon playfield designs (Mystic Gate pressure-fit construction); community outreach for assembly guidance
high · Nicholas Baldrige requesting photos and assembly information for Mystic Gate underside from community members via email

Transcript

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0:00

What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nick Baldridge. It's been another two weeks. That means it's time for another multi-bingo update. I need some kind of bumper music to lead us into this, don't I? Well, I've been diligently working on wiring up additional stem دير ت کے Societe Quintini guarnica Ew constitu Ashley Year in suspected inисьر ش الـ Dante Chalbag. The I'm a fan of pinball and I've been playing pinball for a long time.

1:04

I've also partially, I'm about a third of the way through, de-harness for double-up, a 20-hole pinball playfield. So, lessons learned thus far. For the first playfield I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. For the first playfield that I did, which was the twenty-five hole playfield, I was still laboring under the delusion that I'd be able to simply plug in these additional playfields, wire up a few extra switches, and be done with it. That's far from the truth. In fact, it was far simpler for me to actually completely build a new wiring harness for each of these playfields Closed captioning provided by the Amara.org community Well, that's pretty fun, I'd say. It's very time-consuming, but it's pretty fun. One of the things is that my standard bingo playfield takes up three Jones plugs. Therefore, every additional playfield that I wire up requires at least three Jonesplugs. They can use more or less positions on the individual plugs, but the order in which they're plugged profiteous hobbyist projects under Drew subtitle Engineer credit alan seguinte new I minted it all the through is 53 С

3:08

thats all at a three A We have 24-48 wires suddenly branching off from up and up fiveأن segunda I'm a fan of the T-Tar tape. The other issue is that I'm using plastic coated wires, which are far flimsier than the cloth covered wires that were used originally. That has made me question my decision to make harnesses several times. I've also thought about just repurposing the cloth wire that I have, because of course I've saved all the scrap and just making my harness out of cloth. But at the end of the day, I keep coming down to the fact that it's going to be simpler for me knowing the condition of the wire directly from the spool onto the playfield to just wire it myself. So that's what I've been doing. The other lesson that I've learned is that you should start I'm going to start from the plug and work your way back to the playfield switch. The first playfield that I wired was the shoot-a-line, building my own harness, and I wired from the switch to the plug. Well, the problem there is that your measurements become inaccurate because you have to route around whatever, or you have to go through a playfield staple over here and you had anticipated going over there. So, for a variety of reasons like that, which only become apparent as you start to wire in the plug and realize that suddenly it's two inches shorter than you expected it to be, start from the plug and work your way back. I had mentioned previously that my soldering iron, I think I mentioned this on the podcast, but I had a soldering gun which failed when I was building my initial harness inside the I'm a little bit ahead a long time ago. I had an iron fail the other day when I was desoldering one of the playfields. I think it was the shoot-a-line playfield and the iron fell apart again. Burning hot fell on the floor, not on me thankfully, and I replaced that with a cheapo temperature controlled soldering iron and that That been working very well So I been just kind of tearing through it and seeing what all I can wire up Now I running low on plugs and I been reaching out for some specific sizes to a few people so I just waiting on some of those but I almost at the end of what I can actually physically accomplish because I won have any connectors So, let's talk about some exciting things. The first is I took the Shootaline playfield and it was the first playfield that I dropped into the game after reassembling it after painting it. And fired up the computer for the first time since reassembling everything and it worked no problem, everything's good. And then I went to test the harness. So, one of the things, you know, of course I did continuity tests on everything before dropping the playfield in, but you don't really know what's going to happen until you actually start pressing switches. So, I went in and tested every switch on the playfield and there are more on Shoot-A-Line than on most other bingo pinball playfields. And everything worked flawlessly, 100%, which is incredible. I'm shocked that that happened. So, when I say everything worked, I mean all the switches switched appropriately. But one of them is dirty and I've got to lift the playfield and clean one of them and then everything will be good. He did Blakey mare's is unアーツ klassini whereby b ك هذا I did not get the first jack of the cabinet, but I felt that if I had enough wire, why be wasteful? It would not serve very much purpose except to get tarnished and create a problem later on down the road. So, I just built the harness and put that in the head. I have not wired up the drawer switches in the head yet because I don't have the drawers fully assembled and if I were to drop the buttons in it would short the switches and everything should be fine but I don't want to, you know, mess around with that unless I have to. Um, that said, everything's coming along very well. Uh, there's just, uh, nothing exciting where I can say I've got another 400 games done. Uh, I still have the, about the same outstanding list I, I think I mentioned, but I might not have. Uh, I tell you this two week schedule going from every night to two weeks, it still messes me up because I don't remember exactly what I've talked about last time, but, I did complete the roulette games code. That's ABC and Bolero. Those are both made by United. They use lighted scoring and they have a unique playfield which I haven't been able to locate yet. But it's essentially a roulette tub and you fire the ball, it rotates around and lands in one of the holes arranged in a circle. And it's 25 holes. But they're arranged in the circular pattern instead of in the standard descending pyramid bingo pinball playfield format. So what makes these playfields unique and actually fairly interesting is that there's a pop bumper that's mounted in the center. And if your ball happens to slow down and roll across the center, the pop will fling it into one of the holes or around the edge, and then you can nudge it around and get it where you need it to go. These games look really challenging to me from a player's perspective because it looks like control is an issue. You've got to really use physics in a different way than you do typically on a bingo pinball playfield. So, I'm looking forward to digging into that. I've got the code written, I've got my pops coded in, and I'm looking forward to actually actuating one of those and seeing how it plays. So, that's one of the playfields that I still need. I still have to build up Galaxy. I've got a beautiful new old stock one. I've got the top side populated, but the bottom is unpopulated. I also have a mystic gate which is topside mostly populated. I have some questions about how some of the units actually fit together because they're a little unique and appear to be pressure fit instead of set screw or E-clip or anything of that nature. If anybody has a mystic gate, I'd love to talk to you and get a photo or two, especially the underside of the playfield. So if you do, please contact me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com.

12:01

So those are two of the unique playfields and the roulette playfield that I already mentioned. So that's three which still need to be built. And then I need a Bally Tahiti playfield. This uses a ball return mechanism which is unique to Tahiti and Galaxy. And Galaxy The Galaxy I mentioned is not bottomside populated It doesn have the unique unit which moves the shutter back and forth to allow for half of the balls to return I don even know what one of these looks like although I know it motorized On Palm Springs and Surfclub it is not motorized instead it coil driven So you hold in these big beefy coils underneath the playfield and while the shutter motor turns it will pull it over to one side or the other releasing one half of the balls either the odd or the evens And it constructed in such a way that it can do that It actually very clever and I'm a fan of the game and I'm excited to get those games playing because I've had a lot of fun playing both Palm Springs and Surfclub in the past and I'd like to play them in the present. So I'm hopeful that I'll have by York or thereabouts I'll have pretty much all the games coded that I can use these playfields for. That includes the largest amount that I have left to code which are For the 20 hole games, that includes games like Double Up, Hawaii, London, Venice, Orient, Bahama Beach, Zodiac, and quite a few more. So there's about 16 of them, and that also includes the wheel games, Big Wheel and Magic Ring. That said, I have some tweaks to make. I've mentioned this before in some of the older games. I need to go back through and I'm a little bit of a joker, but I'm going to try to verify some of my portioning because some new details have come to light or my understanding has improved, especially in the older games. I think I have a better handle on it now. So that's pretty much what I'm going to be doing in the run up to York is just working on playfields and working on code. But, I also have a real cosmetic treat that I'm working on. It's still in the nascent stages in my brain. And I've probably mentioned something about it in the past and we'll see what I can do to make that a reality before York, but probably not. As it stands, the game is pretty. I love still just going down to look at it. Closed captioning provided by the Amara.org community Closed Caption by The Closed Caption Project esta CH-L aroboat Primaora paulicaicemplate no establishmentvalyond vàingnig YouTube.セライiorsagedi wähćøøøï Jump Bly Nižnevè čøñ căngkïšăð–uãçk, UNIZ здесь de rpere čøľ lecturesOf F två entrepreneurial Closed captioning provided by the Amara.org community Pinball resource. So give them a call if you need a set. And they're in limited quantities, so get them if you need them. His work as always is outstanding and they really are quite the difference from most 50s wood rail plastics. Many are shriveled up and brown. For today's featured game, I wanted to talk about the P.O. Manufacturing Corporation All American Football, which was manufactured in September of 1935. This is a very interesting game for the time, and I'm not a sportsperson or a football person, but I find this game quite fascinating. So, here's the basic premise. You cannot lose a ball. There is no dead ball area at the bottom of the playfield. So, normally on a game from even the 30s, you wind your way down the playfield and if you make it all the way down without hitting anything, you don't score. There's no secret to it, you just don't get it. But this game actually prevents you from having a dead ball at all by the use of three different playfield features. There is a central hole at the bottom center of the playfield and it's marked touchdown. The ball actually falls back through that hole and is returned to you and more on that in a moment. And on the left and right side there are kickbacks. The kickbacks fire up about three quarters of the way up the playfield and they dodge a couple of playfield features which I'll get into in just a moment. And most of your scoring holes are situated in about the middle of the playfield So the game really gives you a lot of chances to score And in fact requires you to score before you can lift the next ball. So, let's talk about those playfield features I've skipped over. Up at the top of the playfield, there is a set of three different holes. On the left hand side There's a hole that's marked 25 yards. In the middle there's a hole that's 50 yards and on the right hand side there's a hole that's marked 35 yards and essentially what you're trying to do is score touchdowns and I touched on that down at the bottom of the playfield but these holes up at the top of the playfield also return the ball to you and for each ball that is levered down The shoot again. It increments your score towards a touchdown from those upper holes so two balls in the fifty-yard hole give you a touchdown, three in the thirty-five yard hole gives you a touchdown and four in the twenty-five yard hole gives you a touchdown. That's pretty interesting and I would be very interested to know how it counts those. I'm assuming that it's some hybrid of Electric and mechanical electromechanical rather than purely mechanical but I could be wrong. That's why I'd like to see. What makes this very interesting aside from that unique scoring is how the game keeps track of it. This is a game with an automatic totalizer but only for the touchdowns. It's not mechanical per se but It's electromechanical and the way it works, there's backglass animation. This is one of the long skinny backglasses from that period in the thirties where you have countertop games and smaller games where the backglass size hadn't been standardized so you wind up with these displays in the backboard which are fairly small and contain only the information needed. They act less as advertisements for the game and more as an extension of the game itself. So, in this game, you've got all-American football written across the glass and a person