Purchased a Williams 8 Ball with a few minor issues. The first issue I tackled was the 1s digit was not always rolling over to 10 from 9. I started by checking and adjusting the 9 position switch on the score reel, but this did not have any affect. Maddeningly, the reel would work correctly about 20% of the time, and I noticed that it worked perfectly when a 1 point switch was held in for longer than normal. The breakthrough for this issue came when I noticed that the player 2 1s reel was having the same issue. A clear indicator that it was a shared problem: the 1 point relay. Checking the switches on this relay, I quickly noticed a contact that was in the process of breaking off from its blade. A small dab of solder to fasten it back to the blade and we were back to scoring points.
The next issue was for player two, the rack would not fully reset at the start of a game or after collecting the 8 ball. There is a stepper unit for the game to keep track of the stripes progress, and in this case the bakelite board needed to be slightly adjusted, as well as re-tensioning the spring between the full reset coil and the gear that controlled the spider disk.
The last issue was relatively minor, the large bell for 10 and 100 point score reels did not consistently ring, especially for 200 or 500/50 points. Checking the bell I could see the plunger moving, it just wasn’t always reaching the bell fast enough before the coil disengaged. For this the easy solution ended up being remounting the bell slightly lower in the cabinet so that it was closer to the chime plunger.
Total repair time: 3 hours