A Little Bit of Spit Shine

Okay, so we didn’t use any real spit, but with a bit of spit shine and elbow grease, our Bally Beach Club is just starting to show the first hints of her original charm. Now, restoration isn’t as simple as just plugging her in and hoping for the best — there’s actually a lot that ought to be done before firing things up.

First things first, we gave the table a good once over with a damp rag to get the surface layer of grime off.

Okay, so maybe we didn’t do the most thorough job of cleaning things off. As you can see, we clearly need to do some additional cleaning with non abrasive cleaners. For this first round of cleaning, we weren’t focused on cosmetics — we really just needed to get the big chunks of grime off of the playfield before firing things up. Leaving grime on the playfield is a great way to scuff up the balls and cause additional damage to the artwork. It took several rags to get through the first coat of grime, but it made the playfield significantly smoother to the tough. We also took the opportunity to literally get rid of the cobwebs and give the whole table a good vacuuming, inside and out.

After getting through the preliminary cleaning we got down to replacing a few missing parts. As you might recall from our earlier post introducing this table, there are some serious parts missing from this table. But, of course we didn’t jump straight in to replace the missing coin door or anything major like that — we had to start with the bare basics.

For starters, this table was missing the most important part of a pinball table: the balls!

Now, as a bingo pinball table, the ball situation is a little different than what you’d expect to see on a more conventional table. Even though gameplay occurs one ball at a time, the machine is actually designed to take eight balls. Plus, the balls are just a tiny bit different in diameter than what you’d find on a modern table. Each ball on a bingo table is 1 1/8″ in diameter, instead of the more common 1 1/16″, but even with the odd sizing they’re still pretty easy to find at any major pinball supply website.

Installing the balls is a completely trivial task. All you do is plop them down on the playfield and they’ll roll into their natural resting place underneath the playfield. Nothing to it, really. Just make sure to put all eight in there or the right switches won’t be tripped to get a new game going later. The ball channel has a series of sensors underneath it that let’s the game know just how many balls are left to be played, and the circuits get mighty confused if it tries to restart and can’t “detect” that everything was returned to the ball trough.

Next up, we installed our rubbers. Part of the allure of a good pinball game is watching the ball bounce around. Given that the balls are steel, and most playfield parts are made out of plastic, we need a little something extra to get that nice bounce. On most parts of most tables, this is done through rubber rings.

Naturally, this poor pinball table’s rough life strikes again. For whatever reason, every single piece of rubber was missing from the playfield. Perhaps they were taken away by whoever absconded with the balls and coin door. Regardless, though, it’s a pretty simple fix. A quick online order is all it takes to get a fresh set of playfield rubbers, and some suppliers even sell bundled kits that include everything a particular model of pinball might need. Heck, even if we had the original rubbers on the table, it still would have been worth picking up a kit to replace them all. Over time, the rubbers lose their springiness and the table stops feeling as zippy as it should. It’s a cheap fix, an easy fix, and just not a worthwhile place to cut corners.

Basically, we did this:

 

And, then we did that again and again and again and…. well, you get the idea. This table uses dozens upon dozens of little rubber rings. It isn’t exactly hard work, just tedious and repetitive. After a few minutes, though, the whole playfield is a lot more complete:

 

Ah, yes, the sweet signs of progress…

Alright, so we put some balls in the table and we got some fresh rubbers onto the playfield. But that was about as far as things got before we could no longer resist the tempatation to actually plug ‘er in and see what worked. So, we grabbed our fire extinguisher and braced ourselves for disaster…

But I think that’s a good story to save for another day 🙂

Making progress

Just wanted to swing by and check in with some updates on what we’ve been up to. Things are still going to be a little quiet on the blog for the next while as we continue to setup shop. The good news, though, is that we’re not just sitting on our hands enjoying the sunny weather (although that does sound nice….).

First up, we’ve finally gotten around to shoring up the last bits of paper work. Somehow, these little things can be a real pain. There’s just something about actually holding down a day job that makes it awfully hard to finish up tasks that need to occur during business hours. Fortunately, we can finally check off a couple more items from our list: filing the city business license, and setting up a dedicated bank account. Small steps, sure, but every bit of progress counts.

And, now that we have all that squared away, we can finally do a very important thing: we can spend money! Well, at least we can spend it without having to worry about it getting mixed up with our personal accounts. So what was the honorary first purchase? Tickets to the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in Tacoma. We don’t have anything exciting to share out right now, so we’ll just be attending as visitors, but it should be a fun chance to get out there and see some pinball tables. Drop us a line if you’ll be there on Friday, and we’ll try to say “hi”.

Also on the list of accomplishments, we’ve procured some essential parts for the old Bally Beach Club table. Nothing super fancy, but definitely some important essentials: rubber rings, fresh light bulbs, springs, and most importantly the actual pinballs. With these pieces in place, we should be able to get some action shots posted of the table up and (sort of) running. Stay tuned for the juicy details.

B-I-N-G-O! Starting our first restoration

Alright, enough talk about business for a bit — let’s get down to business and talk about pinball. In particular, let’s talk about our first refurbishment: a 1953 Bally Beach Club. Here she is, exactly as we got her:

So the first thing you’re probably noticing is that this looks nothing like any pinball table you’ve seen at an arcade. There seem to be an awful lot of holes on the playfield, and where are the flippers?! Well, the Bally Beach Club is what’s known as a “bingo” pinball table. Back in the 50’s, these were actually a fairly common type of table. Back then, pinballs were often used as a gambling device, and the core of the gameplay was centered around chance. The entire flipper concept didn’t really get popular until the law cracked down on games of chance, at which point flippers came into play to turn it into a game of “skill”.

The game play on the bingo pinballs is actually pretty straight forward. The user deposits a coin, or several, and shoots balls onto the play field. As the balls land in individual holes, the corresponding number lights up on the glass backboard. If the user gets three or more lit items in a row, they score some credits. They’re also allowed to shout bingo, but that part isn’t required. Now, some of the tables (including this one) also let you deposit additional credits at the start of gameplay to unlock additional features, like rollover targets or select-a-spot features. But we’ll get into all that in more detail in a later post.

Now, this particular table has had a bit of a rough life, so it should be a nice challenge to fix ‘er up. This table popped up on Craigslist a few weeks back, so we took a drive out to a swap meet in rural Washington to have looksee. The seller had picked the table up from an estate sale as-is, and didn’t know much else about it. The table turned on, but he hadn’t been able to get it to light up, and there weren’t even any balls in it to run the game.

Upon thorough inspection, it turns out this table is awfully beat up. For starters, it was dirty. Really dirty, inside and out:

But a little dirt isn’t so hard to clean off. What else is wrong? Well, the cabinet isn’t original — it turns out someone rebuilt the base cabinet somewhere along the line. At first we thought maybe someone has just sanded off the original paint job, but the wood itself isn’t original to the time. The back box is the original wood, sanded down and lacquered, but the cabinet it just some plywood someone picked up at the hardware store. The rebuilt cabinet alone is enough to demote this pinball to a parts table to some folks, but we’re happy to press on.

As part of the cabinet rebuild, it also appears that a prior owner took out the coin door. Looking at the front of the table, there’s simply nowhere to access coins, and the top bar is missing the slot to insert them:

Well, as mentioned earlier, adding credits is pretty central to gameplay on a bingo pinball, so that seems concerning. It also means that we could safely infer someone along the way did a bit of rewiring along the way to make it free play. Well, now we can’t just stare at the schematic to debug problems — we also have to figure out the extent of the intentional rewiring that occurred.

Further inspection inside the cabinet reveals that the door rewiring might just be the least of our problems. In addition to a few other hanging wires and unexpected modification we found something a whole lot scarier: fire damage. Yep, this table sure has had a rough go of things.

Take a look at the replay registers, and look at all the soot on the coil second from the bottom:

That’s fire damage. And, peering behind that bank of registers, there’s a whole lot more fire damage. Well, drats, that’s concerning. But, hey, some people just love a challenge.

So, despite all the giant red flags that this pinball isn’t worth the trouble, we bought it. Now it’s sitting in the garage awaiting a proper restoration. Here is some of the work we need to get through:

• Clean off decades of dirt and grime. Inside and out, there’s a whole lot of cleaning to be done.
• Basic maintenance. Add a set of balls, add rubber rings to the posts, replace any dead light bulbs
• Get it fired up, and wrap our heads around what modifications were made to make it free play
• Refinish the legs and get them back on (seriously, they’re in oddly rough shape)
• Cosmetic essentials, like sealing the back glass and refreshing the playfields
• Electrical essentials, like cleaning gummed up steppers and contact plates
• Rewiring and adjusting old modifications to ensure proper game play

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take you through that journey, and along the way we’ll weave in a few posts about the odd history of gambling, bingo and pinball tables.