This Switch Is ALWAYS Off On Any Old EM - Repairing a 1977 Sonic Prospector Pinball Machine 

What a beautiful colourful pinball machine. Thank you so very much for all these videos. You have expanded my knowledge in EM pinball machines. I own a Bally Nip It and thanks to your help, I have been able to get it working 100%. If not for your help, it would still be having issues. I love Pinball machines, that's the kid in me at 65 years of age. I was 14 when I started playing these machines. I will keep playing and learning about how they work, thanks to you.

Thanks, Ron. Enjoyed the video. Happy Thanksgiving to you and the gang...

My guess is the tape was put on the plate of the relay to quiet the hum. …I think it will still work with the tape, but obviously “that ain’t right”. … I expect you will take it off … but maybe not. I’ll just have to watch the next exciting episode. Thanks for posting Ronnie.

Back glass looks great when lit up

Ron, As always this is a great video, and appreciate your videos. Following are some comments, you asked for engineer's comments so here it comes. Wow, that machine does scream Williams! The spray contact cleaner (technician it a can) also applies a residue that acts as an insulator on the contacts. I believe contact cleaner contributed (not solely) to multiple problems on an E-M machine I have. The E-M machines are great, but they need the proper TLC for them to reach their full potential. I like what you're doing Ron, keep up the good work. The magnetic force will not be appreciably changed with electrical tape for the initial pull in of the relay. Electrical tape will not significantly change the magnetic reluctance (magnetic resistance) associated with the magnetic force across the gap when the magnetic circuit is open. It may change the holding force, but if it pulls in, the holding force should be adequate. The tape will eventually cause other problems. The tape will eventually wear and the glue will cause the relay to stick closed. Sand paper on the stepper units will wipe the silver plating off the copper. This also contributed to multiple problems associated with one of my machines. Oxidized silver is black and will conduct very well, that is a great property of silver. Silver on silver contacts does not require a grease to lubricate and provide good conduction with oxidation. Oxidized copper is green and it does not conduct. Once you wipe the silver off you are committed to applying a grease to prevent oxidation, or you need to replenish the silver plating. Silver on silver is best, I would tell technicians to rub grease into the silver and wipe it off. The grease would fill pores with oil and allow smooth motion of the contacts. A heavy grease application (if you see it, it is heavy) will collect dust and will eventually cause the contact to stick. Follow-on comments to technicians with if you can't apply grease properly, you should not apply grease at all (again, this is if contacts are silver to silver). The Jones plugs are silver plated also. You need to be careful not to wipe the silver off the Jones plugs, or you will fight connection problems in the future. You may want to consider applying a "no-ox" grease to the jones plugs if the silver is wiped off. Keep up the good work. Enjoy!

Thanks for the video. It almost looks as if it’s been rewired, it’s so clean.

I have a Sonic Butterfly mine is holding up great also. Sonic made pinballs like a AMC built cars back in the day. They Bought parts from other pinball companies to build machines.

Thanks Ron, you’re the best! Happy thanksgiving!

The inside looks like it would smell like the 1970’s. Like taking a train set out of the attic, a little musty, slight burning smell and ozone.

Cloth covered wires. When did they stop using cloth and switch to plastic coating? In house wiring it seems like 75 they started using the NM wire I don't know if it is the same everywhere in the country, but here in Pennsylvania, You see the original farm houses and houses in the cities that are from right around the time of the revolutionary War and some of them are a few decades before and they are all made out of local stone with mortar in between and these buildings have held up really well for being almost 300 years old Pennsylvania was where the glacier stopped from the last ice age and the front of the glacier would dig up everything as it scraped and grew and it carried all these rocks and boulders and when the ice melted it deposited them all over this area so that was a natural building material that was used As best I can figure either the wood buildings did not hold up or more likely because the stone buildings the huge would beams that you see in them almost all of them have fire damage and I guess during the revolutionary War the British burned every house they could which is why only the stone ones remain Then you don't see many buildings built during the 1800s and the old buildings along main Street that were businesses and homes they start right around 1900 and most of the buildings are right around that time As you move from the main Street into the side streets You Don't see anything being built in the 1910s OR 1920s or 1930s or even 1940s and you start to see a few buildings around the 19 50s but then you see this huge housing boom that occurred in the 1960s And I haven't figured out why that was the case but then you see a lull again And right around 1977 there was another huge housing boom with upscale upper class upper middle class three bedroom three bath very nice very open floor plan modern split ranch with built-in garage and these were built from around 1977 to the very early 1980s and it seemed like by 1982 these houses stopped and there was another lull that lasted until 1998 There were quite a few developers that bought huge pieces of land and they built these incredibly expensive houses that were in the $700, 000 to 1 million dollar range and they couldn't sell them and I thought they were nuts to have sunk this much money because there wasn't a demand for houses and definitely nothing like these things And I often wonder if it would have been one of the worst investments and had destroyed many contractors had it not been for 9/11 because in the span of 6 months after September and houses don't sell in the winter but I watched so many people from New York City and the New York metro area come here and buy up every single one of these houses And I think these developers were wrong in building these things and they literally would have been out of business had the attacks not happened because those people in New York never would have moved here but now this area has been building ever since 2002 and it hasn't stopped and the population has grown by a thousand percent where there used to be nothing but wooded land in farmland it's all houses now and many townhouse developments with hundreds of townhouses in each one But looking at the wiring in the different era homes the homes built in the 60s the wiring was much different than the ones that were built starting in the mid 70s Those 77 and later homes had the first modern electrical that had three prong plugs and GFCI breakers and four wire phone jacks installed in every room Prior to the mid 70s the phones in the house were usually hardwired and belonged to the phone company and the late seventies for the first time people were going to the stores and buying phones and owning their own phones You used to buy a house or rent a house that somebody else had previously and the phone would already be there it would be a giant thing on the wall in the kitchen and maybe a big dial phone in the front room and the wire went to the wall to a box and it was literally hard wired to the wall Really amazing to see the transition and the breakers prior to the 70s most houses had fuses and the breaker boxes were a new thing that distinguished these houses It's amazing driving around and literally being able to spot a house and say that was built between 1977 and 1980 and I don't know if it was the same contractor that did all of them but they all have a very specific look to them and I've seen them in Canada as well that are almost identical so that style must have been a blueprint that was used at least in this area and in an area in Canada but I've never seen it anywhere else which is strange It really makes me think that this contractor or developer or company that made this design must have been in this area and somehow in Canada because this is not duplicated anywhere else in the US that I've seen

The nice thing about the UHU glue stick is they are solvent free.

I have a dealers choice that I have bought recently, my first pinball since the 80s. It has the coin/ball unit leaf on the wrong side, everything sticky and several connections must have caught on a sleeve or something. I fixed most of them, but it does the same as this with the start a single player, get 4 players, but with the added bonus of ball one for everyone, then stays with p4 for the last 4 balls. I'm looking forward to copying your fix ;) I wish you did house calls to the UK!

Williams Diner is the only other one I can think of that the ball goes straight from the shooter lane to a saucer. Can't wait to see what the do-do-do-do music turns out to be

For the ones that say spray it, they can spray it and do them, I would file the contacts myself. It's more like points in an ignition system, pited and burnt as they arc, like you said. You do you, let them do them. We will see who has the more reliable machine, if the people saying spray have even touched pinball machine....... If the metal plate is acting as a contact, then the insulation tape will be a bad thing. If it is not a contact, the tape has probably been put in because the relay was buzzing and the person who put the tape on didn't understand how to fix it properly.

Such a great looking machine. Great video thanks for sharing. Finally getting caught up been busy.

The trick with electrical tape on a coil is normally done on DC coils when the coils iron core has developed "memory" and the pole piece stays stuck on the end of the core instead of releasing. I've also seen it done to stop the pole piece chattering on the end of the core.

Oh those chimes are so nice. They sound different than American chimes

The paper may be vellum. It was commonly used for pencil mechanical drawings, etc. Its use diminished as everyone moved to CAD.

Thank you for trusting us , and giving us the feeling that we aren't completely useless. Yes the magnetic function should work. Maybe not as strong but still work. Maybe the coil stayed activated (sticked) sometimes. And by adding a little room with tape the problem was less. ?

Come on people, thats some nice wiring!

The UHU stick triggered a childhood memory. We had those in crafting lessons at school. Now I don't know if crafting is a good translation, we would mainly cut up pieces of thick paper and thin cardboard , glue them together, and try to imagine that they were something special. I remember one case where one of the bullies tore up my piece of work because his was better. I grabbed his hand and bit him. He cried. I know that wasn't nice of me.

Wow. So you have there a Dutch glue-stick , made in Germany, used in America. It's a small world after all. 😆

The electric tape on that relay is not going to make it stop working. Someone probably put it on there because the switches would stay engaged after the power to the coil turned off, because of some residual magnetism in the metal. Or maybe it was just to reduce noise or something.

Interesting game. I have never seen it before.

Joe has it made in the shade cleaning this one up .

Also, for anyone wondering about a quick and easy fix for the “this switch is always mis-adjusted in every EM” that’s in the thumbnail, just put a T-Post rubber around the thing that moves the switch to give it extra room. Works very well in my experience

I believe the weird paper you have is called book stock. I ran a news paper printing press for 25 years and we sometimes used it for special things. What you have of course is the very old version of it :)

Hey Ron! Yeah it’s true. Apparently: Most countries/regions in Europe and Asia use an international standard known as the A-series. A4, for example (297 x 210 mm) is slightly longer and narrower than the 8 1/2 x 11 inch letter size (279 x 216 mm) commonly used in the US and Canada.1

15:32.....Good grief I thought Ron was being abducted by and alien from the X Files!

I'm pretty sure this design is inspired by the movie "Way Out West" from 1937. The picture on the backglass is a lot like a scene in the movie where they're crossing a stream and the plot involves a gold mine. By the way Laurel is the skinny one in the red hat, Hardy is the chubby one with the Hitler mustache

Well, some do spray flammable things such as WD40 (kerosene), and we've seen the results of that in past videos. But most would want to spray something like a mild acid or something (phosphoric acid, oxalic acid). That won't cause a fire hazard, but then, what about corrosion? And yeah, you've battled that enough on PCBs.

He's (Ronnie) the boogie woogie pinball boy of Rockhill SC..( to the tune of the Andrews sisters hit Boogie Woogie Bugle boy) 😁

Vampire - always wondered why we’d only seen Joey

Isn't Spain on 230v which would drop the amp draw and lessen the heat on the wires?

The paper is probably velum.

Great video Ronnie, Was the inside of the cabinet repainted, because it looks very clean paint? The backglass and playfield looks great. Great job cleaning those switches. See you on the next video Ronnie. Happy Thanksgiving to you

So you repair AM radio's too?...Wouldn't mind seeing some of those repair's, obviously not on a pinball channel....But still?.

Hey Ron!!

Back to work on the Spanish bootleg, I see! 😁 I'll giggle gladly along with Joe's Classic Videogames if you make a nice commission on those pinball machine. Some nut collector probably will buy it off you for a decent price! 🤭

Thye paper is called rag bond paper. It's made with recycled cotton rags and clothing.

Hmmm, if the plate is just grounded like the rest of the metal work then the tape dosent make any sense other than would it reduce the noise much ? maybe while setting it up that solenoid was going crazy and they slapped tape on it to shut it up ! If the plate has an electrical connection to it then I guess it's on the schematic and you would know about it, just wound back and took another look, and it all looks grounded just like all the metal work so the reason it's there must be to dampen something at least that's all I can think of right now, please let us know in the next one ! oh yeah, just as you said parchment I was typing it !! we may have crazy paper we do have 'mighty pretty wire' that ages well....cheers.

Looks a load tidier than any American machine I have ever seen.

JOE CLASSIC, I'm confused about how the index relay and the outhole relays works together when the ball rolls backward back into the outhole relays it resets the index relay or what? You kinda of mentioned it briefly in the video but can you explain more in detail how it works

Very Similar to my 'Mars Trek' by Sonic. 🤪

I think Williams license out to them to make games over sea.

In Germany, UHU (="owl") is a synonym for "glue". Very funny to see "UHU" in an american video. What is the name of THE american glue stick? I'm buying one to stick labels in my american pinballs in the future....😉

A ballcount unit by the out hole, eh? hehe

Please teach me. 17:07 You touch white plastic parts of ball count unit. What's name is it? And please teach me which online store did you buy it from?

Is that actually the Sega that made sonic?

Do you repair Wells Garner 4600k monitors?

The paper is probably at least partly, recycled

Hello Yodelayheehoo

Have you seen the new stern machines on t *k t*k?

A bunch of rookies spraying $#!t down inside their pinball machines. Everybody knows you can't do that! I agree these machines are not appreciated for what they are.