The Unlikely Story of EM guy meets Gottlieb System 80 - The Amazing Spiderman

I had just finished my first full pinball restore of a 1969 Williams Expo, inspired by you kind folk here at Pinside. I don't know whether to thank you or curse you. It was the toughest project that I have ever attempted and I am a former IT developer who has completed some difficult projects. The pinball restoration required learning new and diverse skills and the work had to be top notch. There isn’t a lot of room for error when cleaning, touching up, clear coating and otherwise attempting to rework period art on an old EM playfield. It required a lot of patience and time, both of which I have in abundance, but it was a painful experience. It wasn’t “Jack Bauer gets captured and tortured” painful. It was more along the lines of mental torture – mixing paint and touching up a small bit of playfield only to discover, for the 20th time, that the color was wrong and stuck out like a sore thumb - but only after it dried! It was realizing that I might not be worthy of this challenge. Most normal people would have given up. But no! I had to experience the pain for almost three months! The end result was quite rewarding though and almost worth all the misery experienced along the journey. In all honesty though, it wasn’t entirely unbearable and I might be exaggerating just a tad.

So, you might wonder why I began looking for my next project immediately after finishing my first. Have I gone stark raving mad? Have I become addicted to pain? Am I a glutton for punishment? The natural course of events would have led me to another EM restoration. After all, I could tear down an EM, put it back together and fix anything wrong with it and, now, I had some experience restoring one. But no! Apparently, I like more challenging projects of which I know nothing at all. My first pinball machine was the complex 1973 Williams OXO, but I can mark that up to my naïveté. There was no excuse for a seasoned pinball collector to even look at let alone consider the 1980 Gottlieb The Amazing Spiderman, at the Tucson Craigslist for $200 that caught my eye. I first saw it on the Pinside forum Some nice looking EM classics just came up on CL, but it had been posted for 14 hours and didn't expect to be anywhere near the first person to respond. I sent an email, and then another offering more than $200 if in halfway decent shape. I received an email that it was sold - not too surprising. End of story. But no - wait! I was surprised when I received another email stating that the machine had not been picked up and I could have it for $500. Cheryl, not her real name, told me she realized by the number of calls that she gotten that she had priced it too low.

It sounded interesting, though I'm not a big Gottlieb fan, so arranged a meet and greet to see it. It was a widebody, exactly what I was looking for to add to my stable of thoroughbreds. The seller turned out to be a nice older lady about my age, Cheryl, not her real name, who knew next to nothing about pinball machines. The machine itself was in pretty bad shape. The playfield had been worn to the wood in more than four places and had bad planking over 25% of the surface. The backglass was flaking badly. Most of the red on Spidey was gone, never again to be seen by another pinball player. Just removing the backglass left flakes of paint on the playfield. We tried to power it up and the sound board and speaker immediately began screeching like a wounded animal in pain! The playfield and backbox lights were on with one 0 on the backbox game display along with the Shoot Again, Game Over and Tilt lights, but other than that it was dead. I told Cheryl, not her real name, that I could easily spend many hundreds of dollars fixing it up. To be honest, if I hadn't been there in person, I never would have bought the thing, but it was looking at me as if to say “Take me home, please! Rescue me!” It was a widebody and I had no Gottliebs and I was looking for diversity in my collection and it was inexpensive and I needed a new project. It definitely was a project machine and I am a sucker for rescue pins the same way some are suckers for those rescue pups at the city pound who look at you with those big brown eyes. When the machine wouldn’t boot up, the seller realized that $200 was closer to the value than $500 and offered it to me for $200. I offered $250 (I had promised more than $200 for it) and she accepted. On the way out, I gave her another $20 because the deal was so fair and she was so very kind. I was happy to have it for $270 and I had my next project.

My friend, who besides being a great guy is also my pinball moving go-to-guy but he was on vacation in Hawaii. I’m not about to turn down a bargain pin. How did I move it by myself? Very carefully. Cheryl, not her real name, helped me get it onto a corner of my Chevy S10 tailgate. I took the legs off, put a blanket underneath it and slid it into the pickup bed. It must have been quite a sight rolling down Golf Links next to the Davis Monthan Air Force base in Tucson with Spidey staring at the passengers behind me! Getting it into my house was a different problem. I drove my truck into my back yard until the tailgate was just outside my back porch. I put the legs back on in the reverse order that they were removed. I then dragged it across the patio, across the back porch, constantly having to put the rug back in place, over the sliding glass door guide and across the carpet in my family room. No injuries, fortunately, but my arms were bruised from grabbing and lifting the beast. Remember, this is a widebody, bigger and heavier than your run of the mill game from the early '80s. I don’t recommend this method of pinball moving so, please, do as I say and not as I do. The Amazing Spiderman joined the lineup at Pecos' Palatial Pinball Parlor that really isn’t all that palatial!

Of course, I had little idea what I was really getting myself into. I knew it was going to be expensive, but I knew nothing about the Gottlieb System 80, which The Amazing Spiderman was. A System 80!? Not exactly the first SS pinball you want to cut your SS baby teeth on! I soon learned that the Gottlieb System 80 had a reputation more akin to the Unsafe at Any Speed Corvair instead of the good old workhorse Chevy pickup that I would have preferred to own. I spent and continue to spend days reading everything I could about the problems related to The Amazing Spiderman and the System 80. The list of mandatory fixes was long and expensive. I would need new connectors, $40 to $50, and the System 80 boards rebuilt or replaced with a new PI-80 Janin Pascal board, $300+shipping, just to get it working. Then there were the aesthetics. A new backglass would be $350 and a new playfield could easily be $600 or more. It was karma or something then that in my searching I found an excellent playfield at auction on eBay. I decided to bid on it and would bid up to $265 for it, which would be a steal at that price even with the $150 for shipping. Shockingly, the very next day after lugging The Amazing Spiderman into my house I won the bid at $213.22 + $150 for shipping! Not only was the art work on the playfield intact, it came "populated" with all of the flippers, solenoids, switches, drop targets, etc. Those alone were easily worth $200. A few things were broken from shipping but nothing that couldn't be replaced.

I then focused on getting the parts I needed for the connectors. The order was $72 total along with the tools needed to crimp the connectors to the wires, a new capacitor that was, according to the experts, a mandatory replace and some other electronic goodies I will describe next.

The costs were quickly adding up though, $705.22 so far! That's about $400 more than I could justify for my expensive hobby. I sure didn't want to buy new boards for the thing, easily $400 more! One of the modifications needed for the System 80 pinballs was for the Pop Bumper Driver Boards or PBDB. I could order a new PBDB for about $25 each from Janin Pascal in France who was selling the MPU, Power Supply and Driver Board PI-80 replacement, or I could try to do the modification myself. I now had two playfields with two PBDB boards each or a total of four boards. That is when I decided to do the mods myself. I found online the electronic components needed for each board, less than $1.50 for each, and added it to my connector order from Great Plains Electronics. Oh, and yes, Ed at Great Plains Electronics is every bit the good guy and professional that everybody here at Pinside says he is.

I knew I wasn't going to get away with only $6.00. As a novice I thought I needed a good soldering station that could be set to the temperature I dialed in. I found a good soldering station at a hobby store online for a good price but the online Web page wouldn't accept my order. Another coincidence? Anyway, I decided to go with a nice 3 in 1 Yihua device at Amazon.com. It had the soldering station I needed, a heat gun and DC Volt power for testing boards. I could use all three of these, right? It was "only" $80 - so to save $100, I spent $86! Hopefully, it will be a good investment as I learn how to fix the other System 80 boards. My Hardbody does need the Mylar replaced and that heat gun will be perfect for that task. Yes, I do own two other SS pinballs, both Ballys, but I’ve never done anything more complex than replacing a 6116 Ram chip with an anyPin NVRAM chip in an existing IC socket. It’s a funny thing though how it’s not just the quantity of pinball machines that seem to grow like mushrooms in the pinball collector’s game room but also the number of expensive tools that begin to accumulate on the collector’s work bench!

Now, I read in some of the forums on Pinside that some SS guys are terrified when looking at all of those electro-mechanical relays, leaf switches and stepping units in an EM pinball. But EMs are easy for an SS guy or gal to work on compared to an EM guy looking at their first Gottlieb System 80! The logic is all out there in the open, not in some black box, and you don’t need $300 - $500 worth of tools to fix an EM. Another plus is that EMs are cheaper to buy, fix and maintain.

It’s with more than a small amount of trepidation that I continue to work on the System 80. I have no confidence that I can fix any board problems but I keep moving forward. I found that almost all of the fuses on the cabinet board were the regular 20A fuses. At least they weren't slow-blow fuses. Someone must have found them on sale! Those were immediately replaced with the proper value fuses. All but a few of the new connectors are on and most of the problems seem to have gone away. I never thought I would say this, but I miss those EM Jones plugs! It still isn't booting up so there is lots of more debugging ahead. The machine is currently stuck on Tilt but even as I was writing this, I heard the tilt relay click off and on and momentarily turn off the tilt light. The tilt bob, playfield tilt, ball roll tilt and front door slam tilt all seem to be closed where they should be and open where they should be but I will be checking them again.

There is some good news in this train wreck. The power supply seems to be generating all good voltages. The machine is mostly hack free. The MPU board has been repaired once in July, 1995 and is mostly "clean." The Data Sentry battery, amazingly, never leaked all over the MPU. Removing it was my second task. The first task was to replace the front leg levelers that looked more like peg legs than leg levelers. Next, I have to do the mandatory modifications on two of the Pop Bumper Driver Boards and install them. At least I can use my new toy, the handy dandy soldering station from Yihua to complete the task.

There were some rather amazing coincidences that brought The Amazing Spiderman into my collection. First, I heard about it, a 1980 Gottlieb SS, in an EM post on Pinside. Somehow, out of the many phone calls and emails, Cheryl, not her real name, chose me. The very next day after I purchased The Amazing Spiderman, an auction on eBay was ending for a very nice, fully populated The Amazing Spiderman playfield. It was one thing to find it when researching The Amazing Spiderman; it was another to actually be the winning bidder! I paid more for it than the pinball machine itself, but it was a lot less than the $600 or more that I had seen for similar playfields with all the artwork intact. It’s as if The Amazing Spiderman and I were destined to be together! Perhaps my Spidey Sense is kicking in!

So, thank you DirtFlipper for putting a SS pinball on an EM forum.

Thank you Vid1900 and all the others who have posted their restoration techniques – for better or for worse, you actually led me to believe that I could restore a project pinball.

Thanks to Cheryl, not her real name, for the more than fair deal on her The Amazing Spiderman.

Thanks to Ed at GPE for service above and beyond expectations.

Thank you Clay for your wonderful repair guides that I couldn’t restore any pinball without.

Thank you Pinside for reigniting my enthusiasm for pinball machines that have been sitting gathering dust and neglected for more than a decade.

Lastly, but not leastly, thank you Pinsiders for sharing your knowledge and experience with the rest of us.

And now I have decided that I need a multi-ball pinball in my collection. It must be a pinball that I have absolutely no experience with. Does anyone know where I can find a broken down, non-working, Williams multi-ball, project pinball cheap and in need of a good home?