Introduction
Got a call from a customer that his Williams Pat Hand pinball machine was not working. He had a previous tech come out and fix the match unit, which worked for a few days and then stopped. The costumer continue to play the game (with the match unit not working correctly) and after sometime the game would no longer start up. I went and looked at the game and ended up bringing it back to my shop to work on.
Repair
The first thing I did was look at the match unit. Everything looked good on the unit, but it was not able to advance to the next gear. It just seemed like there wasn’t enough tension on the armature to advance the gear. Once I took out the armature, I could tell what the problem was. It had developed groove where the gear teeth made contact with it. I took the part to my local metal shop and he repaid the armature for me. Now with the armature fixed, mechanism cleaned with new coil sleeve, the match unit now advanced correctly.
Match unit armature Worn groove in armature
Since the game wasn’t working, I went ahead and removed the mother board from the bottom of the game. I went ahead and switched out the 2 prong power cord to a 3-prong power cord. The 2-prong looked original and was time for an upgrade. I went through all the switches, relays, and score motors. After doing these steps, the game was now starting up correctly. I reinstalled the playfield and looked for other problems.
The first problem I noticed was the 1,000 point relay was locking on. This was due to the players unit needing adjusted. Another problem I noticed was the 10-point and 100-point chimes were not working. This was traced back to both the 10-point and 100-point relay needing adjusted and cleaned. The last problem I saw was the coin unit was getting stuck when it tried to advance. A player 2, 3, and 4 game would not start correctly and would only go to player one when additional coins (or credits) were added. I went through the coin unit and was now stepping correctly and letting additional players to join the game.
I finished up the game adjusting some switches and adding new light bulbs. Cleaned and waxed the playfield and now ready to go back to the customer!
Conclusion
This was a fun game to play and can see why it’s such a popular game along with it’s two-player version, Satin Doll. There are a couple different ways to go about scoring on the machine and having quite a few targets to go after.
Here are a few other Williams machines that I have done in the past: Magic City, Klondike, Apollo, and Blue Chip.
