Gottlieb 2001 Pinball Repair (Part 2)

This is part 2 of the repair on the Gottlieb 2001 pinball machine, so if you didn’t read part 1, you might want to start there.

Initial Power

Since the back box and bottom panel were done, I went ahead and plugged in the machine without the playfield. However, I didn’t get any power. I checked the main fuse and it blew. This fuse checked fine earlier and put in a circuit breaker. With the circuit breaker in place, the game then started up and completed its reset cycle. Next, I plugged in the playfield and and tried to restart the game.

The score motor was constantly spinning and upon inspection noticed that the 50-point relay was pulling in, relaxing, and pulling in again. I went through all the 50-point switches and didn’t find any that were closed. I then noticed that two solder tabs on a kickout where touching. Removing this stopped the score motor from running.

Playfield

Now that the game reset properly, I did a topside tear down. The game was really dirty, old rubbers, and cracked plastics. The game will need new plastics down the road.

The skirt on the pop bumpers were chipped, and rebuilt both pop bumpers.

I vacuumed, cleaned, waxed, and new rubbers added to the playfield. Virtually every light bulb was bad in the machine. I counted 3 maybe 4 bulbs in the entire pinball machine that worked.

Drop Targets and Lights

Finally, I played a game and noticed a few more problems with it. The 10-bank drop target was not resetting correctly. This was due to a broken rod. Clay documented this exact problem on his webpage. The assembly needed cleaned along with a new rod (8-32 threaded) installed with locking nuts on the rod. I wrote a post about drop targets before, and tried a couple different methods on this bank. The newer method worked better and will probably update the previous post at some point. The unit also got two new coil sleeves. After all of this the 10-bank drop target is working again.

The game need a few adjustments along with a few contacts cleaned, but was up and running. One problem that was nagging was the 2001 logo and the match lights would not light up. This is a fairly simple circuit, but had to remove the playfield to properly see the switches on the reset bank. These two switches checked out fine and followed the trace to a bad solder connection on the Jones plug. Added some new solder to the connector, and the lights are now working.

Conclusion

This is a pretty big challenge to take on, and will keep working on it throughout the year. I would like to redo the cabinet and add some fresh paint to it. However, since it is snowing outside, this will have to wait until warmer weather. The backglass is not in great shape, and might ended up replacing that, too. The last item is the playfield has some wear by the kickouts and need to decide if I want to touch that up or not. I will play the game throughout the winter and will figure out what direction to take it.

I am a huge fan of drop targets, and love that there is 20 of them on this game. One initial complaint is the pop bumpers kick the ball right back to the kickouts, which in return, kick the ball right back to the pop bumpers, and the pattern repeats. I want to get the ball on the flipper quick and not wait for it to “play by itself”. This might just be an adjustment that needs made. I need to get more plays on this game before I can give it a fair review. In the end, 2001 is a great Gottlieb wedgehead that will join the pinball collection.