Last time I blabbed on about the Bally Beach Club restoration, I ended with a bit of a tease about what came next. It turns out, it’s just too hard to resist the allure of plugging in a table and giving it a good once over to see how things work. So, after completing the preliminary cleaning, we gave in and decided to fire up the table.
First things first, we made sure to have a fire extinguisher handy. Given that visible fire damage inside this table, it’d be a bit foolish to just fire it up without having a little caution at our side. We also made sure to pick a fire extinguisher that is both easy to use and rated for electrical fires.
With fire extinguisher in hand, we plugged the table in. Then, we crossed our fingers and flipped the switch on the left side of the back box. The good news is that the fire extinguisher wasn’t actually necessary — but the peace of mind did help. The bad news is that we were greeted with a whole lot of nothing. The back box innards whirled to life as the search plates spun, but there were no lights, and no playfield action. Womp womp womp….
Of course, what did we really expect from a table that had been sitting unused for so long?
Given the utterly underwhelming attempt to fire it up, it would have been tempting to go back to cleaning things. But it’s hard to stay motivated on prettying up a table that might not even work. This means it was time for a little lightweight troubleshooting. First things first, we turned off the power and unplugged the unit, just in case there were any odd shorts in there looking to provide a good zapping.
Next up, we opened up the back box and lifted the playfield to get a good look at everything. First, each of the stepper units was manually reset to it’s initial position. This is important, because with some gummed up steppers it’s possible to get some very confused circuitry going on. In this table’s case, there were some particularly funny combinations going on, and it seemed simplest to give the total reset stepper a good push.
Then, with the playfield back in place, and the back box still open, we plugged it back in and fired it up. And there were lights! Well, most of the lights anyways; a few burnt out items needed to be replaced. But still, it was gorgeous to see:
Such a pretty sight. Here’s one more from another angle:
And it wasn’t just a few lights on the playfield, either. There’s full illumination on the back glass, too:
Giddy off the excitement of all of this, I powered it back down, closed the back box, and tried to fire it back up again. Nothing. Hrmph, well that’s frustrating! After opening it back up and doing a little poking, it turns out there was a loose wire in the cabinet that just so happened to come into contact with the main control motor whenever the back box door closed. Odd, yes, but easy to fix by isolating the bare wire and ensuring it wouldn’t make contact again.
With that quick fix, we fired up the table again. After manually hitting a few more switches and buttons, a few more of the mechanisms started to come to life, and we even had time to play a few games, but things just aren’t moving smoothly yet. The shutter board is unreliable, and starting a new game is a pretty iffy procedure that often requires a few steppers to be manually put back into position.
But, hey, that didn’t stop me from scoring a fake bingo or two:
Sorry for the tiny cellphone pic; I was too excited to bust out the camera on that one. Anyhow, it looks like there’s a whole lot more cleaning and lubrication left ahead of us…. better get to it!
Vintage Pin Works 