Episode 9 - What's So Great About the 60's?

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·18m 14s·analyzed·Mar 20, 2015

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.027

TL;DR

Deep dive into 1960s EM pinball design, variety, technology, and restoration techniques.

Summary

Nick Baldridge explores the diversity and innovation of 1960s electromechanical pinball machines, covering the variety of game types (pitch and bat, ball bowlers, bingos, racing games), design evolution (wedgeheads, reverse wedgeheads, add-a-ball mechanics), technical details (score reels, steppers, flippers), and practical restoration considerations including safety hazards, parts availability, and maintenance procedures.

Key Claims

The 1960s introduced multiplayer EMs in the late 1950s and the 1960s refined them and brought forth classic single-player EMs like wedgeheads from Gottlieb and reverse wedgeheads from Williams
high confidence · Nick Baldridge, episode introduction discussing 1960s EM game evolution
Add-a-ball games reward extra balls instead of replays and reset after completing sequences, unlike replay games which keep sequences complete until a new game starts
high confidence · Nick Baldridge explaining add-a-ball mechanics as reaction to bingo law changes
2-inch flippers were standard in the 1960s and were replaced by 3-inch flippers in the 1970s
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing Twinkie from Chicago Coin (1967)
Williams produced the last zipper flipper machine, Medusa, in the early 1980s
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing zipper flipper technology evolution
Gottlieb had the best lockdown bar design in the 1960s with no screws, while every other manufacturer used screws
high confidence · Nick Baldridge comparing manufacturer technical implementations
1960s EM machines typically ran 120 volts to the coin door and flipper buttons without proper grounding, creating shock hazards if fish paper insulation deteriorated
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing electrical safety in restored 1960s EMs
Williams reverse wedgehead machines used metal flipper bats that are completely unobtainable as reproduction parts
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing parts availability challenges for 1960s machines
Gottlieb recycled playfield designs with new artwork during the 1960s to keep up with demand
high confidence · Nick Baldridge discussing Gottlieb's production strategies in the 1960s

Notable Quotes

“The variety. You had pitch and bats. You had ball bowlers. You had puck bowlers. You had roll-down games. You had typical flipper pinballs. You had bingos. You had racing games. You had electromechanical airplane games, you had electromechanical gun games, you had all kinds of different games.”
Nick Baldridge @ ~0:30-1:00 — Core thesis on why 1960s games are notable; demonstrates the breadth of game types and innovation during this decade
“Twinkie is an add-a-ball game, so in it you don't win replays, but you win extra balls. It's brutally difficult. Typical for the 60s, it used 2-inch flippers instead of 3-inch flippers, which became standard in the 1970s.”
Nick Baldridge @ ~5:00-5:30 — Direct experience with a 1960s machine; illustrates difficulty and technical characteristics
“Modern machines are computer controlled. They essentially have the same kind of brain that your desktop computer may have. In these games from the 60s, 70s, any electromechanical game, the coils are driven as reactions to switch presses.”
Nick Baldridge @ ~9:00-9:30 — Fundamental technical distinction between EM and modern machines; explains scoring mechanism
“If you touch something else that is grounded, then you become the path to ground for that 120 volts, and you'll get quite a shock. The other issue is that you're only blocked from that 120 volts by a thin piece of fish paper.”
Nick Baldridge @ ~17:30-18:00 — Safety warning about restoration hazards; practical advice for collectors
“One example is the monkey that rings the bell every hundred points in Central Park made by Gottlieb.”
Nick Baldridge @ ~14:30 — Specific example of backglass animation innovation in 1960s games

Entities

Nick BaldridgepersonWilliamscompany Gottliebcompany Ballycompany Chicago Coincompany MidwaycompanyKeeneycompanyRoy Parkerperson

Signals

?
historical_signal: Comprehensive review of 1960s EM innovation including transition from 1950s multiplayer designs to classic single-player wedgeheads and reverse wedgeheads
high · Nick Baldridge's detailed discussion of design progression and the variety of game types that emerged during the 1960s
?
historical_signal: Add-a-ball machines developed as reaction to bingo legality changes across states; fundamentally different reward structure than replay games
high · Nick Baldridge explains: 'Partially as a reaction to bingos and the way they changed the laws around the country, add-a-ball machines were developed'
?
restoration_signal: Detailed methodology for disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling steppers in EM machines; critical for player units, score reels, and bingo control systems
high · Nick Baldridge provides extensive step-by-step restoration guidance covering disassembly, marking, cleaning, lubrication, and reassembly
?
product_concern: 1960s EM machines lack proper grounding and rely on deteriorating fish paper insulation; 120 volts present at coin door and flipper buttons poses shock hazard to restorers
high · Nick Baldridge emphasizes: 'if you touch something else that is grounded, then you become the path to ground for that 120 volts, and you'll get quite a shock'
?
supply_chain_signal: Certain 1960s EM parts are completely unobtainable (Williams metal flipper bats) while reproductions exist for others (backglasses, plastics); cabinet artwork restoration relatively straightforward except for bingo stencils

Topics

1960s EM Pinball Design and InnovationprimaryGame Type Variety (Pitch and Bat, Ball Bowlers, Bingos, Racing Games, etc.)primaryAdd-a-Ball Mechanics and Game LegalityprimaryEM Machine Restoration TechniquesprimaryStepper Technology and FunctionprimaryElectrical Safety in Vintage EM MachinesprimaryParts Availability and ReproductionsecondaryManufacturer Comparison (Williams, Gottlieb, Bally, Chicago Coin)secondary

Sentiment

positive(0.82)— Nick Baldridge displays enthusiasm and appreciation for 1960s EM machines, describing them as diverse, innovative, and interesting. His detailed technical knowledge and passion for restoration is evident. Some warnings about safety hazards and parts availability challenges provide balanced perspective, but overall tone is affectionate toward the era.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.055

what's that sound it's for amusement only the em and bingo pinball podcast welcome back to for amusement only this is Nicholas Baldridge williams bally keeney midway gottlieb chicago coin what do these names have in common? They were all manufacturing EMs and pin games in the 1960s in America. What makes the games of the 60s so interesting? Well, first I'd have to say it's the variety. You had pitch and bats. You had ball bowlers. You had puck bowlers. You had roll-down games. You had typical flipper pinballs. You had bingos. You had racing games. You had electromechanical airplane games, you had electromechanical gun games, you had all kinds of different games. The late 1950s introduced multiplayer EMs, and the 1960s refined the multiplayer EM as well as brought forth the great classic single-player EMs, the famous wedgeheads from Gottlieb and the famous reverse wedgeheads from Williams. During this time also, So, partially as a reaction to bingos and the way they changed the laws around the country, add-a-ball machines were developed. In a typical EM pinball machine, your goal is to win replays. So, either by besting a preset score or by achieving particular goals set in the game and labeled on the score and instruction cards. Add-a-ball games, on the other hand, have the same score and instruction cards, but instead of rewarding you with an extra game, a replay, They reward you only with extra balls or more time on your current game. In this way, you can extend an add-a-ball game almost indefinitely if you're a very skilled player. Other differences exist between add-a-ball games and replay games. Most notably, add-a-ball games will reset after you complete various sequences and drain. Replay games will allow you to keep the sequence complete until you start a new game. Again, I've never played an EM machine out on location. and never played them when they were new, so the only experience I have is restoring them and playing them in my own personal collection, at other friends' houses, or at the shows that I attend. The only machine from the 60s that I own, aside from Bounty, is a real 1967 machine, Bounty 64 again. A real 1967 machine named Twinkie from Chicago Coin. Twinkie is an add-a-ball game, so in it you don't win replays, but you win extra balls. It's brutally difficult. Typical for the 60s, it used 2-inch flippers instead of 3-inch flippers, which became standard in the 1970s. The 2-inch flippers, coupled with the lack of in-lanes, which are actually drains, wide-open out-lanes, and a wide-open center make for a very drain-heavy game. It's very difficult. In the early 1960s, two-player EMs were common fare. As the 60s progressed, the companies decided that more and more should be able to compete. and so they started making four-player EMs. Fixing a single-player EM versus a two-player EM versus a four-player EM is essentially the same task, there's just more pieces. Each of the score reels must be disassembled and cleaned, reassembled, checked for function, and then put back in the machine. Flippers must be rebuilt, just as on a modern game. Targets adjusted, switches checked, relays tweaked, lamp sockets fixed or replaced, all as is typical even with the most modern of machines. Where these differ is in how they score from the modern machines. Modern machines are computer controlled. They essentially have the same kind of brain that your desktop computer may have. That computer is wired to a series of circuits that allow it to drive the coils via the computer. In these games from the 60s, 70s, any electromechanical game, the coils are driven as reactions to switch presses. The scoring happens due to the rotation of the score motor. The score motor is triggered to start moving based on reaction to the switch presses. So switches are all important. During the 1960s there was also a move away from the wood rails that had been common up to this point and to metal side rails which prevented damage or theft from vandals The artwork over the decade saw a massive shift from the cartoonish to the pointy people by the end of the decade. At the beginning of the decade, the only machines with automatic ball loaders were bingos. By the end of the decade, it was a standard feature. Towards the beginning, the way that you would feed your ball into play was with what they call a spoon, a second plunger that sat underneath of the main plunger, which when pushed in would actuate a little lever and push the ball up into the shooter lane. Automatic ball feed was a step up and a step back. It was a step up because now games could last much longer. It was a step back because if a child or someone who didn't really care for pinball started a game, it was harder to shoot all the balls quickly and get to your turn. 60s machines are also characterized by backglass animations, which are some of my favorite things to see in an EM pinball. One example is the monkey that rings the bell every hundred points in Central Park made by Gottlieb. As far as toys, zipper flippers came into play during the 1960s. These were standard two-inch flippers that, when a particular target was hit, or, when a certain button was pressed, would slide together to close off the center drain on any given machine. I've only played a few of these machines, and it's pretty fun to be able to get them. Bally actually produced the last zipper flipper machine, which was Medusa, in the early 80s. The combination of Roy Parker and Wayne Nyans and Gottlieb from this period rivaled that of the 1950s for innovation and beauty. Gottlieb's artwork during this period was phenomenal, and the gameplay was mostly pretty solid. They were selling so many games during this period that they ended up having to recycle designs in order to keep up with the demand. They would commission new artwork and put a game out with the same exact playfield layout as a previous game. There were even throwbacks to 1950s designs. Now let's talk tech. Each manufacturer handled playfield setup and lockdown differently during this period. Gottlieb by far had it the best. There's a lockdown bar, which must be removed from inside the coin door. And then you reach inside and grab a large brass bar, pulling it back, and that allows you to lift up the playfield. There are no screws which hold it in place, however. Every other manufacturer had screws of varying designs. So what do you look for in an EM? I always check for playfield surface first, see if there's a lot of wear or missing parts or problems due to neglect. A close second would be back glass. Back glass has to be at least usable. You have to kind of know what's going on. And then a third would be the cabinet artwork. Now the cabinet artwork on most of the machines from this era are pretty easy to restore, except for bingos, which are very complex stencils. The stencils for these machines are typically pretty easy. The most difficult thing is whether it used spatter or webbing. Webbing is pretty difficult to replicate, and spatter is relatively simple. Both can be done, but they require practice and technique. The stencils on a normal flipper game are usually two to three different colors, and the design is usually repeated on the opposite side, so it's fairly simple to repaint one of these. Machines from this era are very popular, and therefore the parts are mostly readily available. There are a few exceptions. Williams on some of the reverse wedge heads used metal flipper bats, and those are completely unobtainable. Plastics and back glasses are usually unobtainable, but there are some repros out there from Shea, or from Ron Webb. All metal flipper buttons can be hard to find, and certain styles of pop bumper caps are also very difficult to find. Beyond that, let's talk safety. In the 60s EMs, 120 volts was typically run to the coin door in order to start the game and to the flipper buttons in order to turn on the lock relays and other items that would allow the machine to function Like the flippers for example Now, the problem with this is that these machines are not grounded. So, if you touch something else that is grounded, then you become the path to ground for that 120 volts, and you'll get quite a shock. The other issue is that you're only blocked from that 120 volts by a thin piece of fish paper. That fish paper can wear down. So it's important that before you plug the machine in and start poking the different switches, which are facing the user, like the start button or the flipper buttons, that you check the status of the fish paper and make sure that it is doing its job properly and there's not a hole in it. And if there is, replace it right away because you don't want to get 120 volt shock. It's not fun. Coin mechanisms on these games are frequently stripped as well as all of the coin door parts. The machines, when they left route, were typically wired for home use and free play. And for me, that's a bit of a problem. I like the coin drop aspect. So restoring that can be a challenge. I have one game where I have not figured out how in the world they wired it for free play. I don't see any hacked wiring. They did a very clean and careful job with however they did it. I've checked all the relays that control startup and don't see anything hacked in. But that's a 70s game, so we'll get there one day. So while we're talking tech, let's talk a little bit about Steppers. I had mentioned in previous episodes multiple times about steppers and how they control various features and odds on the bingos. Well, steppers are also used to determine which player is playing on a multiplayer EM. They're also used to control your score on an EM pinball. Where you see the digits that turn in the back glass, those are called score reels, and those are just little steppers. The machines know which score you're on, and that's how you get matches for score to get your replays, and also matches at the end of the game if that feature is enabled. A stepper is comprised of multiple parts. You have the Bakelite disc, which contains rivets, which are wired to various points in the game to do different things. Then you have a spider that sits on top of it that has copper fingers. and as the spider rotates, it engages different rivets on that big light disc and completes various circuits that do different things. So in our example of a player unit, when the contacts are in one position, it tells the machine that player one is up. When it steps up one more, it tells the machine player two is up. And they used this device for up to four players and then it would reset back to player one. and step back up to four and back to one, up to four, back to one, and so forth. So how does it step? Well, it steps via solenoid. And steppers can be in various forms. There are single steps. There are single steps with full reset. And there are continuous steppers. So in some of my bingo episodes, I mentioned about the various types and how they work in the bingo machines. but I'm just going to go over in general how these units work. So for a single step unit, it will step up and step down one at a time via solenoid. For a unit that resets fully, it'll step up one at a time, and then when the reset is engaged, it will return the spider to its original default position. Certain steppers in the bingos work this way, such as the ones that keep track of what your odds are for various colors, as well as the ones that keep track of the replays that you've earned in the various colors. Then you have a continuous stepper. Something like a coin unit would have a continuous stepper, where it just counting the number of coins over and over and over and over again and it uses that to feed some feature In the example I gave a couple episodes ago my double up machine has a continuous stepper that monitors the number of coins that go in to engage that diverter that allows it to send some quarters to the side cash box and some to the main cash box. So what do you do if you encounter a gummy stepper or a stepper that doesn't work at all? Well, first of all, you'll have to disassemble it. And the first time you do it, it's going to be a little daunting, just like looking in your first EM or your first bingo. But once you do one, you'll realize that they're all pretty much the same and they're all fairly simple devices. First things first, you need to mark your stepper in its default reset position or the last position that it's able to reach at this point. Make sure that you mark with the sharpie on the spider itself as well as on the bakelite disc. It won't hurt the bakelite, just make sure that you don't mark on a rivet. To take it apart, you're usually going to have to loosen the spider from the spider's side of the bakelite disc and remove it. From the other side of the bakelite disc, there will be a gear and a spring, and the spring holds the tension of the gear as the stepper steps. You'll need to loosen the spring, counting the number of turns, taking that off, and then you'll be able to remove the gear. Now you may have to remove the solenoids and other switches and various other hardware that may be in front of it, but once you do so, you're able to clean the whole thing. Cleaning it's a matter of taking a green scotch brite pad and scrubbing the contacts. You want to be very gentle with the spider, however, and that's where I usually use 91% alcohol on a Q-tip or toothbrush and just scrubbing. It takes elbow grease to get the grease off, and usually what I find is that there's a whole bunch of lubricant that's been sprayed in there or dripped in there from an oil can, and it's solidified and prevents the stepper from moving. Reassembly is the hard part. And before you reassemble and after you've cleaned, you need to take a drop of 3-in-1 oil from the red can, drip it on your finger, and then rub around the contacts on the Bakelite disc. This provides a little bit of lubricant to prevent the wear down of the stepper, spider, and the rivets on the stepper disc. This is where taking pictures while you disassemble will help you. You have to reassemble it in the opposite order that you took it apart, and there's really no shortcut to this. Only you were able to count the number of turns on that spring's tension arm, and if you miscount, then the stepper is going to behave erratically. So once you've rebuilt the stepper, it's important to check to see if it steps cleanly between steps, and if it resets cleanly. You know, the problems that initially caused you to disassemble the stepper in the first place. You should also take this time to replace any coil sleeves, or clean them if they're in relatively good shape. If they are the metal or brass coil sleeves, they should typically be replaced. Now, I find it usually very difficult to remove one of the brass coil sleeves. Sometimes I even end up destroying the coil trying to get that coil sleeve out. But sometimes you luck out and it's relatively simple. It's also very easy to flange out the unflanged end of the coil sleeve trying to remove it. But replacing with the nylon sleeves offers much smoother action. and where it's possible, I typically do that. If I don't feel like I'm going to destroy the coil, I'll try to replace it with a nylon sleeve. And that's it for this episode of For Amusement Only. Join us next time. Thank you very much. Thank you again for joining us. You can reach me at foramusementonlypodcast at gmail.com. You can find us online at foramusementonly.libsyn.com or via Stitcher if streaming's your thing, Pocket Casts, iTunes. See you next time.