Full pinball restorations

When referring to circuit boards, I mean all the boards situated in the backbox and any located in the lower cabinet. Most circuit boards will be green, and some may be red. For clarification, I also include the player displays, or dot matrix display, in the circuit board category. These components are as important as your upper and lower playfield since they are the brains of the operation. If they do not function correctly, your game will not work.

The common problems found in the circuit board area include battery corrosion, expired filter capacitors, burnt and/or brittle connectors, bad IC sockets, cold solder points, broken fuse clips, poor ground lines, and required safety modifications. I always start with the power distribution/rectifier board since it takes all the different AC voltages and converts them to DC, which is what most of the game circuits operate off of.

Once this board is rebuilt, and its output voltage is all within proper operating specifications, only then can I move forward with powering up the other components. At this point, any other issues will reveal themselves and can be corrected. Many problems on these boards are connector-related. I spend lots of time changing out connectors, and both male pin on the board and female in the connector housing need to be done.

Each board is pulled out one at a time, and all solder connections are re-flowed. Additionally, board-mounted battery packs are removed, and remotely mounted with a quick disconnect. Many board problems are caused by pinballs being stored away for years with batteries still in place. Batteries over time leak fluid and gases, causing damage to old radios or toys that had the batteries left in them. It’s the same for pinball machines.

The batteries hold things such as the high score thresholds in memory and game parameters such as free play. On all early Bally and Stern games, I remote mount a custom-made bridge rectifier board. The original three bridge rectifiers were very under-rated for the job required of them. (8amp-200 volts) When they failed, they were very hard to replace and required much de-soldering; basically, it was a service call. The three new bridge rectifiers (50amp-1000 volt) are function identifiable and easily changed if ever needed.

Player displays on many of the older games will be what’s called “gassed out,” and they cannot be repaired. But now, the industry has access to new LED displays that require less power, making them more reliable as the high voltage section on the power supply can be turned off, since its only function was to provide power for the plasma displays. Again, I’m not going into huge detail, I’m just trying to let you know the care that goes into each rebuild/restore here at “SwissPinball.”