Clive: One lunchtime some friends and I decided to go to the local pub for something to eat and, oh my, oh my, go tell it on the mountain, there was The Addams Family pinball machine in all its flashing glory next to the pool table. This would have been around late 1992. I hadn't seen or played a pinball machine in probably eight years prior to that. I was amazed at how far the technology and game play had come since the machines of the early 1980s. Modes, a hand that picked the ball up, THING flips! I was hooked on pins from that point.
I placed an ad for broken electronic pinball machines in a London classifieds newspaper called Loot. Loot was the 1992 paper version of Ebay, it contained wall-to-wall ads of every kind, came out twice a week and was printed on bright neon paper. I got a response from a guy who was selling ten pinball machines in various states of disrepair but all where complete and in good shape. I purchased all ten. They were all early solid state games (Hulk, Phoenix, Galaxy etc.). I put together a small electronics workshop in my English backyard and it was then that I started my new hobby of pinball repair.
PinballCountry: When people think about board repairs your name immediately pops up. What do you think contributes the most to your notoriety?
Clive: Notoriety? Probably, the way I dance. : )
Seriously though, in the mid to late 1990's, I used to do a lot of electronic and game technical support on the Usenet newsgroup Rec.Games.Pinball (RGP) and would also write technical articles on pinball. I would think that I am known more from that period on RGP.
PinballCountry: What is the farthest away that people have shipped you boards for repair?
Clive: There are infrequent repairs that arrive from Europe; Germany, Italy, Belgium and the UK come to mind. We have a lot of Canadian customers.
PinballCountry: Do you repair EM machines as well as SS and DMD machines?
Clive: No EM repairs, -- only solid state (electronic) machines. I'm a product of the digital age and cannot relate all that well to Electro Mechanical games. I understand the attraction of the games but they are not for me, with the possible exception of Bally's Vampire (which I admire for the artwork). For in-home calls on pinball machines, we now use a couple of local technicians as I'm usually tied-up in the shop with circuit board repairs.
PinballCountry: How many board repairs do you average in a typical month?
Clive: It varies, anywhere between 90 to 100 boards a month right now, more if Jamie (our part time technician) is working with me. There are certain variables at play that determine exactly how many boards are repaired; condition, amount of work, complexity, that sort of thing. A typical month does not involve working 9-5 days but more often than not, its 10-11 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. It's quite immersive. We've repaired over 8000 boards in total since starting in 2003.
PinballCountry: Do you repair only pinball circuit boards?
Clive: No, we also circuit repair boards for amusement devices, redemption games, shuffle bowlers and also repair the odd video game board for our customers. A high degree of the circuit board repairs are pinball related.
PinballCountry: Has the economy had much impact on your business?
Clive: None whatsoever. We have been very lucky in that respect.
PinballCountry: I'm sure that you have seen all kinds of things. Is there one failure, perhaps battery acid damage that accounts for the biggest percentage of problems?
Clive: Actually, some of the biggest problems right now are simply due to the age of some boards. There are lots of boards that come in for repair with cracked solder joints, dried-out leaky capacitors, corroded connectors, flaky masked ROMs, failed memory, or more usually, a combination of those faults. Some of these boards are 30 years and older and are really starting to show their age. Circuit boards with battery corrosion would be somewhere around the middle of all the fault types seen. We do see a lot of boards that have been damaged by attempted repairs. These boards usually arrive from customers who have removed them from as-is purchased games or circuit board purchases.
Now, if you were just asking about early Bally boards (pre-1985), then battery corrosion would be at the top of the list.
PinballCountry: What is the biggest repair mess that you have had to deal with?
Clive: I can't think of any one particular board repair that was so bad that it stood out above all others. There have been many boards that have arrived in poor shape with all kinds of appendages hanging off them or that had multiple missing parts or that had the ICs or capacitors glued onto the board. When I see these boards, you can often hear my eyes rolling in my head.
On a slightly different note; we recently repaired a stack of new old stock (NOS) WPC-95 boards that were rejected by Williams during testing and put to one side at the plant. I'm assuming this was just before the switch to Pinball 2000 since nothing appears to have been done with the faulty boards. These boards had various production issues: wrong components installed, failed new logic, defects in the foil/traces resulting in short circuits etc. Unusual but at the same time interesting as these types of production faults don't usually come to light.
PinballCountry: What is the most difficult kind of problem to debug?
Clive: Any electronic repair where the problem is intermittent and not easily reproduced. It's not so much that the problem is difficult, more that it's frustrating to track down. For instance, a problem in the digital domain where data is being corrupted by logic (for example; Programmable Logic Arrays or custom logic devices) but the logic appears to function correctly.
PinballCountry: What is the strangest electronic fault you have come across?
Clive: This was a DCS sound board fault for a Road Show pinball. The customer stated that after he locked the second ball for multi-ball, the game would slow down by some alarming rate. I set about reproducing the fault and after the second ball was locked, the game did indeed start to update the display and lamps at an incredibly slow rate - about once per second. You could actually see the lamp rows and lamp columns changing this slowly. It turned out that after the second ball was locked, the DCS board would just machine-gun the CPU board with data (presumably, the CPU made a sound call request and the DCS respond with a hail of nonsense). Basically, the CPU board couldn't get any work done because the DCS board was absorbing all its resources. A new 2105 DSP cured that problem.
PinballCountry: Is there any that you can't fix? If so, who do you turn to?
Clive: Generally, every circuit board is repairable. If the board has a golf ball size whole burned through it, or looks like a piece of burnt toast because the game has been struck by lightning; it's not going to be repairable. Some boards have all the logic destroyed due to inadvertent high voltage shorts to the board and in some cases are not economically repairable and it would be cheaper for the customer to obtain a replacement board rather than get the original repaired. We have a free evaluation process to determine what can be done in these cases. We get a lot of boards that people have given-up on, so it's important that The Coin-Op Cauldron is a last resort for some customers. We don't send boards out, -- they are all repaired in-house.
PinballCountry: There are many different kinds of circuit boards. How do you go about testing boards that are shipped to you? Do you have a separate test fixture for each? Can you describe your setup?
Clive: Well, the workshop (which is just about to be reorganized), is about 1400sq.ft in size. The shop contains benches, test rigs, test equipment and pinball machines as well as all the chip-stock, components, schematics, manuals, a technical library, storage and packaging. The main work areas/test stations have static dissipating bench mats and static monitors. Each test area is equipped with an oscilloscope or two, ESR/LCR meter, function generator (mainly for generating zero-crossing pulses), a triple lab power supply, curve-tracer and logic probes.
There is also some global test equipment used in the shop: A couple of logic analyzers, Fluke 9010 and pods (not used for pinball), counter/timers, Digital Multi-Meters (DMMs) a curve-tracer (with signature capture) etc. There is an area devoted to device programming (EPROMs, PLDs, microcontrollers) with a host of different programmers.
Desoldering equipment includes Pace PRC2000 and MBT250 systems . Soldering irons are Weller. Surface mount repair is handled by a modified PDR 1700 infrared rework station for, SOIC, PLCC and QFP devices.
Circuit boards are tested any two of three ways (two-tier testing): On the bench and then in a game, or, on the bench and then in a test rig. The test rigs are simply the guts of pinball machines (flippers and all) organized in a tidy manner with some custom embellishments. For instance, the early Bally/Stern test rig can test all Bally and Stern boards with various custom adaptors; MPUs, displays, lamp driver, solenoid driver and all sound and speech boards. The test rigs also have a latching switch matrix as opposed to the standard momentary switch matrix (which only remain closed as long as you hold the switches down) as you can simulate proper game play with a latching matrix.
The circuit board test procedure is the same for all boards sent to us for repair: The board is checked visually for damage and condition and then at the bench to determine if the board is safe to power-up. Most faults are caught at this time with a DMM. A very high degree of repair faults are diagnosed with just a DMM alone. If the circuit board is safe to power-up, the board is then tested to verify the fault. If the board cannot be powered-up because it is unsafe to do so (due to a shorted high voltage power supply, for instance), then the repair starts at this point. Once the circuit board is up and running and appears to be fully operational on the bench, it goes either into a game or one of the test rigs for final play and soak-testing.
PinballCountry: What tools do you recommend for other technical folks? Do you have a favorite soldering station or logic probe, for example?
Clive: A bench or workspace that is static free. A good digital multi-meter is a must for any pinball repair. A good temperature controlled ESD safe soldering iron and a desolder station or desolder hand pump. Don't discount solder wick as this is a very handle tool especially for surface mount board clean-up.
My favorite soldering iron is the Weller DEC 1001/WSD161 which is a dual iron. Weller currently makes a good range of ESD safe irons like the WESD51 (of which we also have a couple). We were given a Xytronic 137 ESD soldering iron about five years ago as part of a promotion and I was very impressed with that.
As far as test equipment goes: A logic probe is very handy for those quick digital in-game logic state checks. A good, calibrated, 100MHz or higher analog oscilloscope is handy if you are taking-on more complex digital circuit board repairs. An ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance) meter for testing capacitors. A reliable EPROM programmer for checking EPROMs. Some EPROM programmers can now be obtained quite cheaply and come with test functions for checking CMOS and TTL logic as well as Static RAM, again, very handy. If you are serious about programming devices then try to obtain a programmer that verifies 5 or 10% either side of Vcc since some used EPROMs will verify at a steady 5 volts and fail with any kind of Vcc fluctuation when the board is back in a game.
PinballCountry: What type of solder do you use?
Clive: We use Kester 245 which is 63%/37% tin/lead composition. It's a no clean solder, which, despite its name, does require a little clean-up. For surface mount repair, we use Amtech NC-559-V2 solder paste which again, is 63/37.
PinballCountry: Everyone knows that keeping a pin clean is an important part pinball maintenance. Is there any kind of maintenance or precautions that can be done to protect the electronics within the pin?
Clive: Well, moving batteries off circuit boards with remote battery packs to prevent corrosion is the first that comes to mind. Observing static precautions and not handling circuit boards without being grounded (especially so in winter, when static build-up is more common due to the dryness of the air) and allowing the games to get sufficient airflow in dust free areas so the built-in convection cooling can keep the board temperatures somewhat regulated and clean.
PinballCountry: Some systems such as Gottlieb's System 80B are notorious for being problematic. When the electrical mods that are available online to correct the design flaws are applied do these systems then become as reliable as any others?
Clive: I think Gottlieb solid state games get a bit of a bad rap regarding reliability. I'm a big fan of System 80 games. The ground modifications make the games very reliable. The System 3 board set is extremely reliable. Apart from obsolete components, which plague System 1 CPU, sound and early System 80 sound board repairs, I don't think System 80/A/B are any worse than Williams or Bally in terms of electronic reliability.
PinballCountry: Do you have a favorite source for replacement electronic parts?
Clive: Most of our electronic components are ordered from the usual suspects; Mouser, Newark, Digi-Key and Allied. We let specialist houses track the obsolete stuff for us; America II, Future Electronics, Quest Components and others. We use a few other exotic houses when the need arises. Great Plains Electronics has some valuable stuff made especially for pinball.
PinballCountry: Some systems have an additional transformer winding (a so called "hot" tap) that can be used to hike the voltage to pop bumper coils and such. Do you have any reservations about someone changing transformer taps to add a little more zip in their game?
Clive: Well, the boost is really designed for low-line voltage levels in areas where the incoming 110/220 volts AC is low. I cannot see any electronic reason as to why this would be detrimental to your game but it might result in broken drops targets and ramps due to the extra power. ;-)
PinballCountry: I have also heard of a removing some of the windings on the coil of the flippers to make them stronger. Does this really work?
Clive: I can see no reason why it would not work. Removing windings will lower the coil resistance and allow more current to pass and you will likely see in an increase in magnetic field strength. That said, there will become a point where the increase in magnetic field strength will become flat and removing windings will get you no further increase in power. From this point on, you're just removing windings for no gain and if you continue to remove windings, the magnetic field will diminish. That said, removing windings from double-wound flipper coils will not work because you would have to get through the hold winding before you reach the power winding.
How the removal of windings translates to a real-world increase in flipper strength, I have no idea as I have never tried it.
The game was designed to operate as released from the factory. If you're seeing lag or weak performance from the flippers then rebuilding them with new parts would be the way to go.
PinballCountry: Are there any other mods that can be done to the electronics to make gameplay faster?
Clive: None that come to mind. The ball is doing the work!
PinballCountry: Replacing bulbs with LEDs is becoming quite popular. Are you a fan of this?
Clive: I'm not opposed to LEDs but I prefer the soft glow of incandescent lamps.
PinballCountry: Some LEDs are advertised as non-polarized and some are polarized. Since traditional diodes are all polarized how is the non-polarized LED made?
Clive: I'm assuming they're nothing more complex that two sets of LEDs wired in opposition to each other: One set is always conducting (on) and one set is always blocked (off) no matter which way the LED lamp is inserted.
PinballCountry: Are there any advantages to using a polarized LED vs a non-polarized LED?
Clive: The non-polarized are probably cheaper than the polarized version, beyond that point, I see no advantage.
PinballCountry: Are you an avid pinball player?
Clive: I'm a very casual player. I'm not good enough to play in competition and some of my older friends would probably attest to that! I only get excited when playing if I see smoke coming from the boards. ;-)
PinballCountry: What is your favorite pin?
Clive: The Addams Family. I fell in love with the game. I thought it was extremely innovative and fun to play, and that still holds true today. It was a real landmark game for me. Twilight Zone would be a close second and probably Star Trek The Next Generation would come in 3rd. I also have a soft spot for Gottlieb System 80 games and Haunted House is the only game I've ever purchased twice!
PinballCountry: What procedure do you recommend if someone wants to send you a circuit board for repair? Should they email/call you first?
Clive: If you are a first-time customer, a call or email is the best way to contact us. It can often get busy in the shop so I might not reach the phone 100% of the time but I always catch emails. Everyone here at PinballCountry would like to thank Clive Jones for this interview.
Article C 2010 PinballCountry.com and used with permission.
