What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast. Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only, this is Nicholas Baldridge. Today we've got a special treat, a tandem interview with Steve Smith and Hugh Cowan. Hugh is a master bingo restorer and technician, also known as the Old Binger. He repairs many machines, has seen all kinds of issues, is a really smart guy, and great fun to talk to. So I hope you enjoy, and here we go. Good morning, guys. Good morning, Hugh. Good morning, Mr. Kern. I'll tell you about my bingo addiction, how it all started. As a kid, 15 or 16 years old, we used to always ride our bicycles to school and back. And we rode our bicycles to town. It was about a mile, a mile and a half. And went to the movie show on Saturday, Saturday mornings. One Saturday, I had 15 cents left over, three nickels. I stopped at a little filling station around the corner that had two bingo machines in it. And they actually paid off if you won. And I watched the older guys play them for a while, and they all left. And I walked up, and shaking like a leaf, I put a nickel in it and played a game. Didn't win anything. and I had noticed that they put a bunch of nickels in it, so I had two more, so I put two more nickels in it. Lost my money. Didn't win anything. Thought about it all week. Then during the week in the afternoons, I'd cut grass, make money in the neighborhood. So I started after the shows going around to the little film station getting to know everybody and watching the adults play the machines. And I watched how they played them. And I watched and I watched. And I would lose a little money here, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 cents. And then I began to notice that the machines followed a pattern. If you ever had a big winner, it was really hard to get anything to happen for a while. and the other thing that I noticed was that a lot of times they would coin up maybe 10 or 15 times be really close, need one ball or one ball would win two ways and they never went for the extra balls so I learned the pattern of the machines and while the other kids were out hustling in the pool hall shooting pool, I was riding my bicycle around town hustling bingos. They wouldn't let me play as long as an adult was playing, but if the adults weren't playing, they'd let me play. And I learned to walk up and look at the game that was already on the machine, hit the R button, bring it back to life, sit in there after they had shot their fifth ball. Maybe drop in five or six, seven, eight nickels and get an extra ball. and that was my first win on extra balls. I hit a four in line. Oh, it was somebody else's game? Cool. And I immediately collected my money. It was a county fair. I hit it for 32, I believe. Would this be why that's your favorite game? No, it would not be wise to. It's my favorite game. But it is. Well, you had two of them down there when I was there, didn't you? Yes, I still have one. And I'll always keep a county fair. It's a single-button machine, what I call a single-button. It doesn't have the pick and play, which is the blue, green, and red. plus it has wooden rails very beautiful machine doesn't that one have an exceptionally nice lockdown bar on it yes a friend of mine made a lockdown bar for me and I built it up and it is very very nice that friend of yours will never let it go I don't have many in the shop now but anyhow that's how I got started I went home with 32 nickels and the addiction started and Nick you understand the addiction now but think how much money that was to a 15, 16 year old kid back 50 years ago, or maybe 60 years ago. So I started just hustling the bingos around town. And made I learn to play them. Sometimes I would take $2 worth of nickels or $3 worth of nickels and drop every one of them in it. get the odds up after I had watched the game not pay off for a long period of time. I knew it was loose, and I'd have one shot at it. If I hit, I'd go on with $10, $15 in my pocket. If I missed, I had lost my $2 to $3. So at that time, of course, I didn't know that they do get loose the more you don't win, and that they get tight when you win. It's a reflex unit. So, skipping forward from my beginning, when I was around 55, the company I worked for had a big workforce reduction and they offered a ludicrous payout package. And I had been there many years and had lots of benefits and those were the people they were trying to really get rid of. So I saw the writing on the wall, and as soon as they offered it, I immediately took it and went into semi-retirement. I still did consulting work for paper mills, power plants. As an engineer, turbine overhaul. I hired out probably about 50% of the time. The rest of my time I had time on my hands. And I wanted a bingo. So I started hunting one. I had no idea how they worked. I had no idea how to work on them. I just wanted a playing bingo. And I couldn't find one. I would have took any magic screen game. But I couldn't find one. I couldn't find one. Let me ask you to rewind back to when you were playing as a kid. Did you see any new games show up and get all excited about it? Most of the games back in those days, yes, I saw the Circus Queen show up. The Roller Derby showed up. even back in those days I'm pretty sure that the silver sails and the golden gate showed up now I love the circus queen I love the pick and play features if I learned pretty quick that if you started out with the blue button the red button one coin in and then you hit the blue button, one coin in would always give you a double jump on odds, your scores. And that was pretty neat. Then you'd go for just a few more on the scores to see if you could get the okay gain. I mean, the green high enough to give you a decent okay gain. And then what you did is you didn't try to get the scores any higher. you went for features and you went for the okay. You wanted the okay lid again. And you wanted to get in that orange section and catch the numbers down the left side, 1923, the okay numbers. And if you could hit the okay, you didn't even try to get anything else. All you wanted was that okay back, those preset odds, and then you added to it again. And you kept building up and building up until you finally had enough credits to where you could build the features to After Fifth. And once you got After Fifth and the OK, you were really on your way then. Then you could make some money. Now, when you saw a new game arrive, were you excited, like, I'm going to try this one? because I remember as a young kid, the very first time I saw these, I got shooed away from them, but some teenagers showed up to play them later, and there was a new game there. And I heard them saying, hey, there's a brand new one. Cool, let's give it a go. And they tried it a little bit and then didn't like it, and they went back to the game that they knew how to play already, and they hit on it. you know and um you know just wondering just wondering yeah i never ever saw a bounty i remember seeing silver cells golden gates roller derbies circus queens can cans a few more of the games. And going back that far, your memory gets kind of hazy, but I played them all. So jumping back to where we were, I couldn't find one. So I got on the web, and here was this guy up in Arkansas. call. Doc Mora. Bingo's R Us was what he sold on. And I called him up and talked to him. He kept saying, send me money, send me money, I'll send you a game, send me money. And I didn't want to do that. So I got my son to go with me and we drove up to Arkansas. Spent the night in Harrison. And this guy lived out on Rainbow Ridge out of Omaha, Arkansas, just south of the Missouri state line. And he had a whole bunch of bingos in a building. And I had never seen a Hawaii. And he had one that wasn't even on the legs. It was sitting flat on the floor. We had to tilt it up to turn it on, but it played perfectly. It was a ballet or a United? All these games are ballet. I've never dabbled in the United, so everything I talk about is ballet. So I bought it. And then he had like six Tahitis there that looked almost brand new. And I wasn't really interested in the Tahiti, and he had a Malibu Beach. and I had never seen the Malibu Beach as a kid that I can remember. But it was magic screen, single button, no pick and play, which in fact turned out to be an exact rebuild of the Laguna Beach. And I guess you know the story of the Laguna Beach, Malibu Beach, Laguna Beach, how the Malibu Beach came to be. in 1979 ballet had so called reached the end of its rope all its games had been outlawed and they were closing down Las Vegas found out that they were closing shop and they got together There are several of the casino owners out there because they were still running Ballybingos in the casinos at that time. This was 1979. They ordered 500 Malibu beaches on the end of the line before they closed the doors. and then by the time Bally got them all built they decided they didn't want them so they reneged on the contract and Bally sold the Malibu beaches but that was the last game that went out now Las Vegas didn't want the fancy machines they wanted the simple ones they wanted in fact they asked for by name that they build them 500 Laguna beaches. And Bailet said they wouldn't do that, but they would build a game identical to it and pay off features, scores, and if you'll compare the two, you'll see they're identical. They used updated wiring. They used updated disk. They changed the way that the OK game paid off Instead of using stop relays when the scores got to their preset point, they used a disc that stepped, I believe it's 28 steps. And through those 28 steps, it gets everything that can possibly happen when you hit the OK, click the OK game. And that's how the Malibu Beach came. Now the early Malibu Beaches were pretty decent machines from the factory but I have found seven or eight Malibu beaches that had the last serial numbers on them and were the last few going out the door. And Valley just slapped them together with wiring arrows. They didn't test them. In fact, if you look on my website and see that brand-new Malibu beach, the brand-new one that I found, it took me two days of correcting wiring before it would play. That's how they just slapped it together. They were getting laid off in a week or two. The people put it together, didn't care. So that was the story of it. and back to my first bingos. So I ended up about to Malibu Beach. I bought the Playing Hawaii, and I bought the Tahiti. The Tahiti looked very simple compared to the Malibu Beach, plus Doc sold me a game missing some parts. So I fixed the Tahiti. It sold immediately, and it was not long after that a guy found out I had a Hawaii through dock, and he bought it. So I started working on the Malibu Beach, and it was missing the clutch part, the disc that the Magic Screen motor hooks to. that's got the little slots in it and a clutch on each side and hooks to the magic screen itself. And I kept trying to get Doc to send me one and he wouldn't. And finally, in desperation, I got Jeffrey Lawton's number and that was my first conversation with Jeffrey. I called Jeffrey, told him what was going on and I couldn't get Doc to send me a part. Jeffrey immediately sent me a part. and told me that it would be very difficult for me to put it in not knowing anything and would probably have difficulties timing it. But he did send me a part. And it took me, in my spare time, probably about three to six months to fix that machine totally and get it perfect. Sold it immediately. I didn't have any games to work on any games to play I went back to Arkansas took a trailer this time right in there you haul I bought 10 warehouse games from Doc London's I mean just every variety that he had brought them home now Now, later in the years, in the Londons, the Safaris, the Bonus 7s, they ran out of room for disks because they had dual games and so many features on them. So they installed an electronic board. I had a fairly good knowledge of electronics of that day. Not of today's day, of course, but of that day. and I found a guy who would help me. Most of them had bad boards on them, especially the capacitors. And, Nick, you understand that. A capacitor is like a battery. Yep. It's going to last 5, 10, 15 years, and then it's going to go bad. In fact, a capacitor is nothing but a little bitty quick-acting battery. That's all it is. Right. Or a spring, it just takes a charge and then spits it right back out. so I cross referenced all those parts that was in all the boards of all the games that had the electronic boards I bought up a healthy supply of all the parts I repaired all the London boards the bonus 7 boards the super 7 boards the Venice boards Zodiac so I repaired the boards in them fixed the machines and sold them. Now, were they all 20-hole games? Yes, those were all 20-hole games. I know of no magic screen game or 25-hole game that has... Ring games have it. Right, the magic ring and the big wheel. They have a small board in them. In fact, I converted a big wheel to a magic ring board and rewired it. The magic ring didn't work quite right, and they corrected it. I mean, the magic ring worked right. It was the follow-on game to the big wheel. So each circuit board was game-specific? It was game specific. That's correct. And they recognized a ball in the hole on the secondary game by as little as .2 volts. I realize that's a lot today, Nick, but back in that day, .2 volts wasn't very much. No, it's still not very much. so they were pretty sensitive but most of the boards were fairly simple uh the main goal of the board was to pick up a 50 volt relay yeah and to take a signal in as small as 0.2 volts they ran it through three transistors each one amplified it more uh-huh passed the signal from it up to much the same as the way a radio works takes in a little small signal amplifier circuit secondary amplifier circuit and then you finally got to a transistor big enough to handle the current flow to pick up a 50 volt coil so that's that's basically the way they worked. The main trouble in them, the first thing I would do with the board is just pull out all the capacitors, replace all the capacitors, and then I would start troubleshooting the board to see where the problem was. Sometimes it was a signal diode, sometimes just a diode, but the game would never be reliable without replacing all the capacitors. And that's why I don't want to go to the trouble to work on those electronic boards anymore. So these days you're purely EM? Purely EM. That's all I work on. I do have a few boards laying around. If you run across somebody, I think you've got a London board, a Venice board, probably a Bonus 7 board. In fact, I've got a Bonus 7 in a warehouse that I bought out of a pawn shop in Alabama. This was in really nice shape. I never have bothered to put it together. So anyhow, I went back in about 10 games, loaded the trailer with 10 games, pulled it over Mount Eagle, scared to death. Got them home, fixed them, sold them. Did the same thing again. Next time I told Doc, I said, I'm not buying games from you anymore. I know how to fix them. here's the deal I'll come up and stay with you if you'll set your travel trailer up and let me stay in your travel trailer I'll come up and stay two weeks you have me 10 machines sitting on their legs already cleaned so I don't get on the outside so I don't get my hands filthy working on the outside you have them sitting on their legs I'll come up and I'll say 10 weeks and I'll get those games playing. I will not shop them out, but I will make them play. And in return, you give me 10 games. So that was the deal and I did that twice. And then I got enough games built up and in the process, I had gotten with my IT guy who at that point in time was my son-in-law. Unfortunately, he's not anymore because I really like the guy. And he had built the basics of my website. And then I took it from there and learned to use it and build it up and built my website. And people were beginning to find me through my website. And what year was this? Had to be 10, 12 years ago. I don't know exactly. but people began to find me on my website, and the biggest thing my website did for me, in addition to selling things, is it opened a door for me for people who had warehouses full of these games. So instead of just brokering through Doc and taking what he didn't want, I got to buy games myself. Most of the games I found, the good picks, came out of college towns. I bought 54 games down in Athens, Georgia at one whack. I stood on top of a Lido to take pictures of what was back behind it. in a row. They were stacked 15 across, three deep, plus the guy had 10 brand new Tahitis. So it was 54, maybe it was 11 Tahitis. It was around 55 games. The Tahitis were all brand new. They'd been on route less than a month when they changed the law and he had to pull them off. And they were covered up in the back. And they thought they had a treasure. and I didn't. But I learned that Tahiti is a treasure to certain people. I've got a customer that's a single guy. He's got five Tahitis in a row in his basement. All his friends come over on the weekends, and I have put a modification on those games where when you turn the side key, instead of putting one game on at a time. I added a 16-pulse switch to it, bypassed a few things, and you turn the key and it just spits games on, 16 per RPM, like a machine gun. Of course, the Tahiti runs off a 23 RPM motor, so it's a lot faster than the 19 RPM that you're used to in the Magic Screen games. but they come over and he puts free games on them he's got a 40 coin limit so they throw 5 bucks on the glass apiece they'll play whoever scores the most score picks up the money and they ante up again and it's a wonderful game to do that on but as far as being fun to play it's not very fun game I don't think in fact I've still got one I'm sitting here in the shop right now I just got it out of the warehouse the other day it'd been in the warehouse for about 10 years pulled it out and brought it in it's got let's see what's on the meter here 58 payout plays on it and 760 nickels quarters in I guess quarters in so it's sitting here and I was just going to clean it up what else is sitting in your shop right now the county fair course will never go anywhere the county fair and two bounties is what's in the shop right now. I meant that. And you finally took that Sun Valley back up to Dock? The Sun Valley is still in my storeroom. Oh, it was in your shop when I was down here a few years ago. Yes, it was. It's a very nice Sun Valley. But it's got a problem. And he wanted me to restore it and I refused to restore it. The reason I refuse to restore it is it has, there is a type of insect, beetle of some sort that's microscopic, that loves the cloth wiring and bingos. And once they get in one, it eats the cloth insulation up and the machine starts having various shorts here and there. And that machine had the beetles. That's terrible. So I fumigated the machine to kill the beetles and put it in my storeroom. Now, the IDOC up in Virginia, I don't know what his status is now, but I know that he started his own business, and he is tremendously busy in that. and I know he put a whole bunch of capital in it. And he did pick up his circus queen that I had totally restored for him. And that's his pride and joy. I remember he was active on your forum when that was... Right. Right He a good guy I mean I think he just kind of moved on in life right now for a while and very busy He'll probably get active again when he gets some time. I'll tell you who's resurrecting their interest, and that's Phil out in Colorado, who was the moderator on your forum. Phil is a very intelligent guy. I'll say. I agree. He knows a lot about bingos. We did a lot of Photoshop work together. In fact, I played for a couple of years with scanning in-back glasses, is putting them together with Photoshop, going in, correcting all the flaws and defects. And the problem that I had was getting somebody to print it on the right material. Paper is just too faded out looking, you might say. I found some backlit material, and we reverse printed some of those. I bought a roll of it. It was a lot better, but it still wasn't good enough. And then I found a mother load of back glasses and bought about 100 back glasses and said, shoot, I've got back glasses. Why am I fooling with this? So I just kind of dropped that out of the picture. Where in the world did you run across that mother load? It came out of Virginia. Of course. Yeah. My backyard. where I'm sitting there. The hot spot closest to me of bingos right now is Knoxville, Tennessee. There's a lot of bingos there, a lot of bingo players. In fact, in Knoxville, in the little suburbs of Knoxville, let's say, not Knoxville per se, and I'm not going to tell you where, they're still running bingos in the bars. and people line up to play them. I wonder if those are still raking in coin. Well, I've got a guy that, I've got two guys in Tennessee I'm working with right now. This one guy's got a silver sails, and somebody's been mucking with a wiring on a transformer on it, pretty bad it looks like. I don't know what's going on there from his pictures but I offered the guy he's a young guy and he wants to learn how to work on them and I told him I make this deal with a lot of people you bring your game to my shop you show up Saturday not real early you show up Saturday we'll set your game up Saturday and we'll start working on it you get your motel, spend a night, come back Sunday, we'll work through around lunchtime and you take it and go home. I'll show you how to clean the disc, I'll show you how to disassemble stuff, clean it, put it back, adjust it. And you take it back home and you do all the guns work. You get every disc and it cleaned, then you bring it back to me and I'll do the final troubleshooting and you take it home and you'll have a good playing game and you'll know enough about it If something's not working right, we can talk on the phone, and I can talk you through the fix. You're not going to show them your troubleshooting method? My troubleshooting method is unique. I developed it myself. And I do not think of these games as being AC. It makes it too hard to think about them. If you think about the games as being strictly DC, the fuse is always on the hot leg. You wouldn't fuse the ground, would you? No, you fuse the hot leg. And you notice that Valley did something really bad when they started building these machines. They ran the hot leg straight to the coils and the motors. and all you're trying to do is complete the path to the ground, and the ground is the 3-0. So if you think of it as D.C., where you've got a hot leg and a cold leg. Nick is grinning like he's looking at... Hugh, that is remarkably simple. That is amazing. It does simplify finding the problem. It gets down to the point where you can locate a bad wire, a bad Jones plug connection, a bad finger on a disc, two fingers shorted together on a disc that's not supposed to be. You can identify most common problems with it. Now, that is opposed to what Jeffrey uses. He's got a coil. He's got a 50-volt coil with alligator clips on each end, and he clips it on there to see if the coil picks up. Well, no, it'll trip out. He'll end up using the power off of the anti-cheat relay, which as soon as it makes, drops the relay and drops the power off of it. I think that's pretty smart. It's kind of almost like having a circuit breaker. And you can do this off the game, too. I've heard, I think that's what Chris Howard does over in Robert Englunds. I've got one in my tool pouch, made up. And I use it in certain cases. In certain cases where you cannot use a jumper, you can use that. and then there's times when you know you've got a problem going on and the only way you can find it I ran into one down in Florida I was down in Ocala, Florida and I was working on a bikini that I had restored 10 or 12 years ago and it had gone through 3 or 4 hands and another guy had ended up with it down there. And it wouldn't pay off. And I went down there and I fine-tuned the payoff circuit on it. I couldn't make it pay off. And I noticed that the sequencing disk wouldn't step all the way to its top. and I said, what's that got to do with it? You know, it should still pay in line. And I got to checking and then I found the in line problem and I repaired it, but it still wouldn't pay in the sections. so I took my fuse jumper and I reached up and I was going to just trigger the sequencing coil with it just pick the coil up and when I touched it, it drew a real heavy spark but it did pick up ok I went to another one and did the same thing another disc did the same thing on the same step up coil it picked up but it didn't draw the heavy spark. So what did that tell me? It told me that the sequence in this coil was pulling heavy current. Not enough to blow the fuse, but heavy current. So I took the coil apart and it had one of these brass sleeves in it, inside the coil. okay that brass sleeve had some play in it up and down and through the years it moving up and down and the water is wound directly on to it and it's select wire it had rubbed through the insulation and shorted most of the coil out or a half the call or third of the call so I changed the call and everything was fine. Now those kind of problems, you'd say, well, you'd never find that with a jumper, but I did find it with my jumper, seeing that I was pulling heavy current. And so what would happen is every time it would try to lock in, that sequencing disk would start stepping to check each hole of that color section that it was locked into, and it was pulling so much current that all the other coils dropped out. Gotcha. Now, let me ask both of you guys this because you're more meter savvy than I am. There's no way we can check for resistance on a coil like that unless you disconnect the whole thing because it's... That's the thing. When it's in... Oh, absolutely. If you disconnect it. Yeah. And normally you can disconnect just one end of it. Yeah. So you can disconnect one end, it's not going to come through the other side. Oh, that's right. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. It's got to travel through the whole wire. Would it matter what side you did it on? Because doesn't it connect back on down the way? Common's common, right? Okay, yeah, okay, I'm sorry, I got my head around it. Yep. Forgive me. Yeah. So I use a meter on machines very rarely. I don't test switches. Mainly I use my meter on the 120-volt circuits and on the 120-volt stuff. Because what happens in these games, Nick and Steve, is you have so much AC current running back and forth beside itself that it induces a fake voltage in the wires next to it. and you may read it and it reads that you've got enough voltage there to do something, but it's induced, not direct. Well, I thought that's why they used plastic coating on the 120-volt lines. They still induce. Really? Okay. It's like these phone chargers you're fixing to get for you. phone charges and it's not even connected to anything. It's just in the induced area. That's how a magnet works. A coil induces a pull. So once you try to put that induced voltage to work, the voltage drops to nothing immediately because there's no current flow. So you get false readings with meters. especially in the 50, 17, and 6 volt circuits. You get fake readings, and you'll think you've got voltage there, and you don't. Hugh, you're blowing my mind. I mean, this explains 900% of the problems that I run into. I don't think you leveled him up. A couple leveled him up. Okay. So you don't use a meter. Mm-hmm. A lot of people will take a meter and put it on both sides of the switch, okay, and read it, see if it'll conduct. So it's conducting. How much volts are you putting on it? Nine volts out of the meter? Yeah. What if it's got 50 volts going to it? Will it conduct 50? Just because it's dirty, it's dirty. So it's dirty, it won't conduct 50, but it'll conduct nine. So you get a false reading on your meter. You're right. The only way to do these machines is like I do them. And I'm saying that I developed this procedure is to actually do a functional test. You test that device, whether it be a coil, switch, motor, or what, by completing the circuit to ground. and remember it's always got a hot leg on one side that comes directly from that fuse. So if you complete that path to the ground on the transformer, you have jumped everything out of the circuit. That coil or motor should run. And that's all you've got to know. And if you want to go switch and switch up at a time up your ladder, these schematics are what I call ladder schematics. the motors and coils are there at the bottom you start up the ladder you may have 15 switches up it and only one of those switches all the other switches are permissive that the game is in the right state for that particular thing to happen but there's only one trigger switch on it everything else should be made and when you push that trigger switch it should trigger the circuit so the first thing you do is identify the trigger because you don't want to jump the trigger out hard if you jump the trigger out hard that coil is just going to pull in and stay there and buzz and some coils it only takes a few seconds to burn them up especially a trip coil on the trip bank that coil is so strong that if you jump it out for over four or five seconds it's toast huh it's going to toast so what I do is I reach in there with my jumper clip to a little bitty screwdriver or something and just tap it and get off of it it should trip it should pull in the other one that will do it on to you is the search index coil and Nick is familiar with that one search index coil has to pull in real hard and fast But once it pulls in it triggers a switch that pulls in the relay cams And that opens a switch that feeding direct power to the search index and runs it through a 10 ohm resistor to it to cut the power down to it once it's pulled in so it won't burn up these people were smart i agree and i have seen some technicians do some things in these games that thinking back about it, those technicians were smart too to come up with the things they come up with. For your restorations, when I was down visiting you four or five years ago, you were up to about 75 or 80 restorations and God knows how many repairs. I probably will not do any more total restorations except one or two for myself. I probably won't do any more for other people. I just sold my circus queen, which was the joy of my life. But I am going to do repairs. You didn't sell the circus queen with my lockdown bar on it. No, your lockdown bar is on my county fair. It's absolutely gorgeous. I did have to do a few little things to it to make it. It wasn't perfect, but it looks perfect on the outside. Oh, it does. It does. I had to do a little trimming to make the buttons work just right, but it wasn't much. It's very, very close. You got the first one, man. It was the very first one before you were my guinea pig on those things. Yeah, you thickened it up at the back a little bit to keep it from chipping and breaking, splitting so easy where they always, always do. That was a good one. I'm going to continue to do repair work. In fact, I'm going next weekend, next Saturday morning. I'll be leaving here with my trailer headed up to South Tennessee, and I'm going to pick up three games, bring them back, work them in my shop where I can work at them at my leisure, and then to cool. And without people hanging over you, you know, what are you doing there? Why are you doing that? I think I'm going to shop those three out, and then I'll take them back and I'll get three more. The guy's got about 20, so that should keep me busy for quite some time, just that one. And I'll pick up jobs on the side, just enough to make a little money, help out a little bit with our home restoration. What's your favorite game to work on? I don't care as long as it's screen game I'm a screen game person Let me tell you I told you Nick Nick's first game was a Double up Oh double up is a nice game I've got a really nice double up In the store room His is tight In fact, I traded a county fair and got that as a trade-in. I had previously sold the double up, so I had worked it and cleaned it up. And the guy decided he had to have a county fair, so we worked up a trade, and I took him a county fair. In fact, he wanted it so bad, I used a Laguna Beach body and a county fair head. And he didn't care. he don't care what this this guy don't care what they look like he just wants to play and he plays six eight hours a day let me ask you about to double up play from a player's standpoint this one that nick has here behind us seems a bit on his stingy side is that something you've noticed or is his just being contrary they are not that contrary he's got a problem yeah i suspect it's uh the mixer needs to be rebuilt uh why do you suspect the mixtures the mixture is probably the one component in those games that give the least amount of problems. Yeah, normally. These ones are a little gummy, so I haven't fully disassembled the mixer in this game, and I haven't replaced the clutches. I've only lubed them. Have you looked to see if the drag links are dropping out at random, catching at random, or is it Yes, they are. But I just fixed an issue with the mixer latch. It wasn't pulling well enough in order to actually spin the spotting disc. Sounds like you need some clutches. Yeah. Okay, that was a spotting disc index call. Yeah. You confused me when you said mixer latch. A mixer latch unlatches your mixers. the spotting disc index coil unlatches the spotting disc to turn. Yeah, it's on the other side. If it wasn't turning, it's going to give you the same game over and over and over and over and over. Okay. And the other thing that will cause that to happen is exactly what Steve said. I had a guy from Belgium that came over here and stayed with me twice for two weeks to learn how to repair these games. And they had pulled all their drag links out of their gangs over there. And their reasoning was, makes it going up faster. Punch button, blam, punch button, blam, punch button, blam. You don't have that random time that the mixer latches and the spotting disc is pulled in. And I said, let me show you something. So I took one of my games. We tied the drag links back where they couldn't be in operation, and we played a game. I marked where the spotting disc sat down. Marked the arm, and I marked where it sat down. We punched it again. and there was five places on the whole spotting disc that it would set down every time. Only those five places out of 50. Okay, so they wasn't getting any random. And he said, looked at me and he says in his accent, he said, we must reinstall our drag links. And I said, yeah, you must. Yeah, it's not the same game without them. Nope, it takes away the variance. It takes away some of the randomness. What's the worst thing that you've had to repair that you've come across? There was a guy up in Tennessee, and he had come across 10 Malibu beaches. And he bought them for $500 a piece. okay and he hired me and I'd drive up there on Friday afternoon and spend a night with him work on him Saturday work on him Sunday and Sunday night I'd come home and we got down to the last one and we sold every one of them as fast as he could put them on eBay for around three grand so we were turning one a week he was taking his 500 bucks out and we were splitting the rest of it and I was furnishing the parts and expertise he did the clean up work, he cleaned the play field, he painted the legs he did the stuff that did on outside, all I did was the electromechanical one of them had a fire in the spotting dust index and had burned all the wiring off, that big bundle of wire that goes to the spotting disc. Oh, great. Burned it off. So I brought it to the shop, put a new spotting disc on it, traced every wire that goes to the spotting disc which is 50 plus probably 50 and then you got another row that's got one 10 11 12 and then some auxiliary wire and it comes down probably 70 wires that I couldn't identify fortunately it was Malibu beach I could read wire colors but I still had to put a meter on each one and chase it back to where it belonged. And then I had to find the same color wire out of an old wiring bundle, did a barrel roll, barrel, which is wrap the wire around each other in a straight line, twist them together, solder them, slide heat shrink on it, heat shrink it. And when you do 70 wires like that and they're burnt off in one small area, you end up with this huge wad because you gain diameter every time you put one in. So you have to space them back and forth. But I chased every one of those out, put that machine back together. That was quite a chore. So, you know, and you talk about spotting disfire. There's two places I've seen fires in these games. The most frequent one is the spotting disc. Las Vegas recognized that early. If you ever buy a Las Vegas machine, you'll see that the coil hot leg, the spotting index coil, goes. They disconnect it. They mount a single fuse box. they put a two-amp fuse in it, and then they run off the other side of the two-amp fuse back to the spotting disc index coil. So if that coil ever shorts out, then it blows a two-amp fuse before it can catch fire. The other place I've seen bad fires is above the search index coil. and you know you never walk away from one of these games when it's paying off. I know that now. And that's the reason. Sometimes it'll stop. The control unit will time out for some reason. The control unit will stop. That stops the pulsing. And all your search indexes and search relays are still picked up. You've just got all these calls picked up. But the one that most often burns is the search index core. And all the wiring above it will burn. And just think of what all is above it. Well, you know, when Dick did this to my Golden Gate, I had to run in the house for something. And I come back and open the door and I smell smoke. And I'm like, turn it off. And we get back there and a puff of smoke comes out. and we can hear the transformer bubbling. It was close. It was close, man. Okay, guys. It's a little after 12. Can we have another session, Mr. Cone? Yes, you can. Okay. Well, powwow about wanting to do that. And, Steve, the proper pronunciation of the name is like it's C-O-W-A-N Cowan Cow like a like a cow Cowan Cowan I am sorry. He's been calling you the wrong name the whole time I've known him. Yeah, he just correct me on air. Edit that part out, man. Never. Never. So many people do that it doesn't bother me at all. But I just thought I'd throw that out there. Well, this is good. See if we can fire up some more young people to take this stuff along when we go. Well, that's why I don't mind doing things like that and teaching people and telling people. I have helped hundreds and hundreds of people over the telephone. Some you can help that are smart enough and have a basic understanding of stuff that you can help. Some of them, there's just no hope. you realize some of them there's just no hope like you were before Lawton got a hold of you and straightened you out shut up go to your room to me you're new blood you do realize I'm 72 now right that's what I was going to get you to say Nick is 31 32 happy birthday I just turned 58 Monday oh you're a youngster well be be sure if something happens to me come down here and get your bar off this county fair no just want a piece of the action I'll help move the stuff if we have to you stay healthy alright buddy thanks for joining me Hugh and I really appreciate you coming on ok and thank you again for joining me my name again is Nicholas Baldridge you can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com you can listen to us on iTunes Stitcher, Pocket Casts via RSS on Facebook, on Twitter at bingopodcast you can follow me on Instagram at nbaldrich or you can listen to us on our website which is 4amusementonly.libsyn.com thanks very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time