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SDTM Cary Hardy: Toledo EM Pinball Part 2

Straight Down the Middle·video·16m 40s·analyzed·Sep 26, 2019
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.016

TL;DR

EM pinball restoration: electrical diagnostics, solder repair, cosmetics, sale to arcade operator.

Summary

Cary Hardy completes restoration of a Toledo EM pinball machine in part 2 of a series, documenting electrical troubleshooting (shorted coin relay, stuck ball index mechanism), repairs via solder reflow, cosmetic restoration (LEDs, rubbers, plastics), and final gameplay. The machine is sold to an arcade in the Dallas-Fort Worth area after completion.

Key Claims

  • The ball index coil issue was resolved by reflowing solder on the coil lugs after hours of schematic analysis and troubleshooting.

    high confidence · Cary Hardy, direct description of repair process and outcome

  • The machine had a shorted coin door relay due to a wire out of position causing contact interference.

    high confidence · Cary Hardy, visual inspection and explanation of the fault

  • The Toledo was an undocumented home-use-only machine in unusually clean condition compared to other EMs he's worked on.

    high confidence · Cary Hardy, observation based on condition assessment

  • Cary spent approximately a full day or more troubleshooting this machine, including work until 2-3 AM.

    high confidence · Cary Hardy, direct statement about time investment

  • Cary prefers to sell restored EMs to arcades rather than keep them, to give them more active use.

    high confidence · Cary Hardy, statement of preference and reasoning

Notable Quotes

  • “Hours looking at schematics, troubleshooting out the wazoo, and all I had to do was reflow the solder on that damn coil lug. And then it took off.”

    Cary Hardy@ 10:01 — Encapsulates the frustration and eventual resolution of a complex EM troubleshooting issue

  • “This was an undocumented home use only machine. So I'm thankful for me being able to find this machine and rescue it.”

    Cary Hardy@ 11:34 — Reflects pride in preservation and restoration work

  • “Props to all of you guys out there that their primary hobby in this industry is EMs. Thank you for all the work that you do to keep these things going, mainly because I sure as hell don't want to do it.”

    Cary Hardy@ 15:37 — Acknowledges difficulty of EM restoration and respects specialists in the field

  • “I enjoy selling these games to arcades and stuff like that because it gives the chance for these games to have more contact than just someone having it sitting in their house, like us collectors tend to do.”

    Cary Hardy@ 3:01 — Expresses philosophy on game placement and community benefit

  • “I don't want it. I'm going to start cleaning the score reels.”

    Cary Hardy@ 11:52 — Casual but clear statement that the machine was being flipped rather than kept as personal collection

Entities

Cary HardypersonToledogameStraight Down the MiddleorganizationTitancompanyDallas-Fort WorthorganizationThe Getawaygame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Cary Hardy acknowledges and respects the EM specialist community while highlighting the technical difficulty of EM restoration work

    high · Props to all of you guys out there that their primary hobby in this industry is EMs. Thank you for all the work that you do to keep these things going

  • $

    market_signal: Arcade operator in Dallas-Fort Worth acquiring restored EM machines; indication of continued commercial demand for playable EMs

    high · an arcade down in the Dallas-Fort Worth area snagged it up

  • ?

    technology_signal: Use of SMD LEDs and modern rubber materials in EM machine restoration as standard upgrade path

    high · I went with the Warm 2 SMD LEDs. I believe I got these through Titan, and they work and look great. So all new titan rubbers and plate builds

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.050

0:00
Let's check the fuses and then I'd say let's power this baby on for a smoke test. Alright, looks like there's only four fuses. I'm gonna leave the plate filled up and I'm gonna to turn this sucker on and see what we get. Alright, power is connected. Here we go. I turned it off because I didn't like how it sounded. I don't see any smoke. Got a nice little home. Okay. I forget that the coil that activates is on the coin door to activate the coin slots. Alright so let's try hitting the start button just to see if we get any motion.
1:27
What's up guys and welcome back to another episode on Straight Down the Middle. My name is Kerry Hardy and I talk into everything pinball. So if that sounds interesting to you, then hit that subscribe button down below. So I'm back here to finish up this electrical mechanical machine. machine where we left off last time was right before i began to check the fuses and powering this thing on for the first time now i'm not gonna lie guys there's going to be a lot of footage that's not here and that a lot of footage is me tinkering with this thing going through every contact of every friggin switch trying to deter the problems that i do find if i was to record every second of the time spent on this damn machine it'd be hours and hours of footage me actually underneath this machine at one point looking at schematics passed out at like two or three o'clock in the morning trying to figure out a particular issue but what issues I do find I do explain how I resolve them when it comes to cleaning and shopping this machine out with the new rubbers and leds and stuff like that I'm not going to go into great detail on that either because chances are you know how to do that and if you don't know how to do that I'm sorry but maybe that'll be future content for you new guys. Once the machine was complete, this game did not stick around my house very long, put it up for sale, and an arcade down in the Dallas-Fort Worth area snagged it up. I enjoy selling these games to arcades and stuff like that because it gives the chance for these games to have more contact than just someone having it sitting in their house, like us collectors tend to do. But a part of me feels a little bad because I'm pretty sure this game was a home use only, undocumented of course, but it was in such good condition in comparison to other EMs that I've had to work with. But I digress. I move on. It's not like I grew a personal relationship with this machine. Because without a doubt there are games that I would consider a little closer to my heart that I care deeply about. and there's some of my machines that I treat kind of like a redheaded stepchild and just try not to look at them or worry about them. And for those of you out there that keep staring at the getaway, don't worry, you'll know that story in the future. So let's go, let's pick up where we left off.
4:09
All right well all the score reels have hit zero but it not going and that might be because it's not detecting the ball so let's try that again. There we go. So if I have this switch held down. Let's try hitting the start button now.
4:57
Looks like this is gonna need a going through again to see if I missed anything. maybe we're not getting good contact on some of these.
5:14
So the search continues. Like I said hours and I think even a full day later. Alright guys so everything is fixed and ready to go but we're gonna start out by talking about what it is what's wrong with this machine. So let's turn over here to this. Alright so the first issue the reason why it kept on making the popping sound is because that was the sound effect that the machine makes when you insert a coin into the game. So to give you an idea if I was to... that's what it's supposed to make so if I was to hold this down I can't even hold it down because it was so messed up and shorted on the player one right here it was so shorter than there like the wire that was supposed to be in the slot down here was actually up inside here and making these things touch each other Oh shit! See? It caused a short. Great.
6:31
All right, time to adjust the relay because evidently the relay's locked on, so let's fix that. All right, so the next issue I had was once I was able to turn the machine on and it not be making noise. That was also a plus. The next issue I had was whenever I pressed the start button, nothing happened. I'm just hitting the start button. There's obviously credits in the machine, but nothing's going on. A close observation of my relays down here in the bottom area, there was an obstruction in one of them, was able to clear it out, clean the contacts. I was able to start a game. So I was like, good, we should be good to go, right? No more issues, no more anything. Wrong. I would have continuous one ball. Ball one would just continuously keep going. It never, the index, my ball index would never push forward to the next ball. I could do it manually all day, but it wouldn't automatically do it. So let me show you the MEX system for this and explain to you what the problem was. Okay, so here is the ball index mechanism. So this is how this works. Essentially after a ball ends, this coil is supposed to fire. Which basically increases it to make it to where it's on ball two. But if you're on a three ball game, then it would actually fire twice. and also depends on if you have one or two players going so essentially this will fire all the way until it gets to the last ball of the game like right there would be the final way to go and then this coil would fire to reset it so right now we at game over right here This coil would fire to reset Bam Now we back to ball one again The issue was this coil right here wasn firing And trust me this was very troublesome for me because I was able to own the coil continuity and all that kind of stuff. I was going through the schematics. I was up until like 3 o'clock in the damn morning trying to figure out what was going on here. Tracing it the best I can. I mean, that's the thing with these old machines. They're so tightly wound and bounded and where they can go. They are color-coded, so that is a perk. And I've been cleaning all kinds of contacts and scrubbing down this side of the mech to make sure it's all clean and I still need to do the makeup here up top but uh yeah this uh this right here was an issue and it got to the point to where I actually uh I caved I uh I radioed for help rather I tried to contact one of our fellow uh Dallas Port Worth members that is very savvy in the EM department and uh he never got back with me until after I figured out the issue though. So I messaged him and I started to go, you know what, let me do a reflow on the proprietary connections to this mech. So all I did was reflow the solder on the lugs to this coil and that bitch took off like a striped ass ape. Fix the issue. Hours looking at schematics, troubleshooting out the wazoo, and all I had to do was reflow the solder on that damn coil lug.
10:13
And then it took off. No more issues. Everything's working 100% now. It's good to go. So, those are the only issues I had with this machine, mechanically. Now it's time to continue with cosmetics. So, what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to file and clean this right here. See, I don't even know what this is. I mean, it's for the score reels and everything, but exactly how it works, I'm not that savvy in it. But I'm going to go ahead and clean this just to make sure it's more basically reliable. So I'm going to clean those contacts all over this board and on the actual clock mech and stuff like that.
10:59
Everything else looks really good. This machine is probably honestly one of the cleanest EMs that I've got to deal with in the past. A lot of these leaf switches and contacts are actually pretty damn clean in comparison to what I've had to see in the past. And that is all kinds of leaf switches with wavies in there and contacts that are either missing, burnt, just crud all over them. It's just not fun. But surprisingly enough, the dirt that I found in these contacts has been little to almost none. This was an undocumented home use only machine. So I'm thankful for me being able to find this machine and rescue it. And let's get it cleaned up now and see if anybody wants it because I don't want it. I'm going to start by cleaning the score reels. It's a pretty simple task. I mean just kind of spin them around and wipe them off and you can use almost like you know Windex will be sufficient in my mind. And so I think it's just what I used. They were pretty filthy
12:07
Installing the LEDs on this back box is a little bit of a pain on these older machines because literally the only way you can Get them in there is by doing what I'm doing here to get it down there I don't have fingers small enough to do a twist and pull or a twist and insert
12:25
Fully LED back box i used cool white what the hell is that for some reason there an off color in there we'll fix that ta-da let's get this uh back glass on here this is actually the first time i'm showing the back glass that i'd give this back glass an easy nine nine point five out of ten score on condition. It's only got one little bitty speck that's missing on this damn thing. Other than that, totally great condition. Lovely quality.
13:08
On to the playfield. I'm going to give you a pan over here just to show you what the current condition is of everything. I believe I've already pulled the rubbers off of the flippers. I think they were already cracked and busted anyways. So overall, the playfield looks pretty damn good. I mean, this is easily a pretty good, easy flip when it comes to cleaning. So, now I've got everything completely stripped off of this playfield, down to just the bare bones of getting things cleaned up.
13:37
Now I've got the LED. What I did, I went with the Warm 2 SMD LEDs. I believe I got these through Titan, and they work and look great. so all new titan rubbers and plate builds all nice and clean and waxed up and we are ready to play some old school pinball i even put new flipper bats on this because i think the previous ones were busted
14:18
Plastics are all in really great shape in this game too. Now I really wish that I would have had some better gameplay for you guys on this. This is actually my three year old daughter playing. She is not the best yet, but she's working on it. She'll get some game better on. Like I said, she's even used to the faster playing games, so this is actually her first EM to ever play.
14:59
But this at least gives you a visual of what the game looked like whenever it was complete. And there it is, guys. That wraps up the Toledo series, a two-parter series, I guess. You could call it a mini-series or just a two-parter. Screw it! We'll just call it a two-part series. Now, electromechanicals are machines that I'm not basically going after, but if I do happen to stumble across them, just, you know, to get content for you guys, then I definitely will, but I do not pursue these machines, mainly because they are aggravating to work on. Props to all of you guys out there that their primary hobby in this industry is EMs. Thank you for all the work that you do to keep these things going, mainly because I sure as hell don't want to do it. So that's going to wrap it up, guys. If you like this video and you learned something, be sure to give me that thumbs up to let me know. Feel free to leave me some comments below for you other EM fans out there or EM haters. Bring it on. And if you haven't already, do not forget to hit that subscribe button down below. That way you can be notified on whenever we upload something for your viewing pleasure.
16:12
Until next time, guys. Peace out.