House call for the new owner of a Gottlieb High Hand EM. Stated issues were simply that it turned on and lit up, but wouldn’t start a game.

Repair time: 2.5 hours

When I arrived the game was as advertised. No activity from the start/replay button. Engaging the start relay however did get a game to start and play. Without a full schematic I was at the mercy of internet searching. Thankfully there is a wealth of information out there; including this snippet of the schematic from a similar era game:

The important part being the series of switches starting at the S relay and moving through the anti-cheat switch and bounce switch.

The anti-cheat, bounce and zero position switches on the Ball Count Unit and Replay Unit in the head were all easy to check and correctly closed. That left a switch on the W relay (with yellow/black and Brown wires) and switches on the score motor at 1C and 2B. Thankfully the score motor switch where near the top of the stack and fairly easy to check, rather than buried down below. Slight adjustment and cleaning with a coarse business card took care of them. Then the switch on the W relay was cleaned and adjusted as well. The result was a now working start button.

However!

A new issue reared its head. The game started and played a few times, but then after a few games it would reset but the score motor would not stop spinning even with all reels at 0. VR relay was never finishing the reset sequence. Thankfully this one ended up being pretty straightforward, and was even noticeable just by paying attention to the score motor.

I first checked and cleaned the 0 position switches on all the score reels. They all checked out. This left the switch at 4D on the score motor, which as I watched was sparking every time the motor made a revolution! The VR relay wasn’t getting enough power from the weakly connecting score motor switch. Cleaned and adjusted and now we’ve got a fully resetting game!

Playing the game, I noticed that the chimes weren’t working. A quick glance at the chime box showed some old dampening foam that had attached itself to the chime plungers and was making them get gummed up in the solenoid coils. I took the chime unit apart and cleaned all the plungers, which resulted in the 10s and 100s chimes working great…but the 1000s chime still didn’t to fire. I checked the coil connection, tried resoldering some old flaky looking joints, but still no chime. I then moved over to the 1000 point relay, where I noticed that manually activating it if I shifted it slightly toward one side that the chime worked! It ended up being a switch in the relay that needed to be cleaned and adjusted.

Total repair time: 2.5 hours! Nicely working game: priceless