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Episode 393 - Multi-Bingo Progress - ART

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·23m 2s·analyzed·Apr 6, 2017
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Analysis

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TL;DR

Nick Baldridge details Multi-Bingo cabinet art finalization and structural modifications for playfield swapping.

Summary

Nick Baldridge discusses the cabinet art project for his Multi-Bingo homebrew machine, detailing his iterative design process using stencils from classic bingo games (United Circus, Bally Beach Club) and ongoing restoration work. He covers playfield electrical repairs, structural modifications for modular display swaps, a custom drawer build with Steve Smith, and acknowledgment of documentation support from Phil Hooper and the bingo community.

Key Claims

  • The stencils on vintage bingo machines are significantly more detailed and intricate than flipper game stencils from the same era, often featuring one or more additional colors.

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, describing his experience cutting stencils from United Circus and Beach Club bingos

  • The Multi-Bingo donor cabinet (Silver Sails) has paint that is relatively well-preserved and not heavily faded, with primary damage confined to the front panel.

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, describing cabinet condition assessment

  • The mini display units originally planned for Multi-Bingo playfields are no longer manufactured and have been out of stock for an extended period.

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, explaining the need to redesign display mounting systems

  • Jones plugs are preferred over Molex connectors for the secondary cabinet connection system due to mechanical reliability and personal preference.

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, justifying design choice for playfield-to-head connector

  • Steve Smith, Nick's bingo mentor, is a skilled woodworker and helped design and build a custom drawer for the Multi-Bingo using repurposed original bingo lock bars.

    high confidence · Nick Baldridge, crediting collaboration with Steve Smith

Notable Quotes

  • “I want it to be eye catching. I want it to be attractive. If you're looking at it from across the room or across the lineup, I want your eye to be drawn to it.”

    Nick Baldridge @ Early in cabinet design discussion — Articulates core design philosophy for the Multi-Bingo cabinet aesthetic

  • “Not being an artist I have a real big problem doing anything art related. So making my own stencil was actually way beyond me.”

    Nick Baldridge @ Describing failed design iteration — Explains why he abandoned the custom art approach and turned to mashup of classic stencils

  • “The stencils on bingos are so incredibly detailed and beautiful they often had at least one more color than flipper games at the same time period and they're very intricate.”

    Nick Baldridge @ Mid-episode stencil discussion — Highlights technical and artistic superiority of bingo cabinet art from historical perspective

  • “It's a secure physical connection. You've got a mechanical component there that I enjoy. And it is pretty gratifying to plug in a Jones plug versus plugging in a molex connector.”

    Nick Baldridge @ Near end, discussing connector preferences — Reveals both practical and emotional reasoning behind technical design choices

  • “These games are documented very well and it's thanks to the efforts of Phil and many members of the bingo community. So thank you, everybody.”

    Nick Baldridge @ Closing section — Public recognition of collaborative community effort in documentation and restoration knowledge-sharing

Entities

Nick BaldridgepersonMulti-BingogameSteve SmithpersonPhil HooperpersonUnited CircusgameBally Beach ClubgameSilver SailsgameRyan ClaytorpersonChadpersonSophieperson

Signals

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Nick prioritizes eye-catching, visually attractive cabinet design meant to draw attention from across a game lineup, leading him to abandon personal art attempts in favor of mashup of classic proven stencil designs.

    high · Detailed explanation of iterative design approach, rejection of original artwork concept, and final decision to combine United Circus, Beach Club, and third stencil based on proven visual appeal

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Detailed observation of the technical complexity and multi-layer construction of vintage bingo stencils, noting they are more intricate than contemporaneous flipper game art and often included additional colors.

    high · Extensive discussion of stencil layer complexity while cutting United Circus and Beach Club designs

  • ?

    design_innovation: Nick is developing a modular playfield display system with removable/swappable mini displays, implementing wooden frame mounts and screw-based attachment instead of glue/double-sided tape due to display part obsolescence.

    high · Extended discussion of display unavailability forcing redesign toward modularity; planned wooden frame construction and screw-down methodology

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Multi-Bingo undergoes structural modifications including secondary Jones plug installation for internal playfield-to-head disconnection, addressing accessibility needs specific to multi-playfield swapping design.

    high · Detailed explanation of secondary Jones plug system and rationale for keeping mechanical connections over Molex alternatives

  • ?

    community_signal: Active knowledge-sharing and mentorship within bingo community: Steve Smith providing woodworking guidance, Phil Hooper coordinating game documentation efforts, Ryan Claytor offering design feedback, Chad photographing reference machines.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.069

0:00
What's that sound? It's For Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to For Amusement Only. This is Nick Baldridge.
0:13
Well, lots of things have been going on. I know I say that every time, but two weeks is a very long time.
0:22
My head is still used to the daily routine, So it always feels like there's a lot going on. Been doing some more work out on other folks' games. Getting some more up and running.
0:41
And working on some problems. Most of those are solid state, though. So today, what I wanted to talk about was the multi. You've heard me say for the past 4,000 episodes, or however long it's been, that I've been working on the cabinet art for the Multi, so I wanted to give you a breakdown of what exactly I've been through and where I'm going next. first I tried working on a design that would incorporate a little piece from every bingo that Valley and United created many of the games were done in about a one to two decade span and then production slowed down so I figured this was at least semi-achievable.
1:39
But the art styles between all the different games are just way too different. But I spent weeks working on that before I finally abandoned it. So then I decided I would make my own.
1:59
For Amusement Only
organization

high · Multiple credits to collaborators and explicit thanks to Phil Hooper and bingo community for documentation work

  • ?

    product_concern: Mini display units originally specified for Multi-Bingo playfields are no longer manufactured and have been unavailable for extended period, forcing design pivot toward modular display architecture.

    high · Nick states displays are 'out of stock and apparently have been for some time' and expresses concern about long-term sourcing

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Silver Sails donor cabinet exhibits relatively good original paint preservation with minimal fading; primary wear concentrated on front panel where most mechanical stress occurs.

    high · Detailed assessment of cabinet condition, paint integrity, and localized damage patterns

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Nick is tumbling and reconditioning original hardware including corroded coin return mechanism, balancing desire for nice appearance with practicality of incremental improvement.

    high · Discussion of hardware tumbling process and realistic expectations for part restoration results

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Nick expresses strong preference for Jones plugs over Molex connectors based on mechanical reliability, tactile satisfaction, and confidence with the technology, despite functional equivalence.

    high · Extended justification of Jones plug choice including statements about 'gratifying' mechanical feel and preference for secure physical connections

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Nick plans to fabricate custom male/female Jones plug pairs and secondary connector systems to support internal playfield swapping architecture.

    medium · Statement about comfort fabricating new Jones plug sets for internal cabinet connections

    • And making my own proved to be futile. Not being an artist I have a real big problem doing anything art related. So making my own stencil was actually way beyond me. Because the main thing that I want this game to be is eye catching. I want it to be attractive. If you're looking at it from across the room or across the lineup, I want your eye to be drawn to it. And with my own artwork, that just wouldn't happen.
    2:38
    So realizing that I couldn't emulate the masters, the artists who made these beautiful stencils, I turned my attention to another area. But this was also a period of wasted development here. so the next thing and final thing that I settled on was to use several different stencils and kind of put them together which is exactly what I did so I ended up using the left side from United's circus.
    3:20
    The right side is Bally's Beach Club. And then the front was from a third game. The front, I haven't shown any pictures of the stencil yet. And I plan to release some photos once I've actually got the game painted. so United Circus it's really interesting to cut these stencils because you can see how detailed they really are and the stencils on bingos are so incredibly detailed and beautiful they often had at least one more color than flipper games at the same time period and they're very intricate.
    4:12
    So these multiple layers stack to form just beautiful artwork. It's really quite incredible to look at a bingo stencil and see how they're done. So, as a reminder, the multi-bingo is comprised of the lower cabinet from a silver sales. the paint on the silver sails portion is actually, for the most part, pretty well intact not only that, it wasn't really faded it's in relatively decent shape I do have some fill and sand to do on the front panel that piece took the majority of the abuse, which is normal so there's some wear down to the wood around some of the button surrounds, and of course there's the typical digging and gouging that happen when you have a shooter rod that's installed at high tension into wood. That's just what happens. So I'm going to go ahead and prep the cab. That's the next step. And prime and paint. so let's talk about a little more about the stencil so United Circus the design is a giraffe whose long neck extends up the side of the head on the left side of the cabinet As the giraffe's neck is extending up, you see flags coming off of the tops of tents at the circus.
    6:01
    Really cool image. and as I was cutting the stencil, Sophie came up and asked if she could have the giraffe cut out. She wanted to keep it in her room. So I said, sure. So she's got a disembodied giraffe's head that she looks at every day in her room.
    6:23
    Pretty interesting. So the lower cabinet, which will be covering this beautiful silver sails graphic that I was talking about, there is a lion behind a cage, a seal balancing a ball on its nose, and a clown standing in front of the seal. The stencil has been modified slightly from the United original. All of the stencils have been modified to have different colors.
    6:52
    I really want to thank a lot of people for allowing me to bounce these ideas and this artwork off of them. and my friend Ryan Claytor really helped me with the coloration.
    7:08
    So, the circus is on the left-hand side. As it carries around the front, there's the mystery stencil, and then over on the right-hand side, Beach Club. Chad, whom you've heard on this podcast before from the York Show fame, was kind enough to supply me with some photos of the cabinet. Unfortunately, the photos that exist on the web are very low resolution and taken from odd angles and far away, so I asked if he could photograph his game for me, and he was kind enough to oblige.
    7:48
    So I was able to take that and set it up for use on my game. Again, the stencil has been modified, so if you look at it, the image itself is from Beach Club. However, the coloration matches that of the circus, which has also been modified with its own coloration. So the stencil for the game will be unique.
    8:16
    From the left-hand side, you'll have this inviting circus motif. From the right-hand side, you'll have this relaxing beach motif. and then from the front there will be an image to kind of, sort of, tie it all together. But I really like the design and how it has come together, in my head at least.
    8:39
    So, that's probably enough stencil talk, although there's much more to say. Not yet, really. All the stencils have been cut, everything's ready to go. I just need to, as I said, prep, sand, prime, and spray, and it should be good to go. The side rails have been removed. All the hardware has been removed from the front of the cabinet, and the interior side rails have also been removed. Those on this donor game were, they had a bunch of crud that had built up in them from over the years. I'm not sure if it was rust or what. It was a very fine powder, and occasionally a little puff would fall out onto the play field, and no amount of cleaning would get it all out of there. So when I took them off, I was pretty excited about that because I have a brand new set, a new old stock set of bingo side rails and interior rails. So I'll be installing those before I paint. Those are painted along with the sides of the cab. So it's hard to tell from a casual glance that those are actually metal, but that's what they are.
    10:10
    It should look beautiful. I've got all the hardware tumbling as we speak. Hopefully that will come out pretty nicely. There were some parts that were rusted, like the coin return, which is always rusted.
    10:28
    So I'm going to see how it looks. But hopefully it'll clean up okay. And that's really all I want. It doesn't have to look brand new, but it would be nice if it looked nice. So that's what I'm aiming for. And of course I can always improve that over time if I want to. that's a lot easier than, say, repainting the whole cab. So I'm going to knock out as much as possible at this time, though, while I'm in there working on it.
    11:05
    So that's all the good news. Here's the bad news. There is a piece of bad news. As I was taking the playfield out, I forgot that on the right-hand side, one of the apron displays, the power cable for that was very taut. It was very tight. It has to wind its way around a lot of hardware under the playfield to prevent the shutter from just ripping it off So I had done this with clamps and down at the bottom it goes from a small electronics connector I think it's called a JTAG connector, to a USB-A connector. Well, there was a clamp a few inches above that USB-A connector, and the last time I had experimented with this, I had lifted the playfield vertically. Everything was fine.
    12:06
    That USB-A connector plugs into a female USB-A connector, which is an extension, which leads to the power. for the display.
    12:17
    All well and good. Everything's fine. However, when I lifted the playfield vertical this time, that connector got caught and broke off. In fact, it ripped out one of the pins inside the USB-A connector.
    12:32
    So, I've got a new USB-A connector shell along with an extension cable with the new JTAG connector, and I will be setting up some extra slack into that system so that it won't rip off in the future. As I was looking at connectors, I thought I might go ahead and order some more mini displays so that I could set up these additional playfields.
    12:59
    Unfortunately, the company that made them appears to no longer be making them, possibly. At any rate, they're out of stock and apparently have been for some time, and that has me a little concerned. So I'm going to need to come up with a way to make the displays themselves modular, which I hadn't bothered to do before, thinking that I'd be spending the money in just installing new displays on these different playfields. fields. But if I don't do that and instead make the displays themselves modular, then it will make storing the play fields a lot easier. I won't have to worry about ripping off those displays or damaging them by scratching them against something. So So, it should be good in the long run. I just have to experiment.
    14:01
    And experimentation is good. So, what I'm planning to do is to build a wooden frame to surround them, screw that into the playfield. Right now, I have everything glued to the playfield as minimally as possible and taped with double-sided tape. instead I'll remove that and then attempt to just screw things down from the top of the playfield and that way I can just remove the displays and swap them over to another playfield speaking of playfield swaps I took the playfield out as part of this as you might have gathered and there were some wiring issues to clean up some wires that I added last of all managed to get themselves tangled around some other wires in there. They weren't part of the bundle. I didn't re-lace the bundle like a fool after I added these wires. So what happens? That wire winds up winding around and through other wires that it shouldn't. So I had to do some de-soldering, re-soldering to fix that. But I'm in the process of re-lacing those cables now. and it should never be a problem again, at least for this playfield.
    15:24
    While I have the playfield out, I will go ahead and wire up additional playfields using this one as a guide. The nice thing is that I'll have the complete map there right in front of me that I'll be able to take measurements from and install clamps and so forth in the same areas. So it should all work out, but it's going to take a little bit of effort.
    15:48
    Um, so, swapping playfields, yes, that's what I was saying. The, uh, issue with swapping playfields is you have to pull the game away from the wall. Uh, that's because in bingos, there are Jones plugs in the head that, uh, allow you to remove the playfield from the cabinet.
    16:09
    Well, that's fine in a typical bingo, however, this is no typical bingo. So what I'm thinking of doing is installing a secondary set of Jones plugs inside the cabinet. And what this would allow me to do is to lift the playfield, unplug the Jones plugs from inside the cabinet, and then swap out my playfield, plug them back in inside the cabinet, and then away I go.
    16:38
    The secondary set of Jones plugs would fish up into the head and plug in just like before. The reason for keeping that is so that I can separate the head from the body. The wires still have to feed to the switch processing boards and lamp driver boards and coil drivers, everything, that are up in the head. So I need that connection and I don want to have to install some Molex connector or whatever although I certainly could And it been suggested to me to just go ahead and do that But I like using Jones plugs It's a secure physical connection. You've got a mechanical component there that I enjoy. And it is pretty gratifying to plug in a Jones plug versus plugging in a molex connector. so I'll likely retain that just because I think it's cool and I'm comfortable doing it. So at any rate, what that means is that I'll need to fabricate, you know, a new set of male and female Jones plugs in order to do this. But I'm comfortable with that too, and everything should be fine. It's also something I don't have to do. so I may just let it go. Who knows?
    18:11
    However, I do have some new Jones plugs to install otherwise, and that's from the drawer. Steve Smith, my good friend and bingo mentor, he's the one who got me into these games in the first place,
    18:26
    offered to help me out with the multi in a couple different ways. I am fairly clueless when it comes to woodworking, and he is quite a good woodworker. And he offered to show me how to make a drawer. I took him up on that and went over there and learned how to do that.
    18:52
    And he was able to take my drawing and make it a reality very quickly. So that is pretty exciting. I've got a very nice drawer ready to go. It uses cut-up, original bingo lock bars that were discarded for one reason or another.
    19:19
    And I have space for ten overflow buttons on top of the regular Magic Screen complement and the normal pick-a-play buttons, which are on the front of the game. So, that's pretty exciting. I've got that to put together. It'll be its own little puzzle.
    19:42
    Switch stacks will mount underneath of the buttons and the lock bar pieces, and then all the wiring will feed back to the Jones plugs. So, my plan is to have one female Jones plug in the bottom of the drawer, another female Jones plug inside the cabinet, and then a male Jones plug that runs from the drawer to the cabinet, and that way I can unplug either end and quickly unhook the drawer. It's going to attach with four screws to the cab underneath, and we'll see how that goes. And special thanks go out to Phil Hooper. I have some code-related things that I need to go through and clean up once I have the cabinet refinished. he has been providing me with some updates on portioning circuitry where either the units were slightly incorrect or just not documented yet. So thanks to Phil and thanks to all the people who are working with him to get good documentation for all these games. It's really quite incredible. These games are documented very well and it's thanks to the efforts of Phil and many members of the bingo community. So thank you, everybody.
    21:18
    So I'll be going through and adjusting portioning on these games, and things should be looking pretty good here very soon.
    21:30
    I still have something to do in the back box of the game. The back box, as a reminder, was a touchdown back box. So it's nice and tall, and it's going to be refinished with that new stencil as well. However, I've got to do something about the monitor and the bezel that surrounds it. It's certainly serviceable, but I'd like to put something a little fancier in there, so I'm investigating what's going on with that.
    22:10
    Well, that's all for tonight. I've got to get out there and build up the cabinet. I've got some bondoing to do, some sanding to do.
    22:21
    So, trying to get the cab ready for Prime. So, we'll see how far I get tonight. Thanks very much for listening. My name again is Nick Baldridge. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com, or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS1. 724-246-4671.
    22:43
    You can follow me on Facebook, on Twitter, at Bingo Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram, also at Bingo Podcast.
    22:50
    And you can listen to me on the website, which is foramusementonly.libsyn.com. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.