Hello. I’m new here. In the last couple of months I’ve learned just enough about EM pins to make a fool of myself. I don’t want to dig into something simple and make it worse, so I’m here to throw myself at the feet of the experts.

I recently bought my first pinball machine. It’s a 1977 Gottlieb Jacks Open. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but it was local, and in very good condition, and affordable. It was in the home of the original owner and operator, and had probably not been moved since the mid 80s when he stopped operating his machines.

I played a couple of games before buying it, and everything appeared to be in working order, with the exception of the lights in the backbox. It’s clean inside, with a nice, dry, woody smell. The coin mechs are off the door, and in the coin box. There’s some spare rubber in a cup inside the front, a spare ball, a switch adjuster, a flexstone, etc. Oh! The schematic was in there, as well. Apparently, the flippers had been rebuilt at some point, and the drops replaced. It had seen some use by the family that had inherited it with the house a couple of years ago, but hadn’t gotten any work done by them.

The credit reel is stationary at about 7 1/2, and the start button always works. On the schematic, the “total play meter” and the “add replay unit” are marked through with a magic marker.

I reassembled it at home, and it continued working properly. I never quite scored the special, but the progression of hands lit and scored correctly, and I managed to get the red special targets to pop up a couple of times.

While I was thinking of where to really install the thing in a crowded house and thinking of adjusting the feet to level it correctly, I took the glass out, and had a look around over and under the playfield. Put in a new fuse for the lights, and wiggled one of the insert lamps to get it glowing the way it should. Otherwise, I took care to move nothing, with one exception. When I looked inside, I saw that the start relay was unclipped, and actually resting on top of the H relay! I picked it up and made a brief attempt to clip it back in position, but decided to let it wait. It wasn’t until looking a second time before writing this that I noticed the loose end of an alligator clip jumper laying between the banks down there, with the rest of it trailing back toward the transformer somewhere.

So, now the lights are working, but the drop target scoring has a problem!

The jacks, queens, and full house all score properly according to the rollovers, then score 5000 and advance.

The royal flush lights, sets up, and the targets score properly, but the machine does not score 5000 and advance to special when the red targets go down. You can knock all nine of them down for the target value, then they stay down.

I tried advancing through them using only the rollovers. This works fine. Even when the royal flush is set up, it scores the 5000 and advances to special, then knocks the black targets down. Scoring the top rollovers doesn’t have any effect at that point, but I’m not familiar enough with the game to know if you can score the special with a rollover advance. I would guess yes.

After the rollover advance, knocking down the red special targets has the same effect as before, where the targets stay down with no advance.

Any ideas? Like I said before, I don’t want to jump the gun and drip a bunch of sweat into this otherwise very nice machine, only to make things worse.

Thanks,
SV

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Thanks for the encouragement, everybody.

Yes, it was a switch on the drop target bank. The feature switch in front of the 'ace' target was visibly open when the target was down, as if I'd caught my sleeve on it, but I don't remember touching it at all. Gremlins? Climate? Lesson learned, I hope. I'm smart enough to adjust a leaf switch, if somebody tells me where to look!

I'll go ahead and secure that relay now that I know it's not part of some complicated mystery. And yeah, the jumper was just loose in there.

Thanks again!