Bally Venice Bingo: The quintessential "chasing Bugs"

Venice Italy: The city that inspires thoughts about the renaissance, gondolas, canotier hats, the arts, romanticism and dubious water.

Bally Venice: A ultra rare bingo machine. A juggernaut of electromechanical complexity and four transistors. A machine that Bally didn't even bother to make a flyer for. My Bingo Grail.

Bally Venice Backglass Detail

This machine is the quintessential chasing bugs bingo machine. Madonna once wrote a song about how it feels to work on this bingo machine. It feels like the first time (fixing a bingo machine) all over again.

So far, Venice has 4 main bugs.

The special game didn't work properly...

The timer unit does not step up when the first ball is raised to the shooter lane, causing the shutter to remain open when the first ball reaches the top ball gate into play.

The blue odds don't step up as they should. Very weird as the blue odds step up coil is wired with the green odds step up coil. So if the green odds step up properly, the blue odds should too.

I get electrical shocks off the control unit frame. Probably a micarta insulator that has a conductive carbon spot.

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The special game bug is solved, the problem was two broken wires on the ODD / EVEN advance unit disk. Two wires on the edge of the disk looked odd, as if they were bent in an unusual way. Curious, I pulled on those two wires and discovered that the wires were actually broken, the cloth sheathing was the only thing holding the wires. I re-soldered the wires. Lo and Behold, the special game works. That was the most intriguing feature. Very fun.

The ODD / EVEN advance unit disk is the second stepper unit from the left.

2 cleanly broken wires

I suspect the other problems are of mechanical or physical nature. Electrically, everything looks OK. I don't have that much time to work on Venice as I have other repair commitments to fulfil first but I still dabble in Venice some late evening now and then.