Episode 410 - Fox Hunt on Fire, 1934 Exhibit Lightning 36

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·22m 15s·analyzed·Nov 30, 2017

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.024

TL;DR

EM restoration struggles and a deep dive into 1934 Exhibit Lightning 36's innovative electromechanical design.

Summary

Nicholas Backbone discusses his ongoing restoration of a 1940 Chicago Coin Fox Hunt, detailing electrical troubleshooting challenges with burned-out step-up coils and non-functional lamps, including a dangerous incident involving a 120-volt jumper wire that caught fire. He also provides a detailed overview of the 1934 Exhibit Lightning 36, an electromechanical flipperless game that was a licensed copy of Harry Williams' Contact, highlighting its Playmatic progressive scoring feature and design differences from the original.

Key Claims

The 1940 Chicago Coin Fox Hunt has two burned-out step-up coils that are sealed units (coils in a can) with no accessible windings.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone describing his multimeter measurements and coil diagnostics
The lamp failure in Fox Hunt is likely caused by overfusing of the lamps and coil circuit, which allowed older coils to burn out before the fuse could blow.
medium confidence · Nicholas Backbone speculating on root cause based on circuit design and fuse characteristics
Exhibit Lightning 36 was originally to be called Contact but was renamed Lightning due to royalty disputes between Pacific Amusement Company and Williams.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone citing Encyclopedia of Pinball, Volume 2 via Internet Pinball Database
Exhibit Lightning 36 features a stool pigeon tilt mechanism identical to PAMCO's Contact design.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone describing the tilt mechanism in detail
Steve Young at Pinball Resource could not identify replacement coils for the Fox Hunt because the old coil wrapper numbers don't match existing catalogs.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone recounting his interaction with Pinball Resource
Exhibit Lightning 36's barrier design features lightning bolt shapes unlike PAMCO's rounded design, affecting ball action and nudge physics.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone describing visual and mechanical differences between the two versions
Williams later redesigned Exhibit's Lightning game because having near-identical Contact and Lightning 36 versions was becoming problematic.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone citing Encyclopedia of Pinball, Volume 2
Exhibit Lightning 36 uses a bell auditory cue that rings when the contact/lightning hole is hit and balls are being kicked.
high confidence · Nicholas Backbone describing the electromechanical bell feature

Notable Quotes

“Well, stupid me, I had, again, left that jumper in place and forgotten about it. Well, when smoke started pouring out of the machine, I thought that I might be in trouble. And it was a lot of smoke.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~mid-episode — Dramatic recount of a dangerous incident where a 120-volt jumper wire caused a fire inside the machine, illustrating the real hazards of electromechanical restoration work
“don't make that stupid mistake that I made and leave a jumper wire in place unless it's something which will not harm the game if you were to turn it on normally, like a dummy, the next day.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~mid-episode — Safety PSA from Backbone to the EM restoration community, warning against leaving test jumpers in live circuits
“I've suffered with this meter long enough.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~early-mid episode — Indicates Backbone is planning to replace his unreliable digital multimeter, a tool crucial for EM diagnostics
“They don't have the same characteristics. Yes, they're just wire that's wrapped around a core, and then it pulls a plunger, or it pulls a relay armature plate, or something of that nature, but the package that they're in is quite different.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~early episode — Technical insight into how 1940s coils differ fundamentally from modern coils in packaging and behavior
“It uses the same stool pigeon Tilt Forum that Pamco's version of contact uses, and that is a little ball that sits on a pedestal and is pushed back onto the pedestal at the start of each game.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~late episode — Details the unusual stool pigeon tilt mechanism, a characteristic feature of Contact and Lightning 36
“Lightning was the first design produced by Exhibit of their own, and it was the first electromechanical game that they made.”
Nicholas Backbone @ ~late episode — Establishes Lightning 36 as historically significant as Exhibit's inaugural proprietary design
“The design of the barriers that prevent the ball from going out of that center area, that area where the ball is actually kicked, are different in the exhibit version than they are in the PAMCO version. They look much more like lightning bolts in the exhibit version, which I think looks cool.”

Entities

Nicholas BackbonepersonHarry Williamsperson Steve YoungpersonChicago Coin Fox HuntgameExhibit Lightning 36gameContactgameRobo FrenzygameWilliams Line DrivegamePinball ResourcecompanyAPB Enterprises

Signals

?
restoration_signal: Backbone identifies two burned-out step-up coils (sealed units/coils in a can) in 1940 Chicago Coin Fox Hunt, likely due to overfusing of combined lamp-coil circuit.
high · Detailed multimeter readings showing zero resistance on coils; analysis of fuse characteristics and coil package design
?
restoration_signal: Six-volt lamp circuit in Fox Hunt non-functional despite transformer providing 6V (dropping to 5.5V in circuit); root cause still unidentified after extensive diagnostics.
high · Backbone measured every socket, tested continuity on bare copper wire, tested with 9V battery across sockets; no switch issues found
?
product_concern: Backbone's digital multimeter is unreliable, requiring 3-5 attempts to get consistent readings, prompting decision to replace it.
high · Repeated complaints about meter accuracy throughout restoration work; explicit statement 'I've suffered with this meter long enough'
?
restoration_signal: 120-volt jumper wire left in place across Electro-Lock during testing caught fire when machine was powered on, consuming the wire but causing minimal ancillary damage.
high · Detailed account of incident including smoke, fire in playfield, and aftermath inspection
?
supply_chain_signal: Pinball Resource unable to source replacement coil for 1940 Fox Hunt because original coil wrapper number doesn't match existing catalogs.
high · Backbone contacted Steve Young at Pinball Resource who confirmed inability to cross-reference old coil numbers

Topics

EM restoration and troubleshootingprimaryCoil repair and replacementprimary1934 electromechanical flipperless gamesprimaryHarry Williams' Contact design historysecondarySafety in restoration worksecondaryGame layout and playfield designsecondaryDiagnostic tools and multimeterssecondaryLicensing and IP disputes in early pinballmentioned

Sentiment

mixed(0.45)— Backbone expresses frustration with technical troubleshooting challenges and tool reliability, but maintains enthusiasm for restoration work and upcoming projects. The fire incident is recounted with humor and self-deprecation. Genuine excitement about acquiring the Williams Line Drive and discussing historical games is evident.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.067

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 uh i have been working very hard on that 1940 chicago coin fox hunt and uh i've got to say it's not done yet so uh when last we spoke i believe I had started on the electrical portion, just barely. I've gone through and everything is working now except for two step-up coils, which I believe are burned out, and none of the lamps are working. I did have them flash briefly and now none are working. So I suspected that I was getting some kind of voltage drop down by one of the earliest lamps in the circuit, and I went through and measured every single socket to make sure there wasn't any weird amount of resistance on any one. I also took a 9-volt battery and clipped it across every single socket to make sure that everything was good. I also measured continuity on the bare copper wire that ties together one side of all the sockets, both in the backbox and under the playfield, and everything's great, and yet nothing will light. So typically what would be the problem would be a switch in a relay somewhere, you know, a tilt relay or something of that nature. Well, I thought that too. None of the switches have any, uh, uh, bearing on the lamps, uh, at least any bearing outside of the amount of, uh, voltage, which is applied. So there's a, there is a tilt relay, and that cuts off both the coils and most of the lamps. There is a tilt lamp in this game. So, okay, work your way back from there, right? That switch has to be, that lights the tilt light, has to be normally open, and then when the relay changes state, it's going to be closed. Simple enough. Will not light. So went back and measured at the transformer to see, okay, the lamps are six volt lamps. It's got to be generating at least six volts on the six volt circuit. The six volt winding rather on the transformer. Measure that it's exactly six volts, like not even a hair above, and it should be a little bit higher. By the time it gets to the circuit, it's about five and a half. So there's a voltage drop, and that's normal, and five and a half volts should be enough potential for it to light a little bit. So I'm pretty curious as to what the problem might be, and I haven't found the solution yet. That said, I think I have finally had enough of my meter, because I've gone through and measured all this stuff, as I was talking about, and with the meter that I'm using, it takes me three, four, five tries for it to give me a reading that makes any sense whatsoever. Um, this is just a digital multimeter and, um, in the early days I was complaining about this meter and, uh, anyway, I think it's, I think it's time. So I've suffered with this meter long enough. so more on that at a later date but at the moment what I think I know is that there are two coils shorted and they both happen to be step up coils unfortunately they're the main action within the game as far as the coils go in driving these lamps which should be lit as well as handling things like the Mystery Award step-up apparently doesn't cut off unless the points coil steps up. That's a bit of a problem if the points step-up coil doesn't fire because it shorted. So what I think happened, here's my assumption, somebody overfused the lamps and coil circuit. In this game, as in many older games, the lamps and coils are fused together, single fuse. This means that it's a pretty high value fuse, and if you over fuse it, it's going to happen, things are going to burn. In fact with a normal value fuse things still might burn just because it depends on what fails and how and how quickly that fuse blows And unfortunately they don blow super fast so it quite likely that you burn something up if you relying on that fuse to catch everything. So here's the other problem. The coils that are used in this game are very old, you know, 1940. They're not really anything like modern coils. They don't have the same characteristics. Yes, they're just wire that's wrapped around a core, and then it pulls a plunger, or it pulls a relay armature plate, or something of that nature, but the package that they're in is quite different. It's really not a problem, but there is one coil that was robbed from this game, and then those two shorted coils. The coil that was robbed is in the trip bank, and the trip bank is a whopping three relays. It's pretty amusing, because all three of those relays are reset by just a vertical bar which hangs off of the baffle. I might have mentioned this last week, and forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but it's interesting. It's a setup that I hadn't seen before. So, I did something stupid, and this is the first time I've done something quite this stupid, and in fact, it was extremely dangerous, so I thought I would just bring that up here, because what better place to publicly shame myself than on my own podcast? Well, as part of my troubleshooting, there is an Electro-Lock, a lock relay or a hold relay. And this hold relay has a single switch. And as part of troubleshooting the lamps and the coils, because at one point the coils weren't working, I jumpered the Electro-Lock. well if tilt was not thrown there was a fault in the game which caused power to go where it shouldn't go or to go where it should go but for longer than it should so that relay tried to fire immediately the tilt relay And when it did, it would cut off the ElectraLock, which is normal behavior. So the last thing that I did the night before was to jumper the ElectraLock as part of testing something else. And the trip relay for tilt I had tripped, so manually. So the play field is sitting upright. I'm looking at the tilt relay. It's tripped. the Electrolok cuts off power to the entire game. At that point, I was assuming it was coil power, but here's where I made a critical error. No, it's not coil power. It's 120 volts. So I have a jumper wire, which is jumping 120 volts through the tilt relay, which really wants to drop. and it can't because I pushed in the baffle with the coin slide. I had lowered the play field the night before. So the next day I get in there and I decide the first thing I'm going to do is test it and see if things still behave the same way. Well, stupid me, I had, again, left that jumper in place and forgotten about it. Well, when smoke started pouring out of the machine, I thought that I might be in trouble. And it was a lot of smoke. And so I lift the playfield a little bit just to see what's going on. And there's a raging fire in there. The fire had consumed the jumper wire. Of course, I shut the power off. I have everything on a switched outlet. So just switch the outlet off. and then I said, hmm, this is interesting. Well, it finished consuming the jumper wire, and luckily it stopped. In fact, extremely luckily, because it didn't cause any other ancillary damage. I was very pleased. But that jumper wire, sadly, did not survive. It was a charred mess. So, don't make that stupid mistake that I made and leave a jumper wire in place unless it's something which will not harm the game if you were to turn it on normally, like a dummy, the next day. So, the Electro-Lock wiring is fine. There's some charring under the playfield. It'll clean. It's okay. but it continues to hold. It's doing what it's supposed to do. It didn't harm the relay in any way, so everything good But I still kind of at square one on this So for the coils I contacted Steve Young about the trip bank coil at Pinball Resource And this is before I realized that the two step-up coils were shorted. And unfortunately, this game is old enough that the number that I had from the coil wrapper didn't match anything that he had as far as existing catalogs or paperwork, so he wasn't able to cross-reference and sell me a substitute. So I'm going to have to go another route. I'm either going to need to wind my own or send in another coil to Steve Young and have him take a look at it, or contact APB Enterprises, who specialize in coils, and see if they can wind me a couple custom coils. Now the step-up coils that I'm talking about that are shorted are themselves interesting and kind of anomalies in today's games. They're what they call coils in a can. So they are completely sealed units. You can't see the coil at all. And there are two leads which come out of the can, which attach to the ends of the coil wire. Well, there's no lugs. You know, you can't see anything. So I'm making some assumptions here that they're probably shorted with the measurements from my awesome meter that I was complaining about earlier. So it's reading zero, and that's with one leg out of the circuit. I feel pretty confident that it is shorted, but I will know for certain here hopefully soon. In other news, bingo news, let's see, what's happening? there's quite a few new people I see on the forums that are coming forward with games that they have that they need some help with and that's always fantastic I've been helping people with different EM problems from different types of games that's always quite gratifying and I always enjoy that and otherwise I am trying to keep everything straight here. This is a very busy time of the year as it is for everybody. There's been a lot of quite stressful things going on and it's been quite a challenge here. But I think there's light at the end of this tunnel here and things are going to be looking up and I'm excited to get back more into service calls and doing some other things that will be more helpful for other people. So that's kind of what's going on with me. Robo Frenzy I have not worked on at all. I wanted to finish this simple ha-ha game, this Chicago Coin Fox Hunt. and then out of the blue got contacted and asked if I wanted a game and it's a Williams Line Drive from 1972 I believe it's a pitch and bat this is the first one that I've owned and I've got it sitting here in the middle of the room because there is no more room in either side to put another game But I'm looking forward to working on that. I did lift the playfield yesterday just to see if there were any parts missing, and everything is there and in reasonable shape. There's some cleaning to do, but otherwise it's all there. The bat itself is broken. I'll just order a replacement for that, and then it should be good. I'm very excited the kids are really excited to get that going so once this fox hunt is complete I'll work on that and then it's back to RoboFrenzy this line drive should be a pretty short little project so let's talk about the year of Flipperless today's game is 1934's Exhibit Lightning 36. This game is an exact copy of Pamco's Contact. Contact is famous for being Harry Williams' first successful design, super successful design, And it has several interesting features that use electricity in a unique way, at least back at the beginning of 1934, end of 1933. So the layout has holes arranged all over the playfield And if you familiar with Contact Master or the modern Scorgasm Master those have the same layout as Contact or Exhibits Lightning 36 And different pockets have different point values, as you might expect. And the arrangement of the pins directs the ball in specific ways. this game has a feature that Harry Williams called automatic progressive scoring and this is where the electromechanical part comes in there is a contact hole up at the top of the play field and if the ball happens to land in that then the balls located below will kick and there's a kicker arm which will push the balls out and down to a higher scoring pocket. The scoring on Exhibit's version at the top starts at 300 points, goes to 500, and then to 2,000 points. Now there are actually two sections that use an electromechanical kicker. The second section, which is down near the bottom of the play field, starts scoring at 3,000 points, then 4,000, and then 5,000. What is interesting about this is that the design of the barriers that prevent the ball from going out of that center area, that area where the ball is actually kicked, are different in the exhibit version than they are in the PAMCO version. They look much more like lightning bolts in the exhibit version, which I think looks pretty cool. In the PAMCO version, they are rounded, and the ball can move more fluidly around the edges. In the exhibit version, it will be redirected roughly. But the ball action must be pretty interesting on this version. I've never seen one of these. but I think there's more chance for you to nudge it away from the middle pocket and down to the bottom pocket or mess that up completely like I would do and have it miss entirely and end up going out. As was common for games at this time there is an area down at the bottom which is just labeled out, and if the ball lands there, then it scores no points. It uses the same stool pigeon tilt that Pamco's version of contact uses, and that is a little ball that sits on a pedestal and is pushed back onto the pedestal at the start of each game. If you knock it off the pedestal, then you've tilted. The scoring on the rest of the game is exactly the same as it is on Pamco's Contact. I find that interesting as well. It was changed just enough, I guess, to make it acceptable. So IPDB has an interesting story. According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball, Volume 2, this game was originally to be called Contact, made under contract with Pacific Amusement Company, to help meet sales of their popular game of the same name designed by Harry Williams. However, to resolve a royalty disparity between the two manufacturers, Williams changed the name of this exhibit game to Lightning. But Lightning was the first design produced by Exhibit of their own, and it was the first electromechanical game that they made. Later on, Williams redesigned this game again because it was starting to become problematic, apparently to have PAMCO's contact and Exhibit's Lightning 36, which were basically identical. So the playfield was actually redesigned and a different color applied to the playfield as well to help differentiate it as well as the cabinet. So one other touch of electromechanical. When you hit the contact hole up at the top, or the lightning hole, depending on which version you're playing a bell will ring as it's kicking the balls this is neat so you get a little auditory cue along with the visual of the balls kicking gives you a little warning right as it's kicking there too so it gives you time to hopefully set yourself and react a very neat idea I've still never played one of these either the exhibit or the PAMCO version. Would love to. Looks very fun. And that's all for tonight. Thank you very much for joining me. My name again is Nicholas Baldridge. My email address, should you wish to contact me, is 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com, or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS1, 724-246-4671. You can listen to me on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Cast, VRSS, on Facebook, on Twitter, at Bingo Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram, also at Bingo Podcast, or you can listen to me on my website, which is foramusementonly.libsyn.com. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to you next time.