Clark Griswald Christmas

My old man is tough to shop for, come Christmas. He is so incredibly simple, that there literally is nothing that he could want. His personal section of the house consists of a single box in a closet, full of random crap; books of matches, washers, lug nuts, etc. The rest is my mother’s domain, and he’s totally fine with that. In fact, last Christmas, my brother got him a card that simply said "Dear Dad, this year I got you exactly what you wanted for Christmas– absolutely nothing. Love, Keith." I’m almost positive that it was his favorite present that year. This year, however, I ran into a bit of motivation, coupled with a small stroke of genius, and I actually came up with something that he’d appreciate.

Sitting dormant in his workshop for the last 20 years is an old broken pinball machine from the 60s. He had gotten it in exchange for some service work, and had lugged it up to the cabin to keep the family entertained while he was building it around us. The machine’s most prominant player, besides us kids, turned out to be his father…and the one big framed picture of him that my folks still have hanging up on their wall, is a picture of him playing it. I don’t remember who passed away first, my grandpa, or the pinball machine, but at some point something critical to it’s functionality stopped working, and the machine was hauled back to my dad’s shop for a little while, until he could get it fixed. Needless to say, that day never came, and it was buried and forgotten in the back corner of the place for two decades. With a spare room in my apartment that could easily be transformed into a workshop, I decided to take it upon myself to see if I couldn’t "buff it out," and resurrect the old girl…maybe even bring her back to her former glory. I mean, I don’t know the first thing about electronics, but how complicated could an old pinball machine be…?

^-hidden fuse

Ah…pretty fucking complicated, apparently. Carving a path through the shop, just to get it out, took me about three hours. I moved a water heater, a washing machine, several giant iron barrels of scrap metal, and a goddamn claw-foot tub just to get at it in the first place. It was buried in random junk, and the grime and dust was so thick on the glass that I couldn’t even see through it to the play-field. Once I uncovered it, I wiped my hand across the glass, in dramatic Indiana Jones fashion, and was able to see the old creepy 60s sing-along-theme imagery lurking down there like some kind of tangent universe fallout shelter ruin. I called in my muscle (my brother), and together we lugged that bitch out of there and onto a truck…whisking it over to my apartment and setting it up in my new "work shop."

Went to plug it in and ran into my first problem– a rat or some other rodent had gnawed the plug off of the machine and ran away with it, leaving me with just a broken ratty wire. Swell. I stripped the wire as best I could, and jammed it into the outlet, raw-dog style, and the machine clicked to life! And clicked. And clicked. And clicked. It started coming back to me, what was wrong with it. The clicking was continuous, and after prying open the coin door (all keys to it had vanished, and I’d end up breaking both the locks in the front and in the back to open it), I shone a flashlight inside, and saw that the "main motor" was rotating away, but that besides that the machine was completely unresponsive. No lights. No flippers. Start button did nothing. Putting dimes in it did nothing. An endlessly clicking score motor is the pinball equivalent of a car that’s trying to turn over, but won’t start…or a computer that just hangs in startup mode. The score motor is supposed to reset the score to zero, and jump-start the machine’s boot-up process, but instead, it was just stuck in a permanent loop…and the score was frozen at 58 points. After a bit of online research, I learned that this can be caused by a billion different things, and after figuring out how to take the glass off and prop up the play-field, I was suddenly less certain that I’d be able to fix the thing.

But all the reading I had done beforehand had expanded my knowledge a bit, and encouraged me. Despite the mess, I learned that old Electro-mechanical games like that were actually very simple, at bottom. Something I believe I mentioned in a previous post. It’s nothing but a network of wires, switches, relays, and electric-powered magnets that power them. I tried a billion different things to get it to start, but made zero progress in a week. Every time I thought I had a decent troubleshooting lead– a sparking switch that I tweaked down, or a relay that I tripped manually just in case the solenoid powering it had died– it would turn out to have no effect. Once powered up, the machine would just continue to click and click and click until I pulled the cord again.

The other day my room mate came out to heckle me while I tinkered with it…mocking my resolve to bring the thing back to life. "Just you wait!" I declared. "I’ll show you!" And a moment later he was on his way to the store. During that moment, frustration took over, and I ended up shoving the play-field– hard— out of mere irritation and defeat. I had it propped up on this flimsy metal bar, like a car hood, and pushing it upwards caused it to fall back, and lean against the top-box with a healthy CLICK sound, and I realized that the machine was actually designed to be opened in such a way. From the new angle, I was able to see a tiny part of the underside of the play-field that had previously been blocked by a large relay bank…and right in the middle of this blind spot was a fuse. A blown fuse. HALELUJAH!

Replaced it within seconds, and jammed the wires back into the outlet– CLICK-CLICK-THUNK-CLACK-*SPARK*-RATCHET—DINGGG!! The thing flickered to life like a horror movie plot device. The yell

ow lamps dimmed and waned. The flippers buzzed loudly when you pushed them– one firing like a machine gun for reasons I’d learn about and fix later. I lowered the playfield, pushed start, and after a few more clicks and clacks, a ball popped into the slot, and I played ALMOST an entire game…. I was on my last ball, when I struck a 100 point button, and almost instantly the machine strobed brightly and went completely dead. Another fuse blown. The ball rolled into the hole with a lifeless thud, and that was the exact moment that my room mate returned from the store.

"But it… but I…. I had it working! It was WORKING!!"
"Sure, dude, whatever you say…"

He walked away with a roll of the eyes while I frantically tried to find and replace the fuse again. It was a different one this time, and after fixing it, I called him in to prove it. Drum roll, please! Jammed the wires into the outlet annnnnnddd— nothing. In fact, even more nothing than I originally had. Now the score motor wasn’t even coming on. There were no differences between being plugged in, and not plugged in, and my room mate just shook his head and went back to his own room. I was a bit devastated. This was backwards progress, especially when I had JUST gotten it to work a moment ago. I went over it with a fine tooth comb, couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it for the life of me. After a few days, I gave up, and just abandoned it…started thinking about how I could get rid of it.

Room mate came home with a friend of ours, one day, while I was in my room. I could hear them outside my door, checking out the machine:

"Woah, cool…is this yours?"
"No, it’s Gabe’s."
"I see it takes dimes, that’s great…does it work?"
"I don’t know," my room mate lied, "…why don’t you put some money in it and find out?"

I chuckled bitterly as I heard the jingle of coins. Oh well, at least I’ll make a little money with it before I– *CLICK CLACK-CLACK-THUNK-RATCHET– DINNNGGG!!*

Are you fucking kidding me? That’s right, folks…to power up an old gottleib, you actually have to put money into it, otherwise it just looks like it’s dead. Only person not slack-jawed blown away was our mutual friend, obliviously playing the game with no idea that he had just accidentally fixed in five seconds what I couldn’t deliberately fix in an entire week. The score motor was actually stuck before, when I got it, but it had un-stuck itself after I replaced the fuse, returning the game to it’s zero-position. Because the clicking score motor had always come on when I powered it up, I was expecting at least the sound of that anytime I plugged it in, and figured that if it was completely dead, the way it appeared, that it must have a major problem somewhere. The thought to try something as simple as putting a coin into it never even crossed my mind.

The machine is still a long ways away from fixed– I’ve got parts coming, more problems that I need to trace with that 100 point fuse (though I’m getting close), and I need to teach myself how to solder. I am, however, back up to 100% certain that I can get this thing into at least a rough functional order by Christmas, and invite my old man over for a game or two.