1972 Bally Fireball or 1940 Gottlieb Score Card?
One is ubiquitous among the serious electro-mechanical collectors. The greatest EM ever produced bla, bla, bla.
The other is extremely marginal.
Choose...
Electromechanical pinball, bingo, arcade and amusement machine repair. EM pinball collector and lifestyle.
1972 Bally Fireball or 1940 Gottlieb Score Card?
One is ubiquitous among the serious electro-mechanical collectors. The greatest EM ever produced bla, bla, bla.
The other is extremely marginal.
Choose...
Allied Leisure New In Box Wild Cycle Repairs
In the 4 previous posts I unboxed and documented the state of the insides of a New In Box Allied Leisure Wild Cycle arcade machine.
It was a collector's dream of mine to one day unbox a vintage EM arcade or bingo machine so when I had the opportunity to buy this NIB Wild Cycle I did a two day 1400 km road trip to go get it.
Parts corrode: switch points, potentiometers, connectors, lamp sockets and zinc plated parts.
Grease dries up or goes hard
Rubber parts degrade, turn to goo, become brittle or deform.
Electronic parts like capacitors and photoresistors go bad.
Gearmotors get stuck in their own grease.
ALSO
There's always the possibility of rodent damage and cosmetically backglass art can degrade.
So If you want to buy a vintage New In Box game: know the risks!
You are rolling the dice on Schrödinger arcade machine. The machine inside the box could be mint or it could be a total POS or something in between. You won't know until you open the box.
Right out of the box my Wild Cycle partially worked. It turned on and it coined up but road disc did not turn and motorcycle did not steer.
The road disc just needed a bit of hand coaxing to get it started. The gearmotor that drove the disc was jammed in its own grease from lack of use.
Once the disc, motorcycle steering and 8-Track work properly. I could finally play a game on Wild Cycle. The first thing I noticed was the bad road detection. It can be seen in a video of another New in Box Wild Cycle: At 1:29 the motorcycle should not be able to drive over the fork in the road without crashing. The detection should be precise and unforgiving. Stay on the track or crash. On my game, the detection was even worse. It was vague and sometimes delayed. Unplayable!
The poor detection was caused by the old photoresistors. 50 years of total darkness inside the box made the original photoresistors slow to react.
Allied Leisure Wild Cycle NIB
Here I conclude documenting the insides of Allied Leisure Wild cycle arcade game as it came out of the box. Time for the relay panel.
Right in the middle of the panel at the top. It looks like there's a unit missing. It's the Crash unit. When I opened the back door for the first time, the Crash unit was just flopping around loose. Fortunately the unit was undamaged and I installed it back in its place. The words quality control come to mind.
Allied Leisure Wild Cycle NIB
Here I continue documenting the insides of Allied Leisure Wild cycle arcade game as it came out of the box. Here I do the back of the game. Notably the 8-Track player, score unit, motorcycle unit and projector.
At the very top of the cabinet is the 8-Track player. Notice the door flap looks crooked. That's because one of the hinges for the flap was broken. Right out of the box!
Allied Leisure Wild Cycle NIB
Previous post was all about unboxing Wild Cycle.
Now it's time to document the machine's insides.
I guess this is more of a photo archive than a "blog post" for Wild Cycle since there isn't that many detailed pictures online.
Publishing in one shot all the pictures I have of the insides of Wild Cycle would have made for too big of a post so I will break it up into multiple posts and start with behind the coin door.
Here's a general view of behind the coin door. We can see the coinbox, music speakers, sound effect speaker, coin meter, handlebar shake solenoid, steering mechanism and a small sub board for crash detection.