Four Beaches Blog

Let’s get technical. What we are going to discuss here is the understanding of how to work on pinball machines. These principals are transferable for many things, juke boxes, video arcade machines, any electronic that has schematics really.

What are schematics? They are a set of drawing that show electrical pathways and components that make up an electronic device. The inner workings so to speak.

If you are armed with these drawings and understand how to read them, you can fix anything.

This picture of schematics to the left, indicates components in a pinball machine electrical circuit and how to find them. Each line represents a wire/electrical path. Notice that I highlighted in yellow the number 9 above a wire path and again in the color code chart. This indicates I should look for a white wire, because #9 is shown in the key to be white. Right below it, you can see “688” on another wire path. According to the color code chart, “688” indicates a blue, slate, slate wire. So for this one, it would be a white wire with two slate lines printed on the wire itself. The manufacturer of this pinball machine, Gottlieb, uses up to three colors on each wire giving 3,265,920 different possible color combinations. In this image to the left the wires are shown with their coded colors printed on each wrapping around.

Bellow you can see what those wires look like in reality. They have a base color and two additional colors wrapped around the wire.

Solid green or green with yellow trace are wires for grounding. Everything else in this image are controlling a different component inside the machine.