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Complete Williams Hot Tip

ronsplooter

Site Supporter
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
6,469
Location
Nottingham
Alias
Chris
Time to start on my new project :D Firstly a big thanks for Mark @8bit-1up for hooking me up with the game :thumbs:It's a bit of an unknown to him and me in terms of whether it works etc so going to start with the basics and go from there. With that in mind, the first thing was to give it a once over and see what I'm dealing with before deciding where to start. To make it a bit easier to keep track of everything I'm breaking it down into 3 areas.....cabinet, backbox and playfield.

Cabinet

First impressions are really good :thumbs:It's structurally sound and the paint work is great for a game made in 1977, especially as the majority is white. I gave it a clean up with a magic eraser and I don't think I'll do much more that that:

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Inside the cab just needs a good clean and all the gubbins is in there for the sounds :thumbs:You've got 2 chime units to get the 4 chimes, an EM score reel for the clicking noise, a knocker and some sort of buzzer (not sure what sets that off). Everything moves freely by hand so just needs stripping down and cleaning up.

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Backbox

Structurally good but the paint isn't as nice as the cab. It's yellowed a lot more and there's knicks and scrapes as well. At some point in the past it's had the front edge repainted along with a 1in border round the edges of both sides. I've cleaned it up and will leave it as once it's in the line you won't be able to see it :)

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It's missing the player 4 score display so will be on the look out for one of those if anyone has a spare they'd part with? The lower light shroud is also a bit loose so will need re-attaching but looks ok other than that.

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Inside the backbox is where my initial work is going to start I suspect. I've stripped out the wiring harness so I can get a better look at the hack job that's been done between the transformer and bridges going into the power supply board. Looks like the power input connecter got fried at some point in the past so rather than replace it, wires have been soldered directly to the board and then a load of choc block used to tie it back into the original wiring. The wires into the transformer from the plug/line filter have also been chopped, then re-connected with crimp terminals which have since failed and finally there's a rogue wire coming off the transformer that doesn't seem to connect to anything!

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Playfield

Probably the best part of the game tbh. Underneath is very clean and the top side is in the kind of shape that should clean up great. No broken plastics, no sunken inserts and very little wear for a game of this vintage. There's a couple of spots where I'll need to get the paints out but mostly solid colour and I'll also re-black round the inserts to tidy them up. There's no playfield protector available for this game so depending on how far I go with the painting I might look at clear coating the playfield instead. Ball swirls in yellow paint, my old enemy :rofl:

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Shame about the wear spots on the playfield, good luck in matching those colours. Overall a great project, already looking forward to playing it at Pinfest.
 
Spent a bit of time on this today, mainly testing voltages to see if it was safe to try and power up as is. Starting at the plug and working my way in from there I immediately saw the first issue.....the game has got a European 2 prong plug on it (not surprising as it looks like it came from Germany). The good news is it also came with a travel adapter so I can leave it whilst doing this testing but will swap for a UK plug this week.

Next in line are the varistor and line filter, both of which look good and the mains fuse which tests ok. The cab switch looks fine and works as expected and this leads to the first real issue, the connector to the transformer. On the mains power side it's all fine with the red/white wire terminating in the female side of the connector but on the transformer side there's just a couple of bare wires. More good news though, in the bag of leg bolts that came with the game is the other half of the connector with the wiring still in place but ending with a couple of those crimp style connectors which must have broken loose in the past. I stripped off the knackered crimp things and soldered the male end of the connector back on so we've now got power to the transformer.

As shown in the previous pics, the wiring from the transformer and bridge rectifiers has been hacked with wires soldered directly to the power supply board and a load of choc blocks. Before ripping this out I wanted to see whether it actually provided all the relevant voltages to the power supply board so that when I do this work I know whether I've introduced a new issue or not.

The easiest way to check things is to give power to the board and then test voltages at the header pins of the output connectors to see if it's sending what's needed to the rest of the game. One thing I need to be careful of here is that Hot Tip is one of two early Williams games that provides 300v to the displays along with normal +100v and -100v, don't want to get bitten by that ;)

Using the pin repair bible, I tested the following:
  • 12v on J6 pin 6 should be 10v to 14v = 13v :)
  • 5v on J6 pins 7-10 should be 4.9v to 5.1v = 4.95v :)
  • -100v on J5 pin 3 should be -90v to -105v = -83v :( bit on the low side
  • +100v on J5 pin 4 should be +90v to +105v = +87v :( bit on the low side
  • Lamp power on J4 pins 5-8 should be 16v to 20v = 19.48v :)
  • Solenoid power on J3 pins 6-8 should be 28v to 38v = 37.9v :)
  • Flipper power wired directly from the BR should be 28v to 38v = 38v :)
So other than the display voltages being a bit on the low end the rest looks ok. I was feeling lucky at this point so decided to wire everything back up and see if the game would boot.

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Powered on and got all the GI but also the dreaded 2 leds locked on the MPU board :eek: This means the CPU board isn't booting and is likely locked up so I quickly powered off and removed the solenoid and lamp fuses from the power board so that any future power on's won't break anything else! Based on the repair bible I'm now looking at a couple of areas to work on next and neither are particularly fun (at least for me).

MPU lock ups can generally be attributed to either the 40 pin interboard connector between MPU and Driver board or the sh*t quality Scanbe IC sockets used all over the MPU board. I'll reflow the solder on the 40 pin connector to see if that helps but not sure I can face swapping out a load of chip sockets so I'm now considering buying one of those new combined MPU/Driver combo boards and then I can mess about with the old boards at my leisure (or send them off for repair) :thumbs:

A very productive day although not the happy ending I was hoping for :rofl:
 
While I decide how to proceed with the electronics, I thought I'd see what goodies came for free in the bottom of the cabinet (there was quite a bit) :D

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Along with the usual screws and washers, I got a head bolt, some solder and a hex spanner that looks like it came with some flat pack furniture :rofl: There's a large jar of Nescafe Original with a best before of 2004 and that weird bar thing with extenders on each end. Answers on a postcard if you know what it is as I don't have a clue!

Digging a bit deeper, the Nescafe jar contained a load of bulbs, fuses and what looks like old rubbers from when the game was change from white to black:

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And finally, a copy of the manual which was a nice thing to find:

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One of the better hauls I've had from a game :rofl:

As I didn't want to end the day on a disappointment, I also started stripping the top of the playfield down :D

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Lovely looking game Chris !
Looks good condition for her age.
300v bloody hell 🤣 might make the hair stand up a bit lol
Look forward to seeing it progress 👍🏻
 
After sleeping on what to do re: the MPU board issue I decided to treat it to a new board which arrived today thanks to Sean's speedy next day delivery :)

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Back in it's box for now though as things have also moved on with the playfield. It's back out of the cab and I started to remove the various mechs from the underside:

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Nothing that interesting here other than the drop target mechs which are a bit of an odd design that use small pcb's and little horseshoe connectors for the switches:

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A bit more time spent this evening and all the major stuff is now off the underside of the playfield......next up is to remove the three harnesses :thumbs:

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Had you not seen Williams notorious drop target circuit boards? Those horse-shoe contacts (appropriate for this game) make contact with one section of the circuit board as the target falls, and a different section when fully down. Then each target in a bank is connected in series through all the circuit boards. The obvious problem is that any contact breaking off cripples the entire target bank. Firepower was intended to use these, but was changed to static targets very close to production.

It's such an early solid state game, the coil diodes are drifting off looking for trouble, rather than tightly between the coil terminals.

The pictures of the inverted playfield reminds me that the flyer for 'Lucky Seven' shows Hot Tip playfields on the production line.
 
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Thankfully the horseshoe contacts are all in good nick and just need a clean up. The pcb's also seem good on first inspection but I'll know more when I get all the gunk off them. Does seem a silly design compared to what Gottlieb and Bally were doing at the time :hmm:
 
De-soldered and removed the lamp harness along with the wooden rails and that's a far as I'm going with the playfield strip down. GI sockets and braid are staying on as well as the various metal ball guides on the top side (and nails). That's left me with the below as the starting point for cleaning:

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Next step was to give both sides a quick hoover to remove the loose debris and then foam cleaner the top which cleaned up all the surface muck:

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I wanted to get an idea of how much of a fight this playfield is going to put up when it comes to the deep cleaning with IPA and magic eraser as this is where you have to strike a balance between clean and not taking paint off. Below are some pics based on a quick 5 min spot clean and it looks like it might not be too much of a nightmare:

Before

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After

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Before

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After

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In that last pic the left side yellow portion has been cleaned and the right is untouched which gives a really good idea of the difference you can make :thumbs: Much more cleaning to come both of the playfield and the mounds of parts I've taken off!
 
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Looking through again, the bumper seems to have its deflecting spur facing downwards.

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I'd thought the score unit might be in the back box, but then Williams did call this the Sound Panel. And it's where the early games with electronic sound had their audio boards. Even after that, it remained this size for a while, e.g. Gorgar. A much more modern wrapper on the knocker coil.
 
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The difference after cleaning is unbelievable the colours are beautiful 😍
How did you clean away the ball swirls Chris ?
 
@Jay Walker it's a bit weird re: the pop bumper skirt as it looks in too good a shape to be original and as you say, it's the wrong way round but when I took it apart it still had the metal coil sleeve in :hmm: So if it has been apart previously then they didn't bother swapping that out :cuckoo:

@Dotteddown Jamie, I use magic erasers (also called melamine foam) and 99% Isopropyl Alcohol for this type of cleaning. The magic erasers are an abrasive and with the IPA you have to be careful as it's easy to get carried away and take paint off as well as the dirt. If you are going to try this then go very easy until you get a feel for it and understand how far you can go. Keep checking the foam as you go and if you see any colour on it that matches the area you're cleaning then it's time to stop! Remember that every game is different and the condition of the playfield (in particular the state if the paint) determines what you can get away with :thumbs:

I spent some more time on it this evening and have now completed a first full pass over the whole playfield with the magic eraser/IPA combo:

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Not a massive update today as I'm in the dull cleaning everything phase :rofl: I follow the same process for pretty much any game I work on so the first thing is to put anything that will fit through the ultra sonic cleaner:

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Parts are done in batches and I mix in some Engine and Machine cleaner (basically a de-greaser) to get the oily crap off. The main reason for doing this is so I'm not putting really dirty parts into the tumbler, which is the next step. I want the tumbler to polish rather than clean so this first step really helps with the longevity of the tumbling media. With this game in particular, there are quite a few black screws and there's obviously no point in tumbling those so they just get the cleaner treatment and then bagged up ready to go back on the game :thumbs:

In parallel to this I also did a little bit more cleaning of the playfield as well as lightly sanding the shooter lane groove to tidy it up a bit. We're getting close to getting the paints out for the playfield :D
 
They're well worth having if you work on a lot of games like you do @Pudsey pinball Today I was doing 20 mins at 60 degrees per batch of stuff but it'll go up over 90 degrees and I think you can run it for an hour :thumbs:
 
Yet more cleaning :rofl: Thankfully most stuff has now been through the ultrasonic cleaner so lots of tumbling to do plus parts to order. I've also been cleaning up the playfield harnesses with some baby wipes for the wiring,, autosol to get the switches nice and shiny and IPA to get the major gunk off the coils. It will get more interesting again soon....promise ;)

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Just to be clear, I'll be replacing all of the bulbs but I gave these old ones a clean as I'll use them to block the GI sockets when clear coating the playfield and I'd rather they didn't make my hands dirty when handling them :thumbs:The first lot of bits came out of the tumbler today and has come up pretty well. As usual with this kind of thing, it'll never be perfect as I'm not getting things re-plated but they're definitely presentable enough for this game:

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