Pinball guts

Now that we have a pinball machine in the house (temporarily), I’ve had to learn a few things about it. One of the flippers started to “stick” a bit, making it hard to play at times. I opened up the case to see if it was something obvious and easy to fix. I’m not exactly Mr. Fixit.

As it turns out, the guts of a pinball machine are amazingly complex. I guess it’s not too surprising, since they’re mainly mechanical, but I shudder to think what would happen if I had to do a serious repair.

This is beneath the playfield:

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There are solenoids everywhere!

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And here are a few ball’s-eye shots from the surface of the playfield:

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Fortunately in this maze of wiring, I was able to figure out a few adjustments I could make to get the flipper back in line. Now it’s back to attempting to get a new high score (I’m the record-holder at 356 million points, beating Zack’s previous high of 333 million)…