Hey pinball fans, Butch Payable with Jersey Jack Pinball. I'm often asked what kind of tools do I need if I'm going to be working on my pinball machine. I'll put together this video to kind of answer that question and show you some of the things that I believe are tools of the trade and things that can help you work on maintain and repair your pinball machine. So if you're ready, let's get started. First of all there are lots of hex head screws, hex spacers and hex nuts used above and below the playfield and pinball machines. So one of the first things you're going to want to get is a nice set of nut drivers. I prefer the Craftsman brand, however the Lowe's and Home Depot brands work very well too and sometimes they're easier to find. Nut drivers generally come in a set of seven and each different size is color-coded. That makes it a lot easier easier when you're looking for a specific size. The most commonly used drivers will be the red, yellow, green, and blue. You can buy those separately if you like but they generally are cheaper to buy in a full set like this. First up is the black nut driver. It's a 3 16 inch driver and it's going to be primarily used in our games to drive these very small machine screws that we use to hold our micro switches to assemblies. Next up is the red driver. That's a quarter inch nut driver. It's going to be the most commonly used tool in your toolbox, I guarantee it. It's used for all of these sheet metal screws and machine screws with hex heads on them that we use to hold assemblies together and hold assemblies to the playfield. It's also used for 256 and 440 lock nuts. Next is the yellow driver. That's a 5-16 inch, very commonly used tool also. All of the playfield posts that we use in the games will be driven from above with a 5 16th head hex and they're also used for 632 nylon lock nuts. Next up is the green driver that's 11 32nd inch that's going to be used primarily for 832 nylon lock nuts. Next commonly used one is the blue driver that's a 3-8 inch driver used for 1032 nylon lock nuts primarily. The brown driver is used a little less frequently it's a 7-16 inch and it's used to drive all of these flange nuts that we used to hold on the coin door frames and major brackets inside the cabinet. The other red is a half inch which is really not used very much at all in pinball but it's part of the set. So what could better than a nice set of nut drivers? Why, a set of magnetic nut drivers, that's what. Many times when you're removing or installing a fastener, you need your second hand to hold something into place. Magnetic drivers make it easy to add or remove a fastener with just one hand. And the magnet also serves to keep you from dropping the fastener, which is also a big plus. Klein Tools makes this nice set of magnetic nut drivers with an extended shank. They have a six inch long shank on them, just twice as long as a normal shank, and the magnetic insert in them. So they come in all the same sizes as the ones that we use in our other nut driver set. So very handy to have. And they're usually sold in the electrical section of your like Home Depot and Lowe's and things like that. Or, of course, you can buy them online at Amazon.com and the like. You can buy a set of them or you can buy them individually. I kind of do both. I bought a set and then I buy extras of the yellow and the red because they're just so commonly used and I always like to have one near me when I'm working. I do have one complaint about the Klein nut drivers. Although they are color-coded, just like the Craftsman tools that we showed and talked about earlier, the color code is kind of in a hard to see place. They put a little ring on the top of the handle of each of these to show, you know, what color code they are. So if the tool's laying on its side and it's some distance away and you can't see that ring or this end gets a little bit worn like they tend to get quite often, then from a distance the tools all tend to look the same. So what I did to remedy that was I added a small piece of electrical tape, colored electrical tape, to the shaft of each of these tools to make it easier to tell which color and which size then they are from a distance. The way I did that, I went to Lowe's or Home Depot and their electrical section, they sell a little pack of all these different colored electrical tapes. And so I just cut a small piece off and wrap it around the shaft and it stays on there and I can tell what size tool it is from a distance. Makes it really, really handy. Next up you're going to need a few screwdrivers. You can buy most of what's shown here as I said at Lowe's or Home Depot. However there are a couple of extras that you'll want to buy separately. namely these two on the end here that don't match the rest, a very long shank Phillips number two and a stubby Phillips number two for getting in those tight spaces. You'll also probably want to buy a magnetizer for your screwdrivers. What that does, you put the screwdriver tip through the end here, rub it on there a couple of times and it magnetizes the end of the driver so that it holds, picks up and holds screws very well and keeps one loaded when you go to put it on. Very handy. One word of caution, the size of the screw does not necessarily dictate the size of the screwdriver. For instance, this little bitty micro switch screw we talked about before doesn't use this little bitty driver to drive it. It's got a Phillips head in it. However, when you put this driver in there, it's got a lot of play in it. If you use that screwdriver to drive this screw, you'll tear up the head of the screw and that's very bad. So what it needs is a number one Phillips screwdriver and it fits in tight. That's how you can tell. You put your screwdriver in and you move it around. If it has no play, that's the right driver to use for that Phillips screw. Just to talk a little bit about the size, this is a number zero Phillips screwdriver. This is a number one Phillips screwdriver. A number two, number two, number two. You can see all those heads are the same size. These are getting a little bit smaller, and that's what that number represents. The slot screwdrivers shown here are kind of used more for prying and holding things in place than they are for driving screws because there's very few slot head screws in our pinball machines. Size isn't really critical with the slot drivers. You get what comes in the set, basically. So left to right, we have a 1 1⁄8-inch driver, a 3 1⁄16-inch driver, a 1 1⁄4-inch driver, and lastly a large 3-8 inch driver. One last note on the magnetizer, you can buy magnetic tip screwdrivers. However, this magnetizer will give you a little bit more flexibility because you can rub your screwdriver on the outside of it now and it makes it where it's not magnetic anymore. And there are times when that's handy and your screwdriver needs to not be magnetized. And of course the magnetized tips of screwdrivers are a little bit more expensive When you worked on pinball machines long enough you can tell what color and size nut driver is needed for virtually any hex fastener just by looking at it You also learn that nut drivers don't work in all situations. You simply can't fit them in between or underneath or around assemblies to get at a fastener. Sometimes a ratchet and a socket, maybe a deep socket or a regular socket might be the key tool to use. Maybe you need an extension for that ratchet. Sometimes an open end wrench might be the ticket. Sometimes an ignition wrench might work even better. The difference between a regular open end wrench and an ignition wrench is the thickness of the tool. If you look here edge to edge, sometimes that makes all the difference in the world and being able to get that driver in around a nut where this would be too thick to fit underneath something or between two things so an extra set of ignition or midget wrenches as they're sometimes called is a good addition to your toolbox as you can probably tell I'm getting my money's worth out of that electrical tape purchase I color code every single tool that can do the same sort of work so when I come to a five sixteenths nut that needs to be removed any one of these yellow tools might be the key tool to use to remove it and i can tell at a glance where all my yellow tools are even when they're in a big pile somewhere that's very handy so all my specialty tools every little doodad and gadget that i buy that can take nuts off or do screw and fastener removal i color code it so that it matches and fits right into my collection of tools. Last couple of notes on color coding and commonly used wrenches. I actually recoded the brown nut driver, the 7 16ths, to white. So I put a white stripe tape on each of those. And then everything else in my toolbox that works 7 16ths also gets a white stripe. That way I can use that extra roll of tape that came with my set of tape. I also kind of cheat on the black. So the black driver has a black stripe on it. I put that one on my magnetic 316th driver. However, I also use black for these larger tools. These are the 5-8 inch wrenches and drivers that I use to put legs on and take legs off of pinball machines. Commonly used if you're moving your game around a lot. Not so much otherwise. But everything has a black stripe and I'm able to use the same color code there because of the obvious size difference here. To finish up the driver discussion here, you probably want to get a nice set of bits here that include security torx bits. These are tamper resistant torx drivers. And you're going to get a lot of other security type square and hex bits and things like that with that set. But those are the key ones that you'll want to get are the security torx because those Those are used to hold on screws on the outside of the cabinet to keep people from removing things like plates and locks and things like that. Along with that, you'll want to get one of these drivers. So they accept all those bits. You can take any of those bits, put it in here. This one has three settings on it. One for ratcheting a screw out, ratcheting a screw in, or just for holding the shaft steady and using it like a normal screwdriver. You can also get these kind of nifty little thumb drivers so they'll take any of those bits also and give you a lot of flexibility and very tight spaces to get a screwdriver head in and under devices and things. And last you'll want to get a set of these Bond Hoose Allen wrenches. This is a really nice set. It goes all the way from 0.50 inches all the way up to 3-8 inches. So a lot of different Allen wrenches in this set. And they have a ball driver on the end, which is also very, very handy. What the ball tip drivers allow you to do is come at an Allen head screw from other than straight in, different angles from the sides. I'll bring in this auto launch assembly here. I can kind of demonstrate. So 530 seconds is the size that we use to drive these Allen head screws that hold the coil stop in place. So with this driver here, the ball end on it, I can just kind of snap it in and then I can twist and turn that from other than straight in. With normal Allen wrenches, I have to go exactly straight into the screw in order to get it to turn and not tear up the head. That's very important. The smaller ball tip drivers are very handy when it comes to tightening and loosening set screws that hold the ball devices onto motor shafts and things in our games. So that's what these little bitty ones are used for. I keep a small parts box inside my tool kit here to hold little things that might rattle around or be easily lost. Included inside are a couple of single edge razor blades, an X-Acto knife with some spare blades, that's where I keep my screwdriver magnetizer. You'll want to get a switch adjuster. These you can buy from a number of places online to adjust your switches within the game. This is a flipper adjustment tool which Williams used to make. You can get these in old goodie bags or you know find them on junk tables at shows and things like that or I think you can buy new ones from like Marco something like that. I also have a set of picks in here. You can buy these from just about anywhere. I think I got these from Harbor Freight real cheap they don't need to be anything super special a lot of people make sets of them though but they're very handy for picking and probing and pulling things through holes and wires and such very handy also i have inside a small assortment of punches that come in pretty handy every so often for taking out roll pins and things like that or just you know knocking things out of holes They come in very handy. I have a 1-16 inch, a 3-32 inch, and a 1-8 inch. Those are kind of the common sizes. Again, cheap set. Doesn't have to be anything super expensive. Just handy to have every so often. I like to keep a few shallow containers in my work bag to hold parts when I take things apart. Remember, you're working on an inclined surface a lot of times in pinball machines. It's nice to have someplace to put your screws and things so they don't roll away. I can always use my magnetic driver to retrieve my fasteners kind of lazy style instead of reaching inside. And some assemblies have more parts than others, so something like an old muffin pan works really well to keep things separated and organized when you're taking things apart and putting them back together again. A couple of other odds and ends that are handy to have in your tool bag. To go with your punches, you're going to need a hammer. Just something real small, lightweight, not too expensive. If you get to the point where you think you need a hammer bigger than this to work on a pinball machine, you probably need to step back for a second and rethink things, because I don't think you're doing it right. Also a nice flashlight Powerful bright but not too expensive Nice to have in the bag Last up here is a heat gun used primarily for heat shrink tubing So you repair a wire, a broken wire, you splice it, you put a piece of heat shrink on it and you use this gun to shrink the tubing down snugly around the repair and to insulate it. I have a D-ring attached to this one so that I can clip it on the outside of my bag and carry it easily. Never hurts to have a torpedo level. Again, it doesn't have to be anything too expensive, but nice to have when leveling your game. Use it on the playfield surface itself in a flat spot where you can put it up at the top of the playfield and at the bottom of the playfield and get the little bubble centered just right in both places by adjusting your leg levelers. A nice set of drill bits is always a good thing to have. You can use whatever cordless drill, your brand of choice. You do need to drill a hole every once in a while. And of course a soldering iron. Again, it doesn't have to be something super expensive. This is the one I carry in my tool bag. I have something much nicer on my bench when I'm working on circuit boards and things like that. This has a chisel tip on it, good for soldering lugs and coils and broken wires and things like that. A sponge that I can wet when I get wherever I'm working on something and use it to clean the tip and of course solder to go along with it, either thick and smaller diameter solder. A note on solder, your game ships from the factory completely lead free. That means there's no lead in any of the solder joints anywhere inside the game. Now you can use leaded solder if you want to later, you can add it to the lead free solder, it won't hurt anything. However, that's by your choice, you're adding lead to your game. If you want to continue as it was shipped you use lead-free solder when you fix and repair things in the game. You may have noticed on my heat gun and my soldering iron how I have this little red strap here that holds my power cord. It keeps it from getting unruly on me. Kind of nice. I just bought a pack of these from Home Depot or Harbor Freight. They're little Velcro ties. Now take a tie wrap and use the back end here, use a tie wrap to hold it in place, and then when you wrap your cord up and get ready to go somewhere, you can just spin this around and it holds your cord in place and you're ready to go. Moving on to other commonly used tools, this is one that you're going to use quite a bit, it's probably not a good place to try and skimp on price. You want to buy yourself a pretty good multimeter. This is a flute brand. It has multiple settings on it for checking current. You can test diodes. You can test capacitors, check for continuity, check resistances and ohms, and measure voltages in both alternating current and direct current, AC-DC environments. Very handy tool. Good place to spend a little bit of money. You can look for these on eBay and Amazon. You can shop around a little bit, but you're going to spend a decent amount of money on a good multimeter, but it's worth it. You will use it quite a bit. Kind of an obscure but handy little thing to have in your tool bag is one of these infrared detector cards. I've kind of turned the background light down just a little bit to make this easier to demonstrate, but they have a test area on the end of them that will actually convert infrared light into visible light. So you kind of charge them up by holding them under a light or out in the sun for about a minute, and then you can bring them into your game and put them in front of infrared LEDs that we use in our Optos throughout the game to see if the infrared LED is in fact radiating. And that is a really important thing to know when you're trying to troubleshoot an Opto. So this brand is MCM Electronics. I bought it some years ago. I checked online just recently and they don't even make them anymore. So I guess I've been in the hobby a little bit too long. However, other companies make equivalent products now. They're just a little bit different shape, different color, that sort of thing. They'll do the same job. That's the important thing. So to demonstrate this, I'm going to use a remote control which uses infrared light also. And I'm just going to point this at the LED, the infrared LED in the end of this remote and I'm going to trigger it a few times and you'll see how I can tell that my infrared remote is actually working, that infrared LED is transmitting. That's really good to know when you're troubleshooting your optos. A lot of wiring in a game so you're going to want to get yourself a pretty good pair of wire cutters. This is a Crescent brand, pretty good quality. They have a little spring load in the handle that opens them up automatically and makes it a lot easier on your hands. It doesn't get fatigued so easily. They've also got a nice flush cut head so that when you have wires that are protruding, you can cut them off very close to where they come through and cut them basically flush. That's what that's supposed to do. Very handy tool. You'll need to strip different sized wires also in preparation for soldering and crimping and making new connections. So you need a good wire stripper. This is my tool of choice. It's made by Ideal. It's called a Strip Master. It's basically a spring-loaded handle action kind of wire stripper. You have different size blades in here for different holes for the different size of wire. So I've got an 18 gauge piece of wire here. I put it through the 18 gauge hole there as far as I want it stripped off and then I basically just do that and strip it. Makes a nice clean strip. handy tool but a little bit on the pricey side. A cheaper alternative is this vice grip wire stripping tool. It has similar markings to the other tool on the nose here to show you what gauge of wire would go in which hole here. However it says it's made for solid wire. This is stranded wire so in order to keep from breaking some of the conductors I'm going to go with a little bit higher and go up to like a 14 gauge even though this is 18 gauge and you strip just like so. This is kind of a multi-tool also so it does things other than just strip wire. If you look into the jaws here you can see back in the back here you're able to crimp lugs and spades and things like that on the end of wires with those insulated connectors on them. You're also able to use it as needle nose pliers. They got little needle nose pliers out at the end. And the really cool feature is the screw cutting capability here. So you can thread a screw into here and then cut it to a certain length so you can make long screws into shorter ones and that's very handy thing to be able to do from time to time. Shown here is a really flexible tool that I've had for years it's called a BCT-1 It's used to do simple crimping for some other different types of connectors that are used in our games this tool and many other crimpers very specialized ones can be bought online in various places Waldham makes them Sergeant Tools makes them Ed at Great Plains Electronics sells all the different kinds and he's usually got them at a pretty good price. This is a very economical, low-priced crimping tool. If you're not going to be doing a ton of crimping, it's a good one to have in your tool bag. We're getting into the home stretch now, pliers. Home Depot and Lowe's sell these sets of mini pliers like the one I've shown here. Some of course are going to be more useful than others but you know they're cheaper to buy in a set than they are separately so you just kind of get what you get in the set. I like the long slender needle nose those work really well for getting into places where my fingers can't reach. The regular needle nose are also very useful. These duckbill pliers very useful also for straightening the blades on leaf switches and such when they get kinked. You can just pinch them in there and make them flat again. Very handy. The tools on the end here don't get as much use. I've just as soon used the flush cutters in most cases so they don't get a lot of use. My favorite pliers among these though are the bent nose needle nose pliers. They have a nice smooth bend in the nose here and the jaws and they work really well for removing hairpin clips and E clips off of shafts and different assemblies like this auto launch assembly. There's a hairpin clip there. What I do is take away the nose curves and I use a good portion of that to grab the clip and it's very securely held within the jaws and little chance when I pull it apart of the clip coming loose and flying off somewhere. When I use normal needle nose to pull off a hairpin clip I've got it in the end of the jaw here and a lot of times what happens in the pulling apart process it snaps out of the jaws and the pin goes flying off to who knows where. Ask me how I know that. Anyway, so I'm going to use this tool to put it back on again. Also, again, position the pin in the back of the jaws and just snap it into place. Very easy. Handy, handy tool. Not a lot of need for larger pliers when you're working on a pinball machine. However, it's It's never a bad idea to have a good pair of channel locks handy and a nice pair of vice grips. And of course if you need to do any heavy duty cutting, that's the bad part about those flush cut wire cutters is they are very fragile in the jaws. So if you're going to cut anything heavy duty you should have a good pair of heavy duty wire cutters with you. A few other odds and ends. The hex tool that you use for the roto lock in the backbox of our games comes inside the game, it's good to keep it in your tool bag. A nice folding razor blade knife, very good to have, every so often you need one. Clips onto the outside of the bag, very nice too. Good pair of scissors, don't have to be super expensive again, but surprise how often you need a pair. And probably the most useful tool of all, the telescopic magnetic picker upper. This is a very nice tool to have for picking up a lost screw that drops down inside somewhere in the play field where you can't reach it, for holding things in place while you're driving them with another screwdriver or something like that. When you're pulling something loose, making sure that it doesn't fall off and into the game somewhere. Very very handy tool. You should always have a few zip ties with you in different sizes. As you go through and work on things in a pinball machine, under the play field in particular, going to be cutting some of those to separate wires to get things out of your way and you'll have to redress things when you're done. So it's good to have a nice little supply to retie things up, redress things after you're finished repairing. A little set of hemostats here is never a bad idea to have either. These are kind of like a locking needle nose scissor of sorts to hold things together here while you're working on them and to hold things in place while you're soldering and things like that. An old cheap paintbrush, not a bad idea to have either, dusting off some of those assemblies underneath the playfield. You get a lot of that black dust that seems to accumulate under the playfield. It's a good way to kind of clean things up as you're working on them and maintaining your game. Bottom of the bag, the last few things you might want to toss in. Sharpies are always really handy to have to mark things, connectors and such, as you take them loose so it's easy to put back together. alligator clip wires are nice to have too to extend to your multimeter, make it easier to measure things and hold on, clip on to leads rather than trying to hold them and look at the meter at the same time. And of course, electrical tape, not to be used as any kind of a permanent solution. I hate electrical tape in pinball machines. However, in a pinch you might need to insulate something very quickly and full intentions of coming back later and fixing it right with heat shrink tubing and a proper splice. So nice to have just for emergencies. And just when you think you've seen it all, this is the all right here. Oh God, that's a bad joke. Anyway, you're going to need to scribe metal every so often, make a mark on metal, or perhaps make a spotting hole in the back of pinball playfield in the wood. So an awl is a very good tool to have along also. This is what my tool bag looks like when it's all put together. It's a Husky brand bag that I bought at Home Depot some time back. It's got all kinds of compartments in it. Very handy to have. It keeps everything organized. The more organized you are with your tools, the less frustrated you'll be when you're working on pinball machines. I guarantee it. And you know I'm an engineer, so what can I say? Everything in its place. This bag has a nice clip feature so you can take the handle loose and you can get inside very easily. microfiber towel here and my parts bins all my tools inside I incorporated a soldering iron holder into one of these D rings here so that I can put a hot soldering iron in there and keep it no problem as I turn this around you see there's my multimeter and my small parts case and my pliers my drivers are all inside. Keep rotating it around. There's my heat gun that clips to the outside also so I can carry the whole thing around. Some more drivers, my bits down in there. And the last side has some of my more commonly used tools like ratchets, my flush cut wire cutters, my magnetic picker upper, scissors, those sorts of things, level, knife. Anything that can clip on is a plus. So anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this tour of my work bag and the tools of the trade that I recommend if you're going to work on pinball machines. And we'll see you on the next video. Take care and keep flipping. .