Own a Popeye machine. The skill shot wheel died. Scoured the net looking for a motor, prefer new. Found Ministry had one. Ordered and on its way. Every respectable company within the states is sold out or no longer for purchase. Had an epiphany. Bally/Williams was notorious for parts bin manufacturing. Game parts are nearly interchangeable from boards to coils and everything between. Do the motors for Judge Dredd, Indiana Jones, Twilight Zone, etc from the WPC era swap? Marco has many other machine motors in stock ready to ship. Popeye’s motor is stamped 35420-331222.

Thoughts?

Searched through pinside for a good 45 mins looking for this topic so I apologize if this has been covered once before.
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Thank you for taking time looking into this!
I seen this also with my research. I’ve ordered a motor to look at it and see if there’s a difference. From what I can gather so far is the motor is the same motor and the part number under it identifies it’s gear that is attached to it. The company multi products used this motor across many gear box sets. Where I’m at is waiting for a motor from a vendor in Vegas to ship the 35420 motor with a blank shaft. My hopes are to do some tests on it to identify it’s characteristics and see if it’d match another complete 14-7990 set I happened to find with Pinball Resource.

Just curious if someone has done this research before I go through the trouble. I feel it’d be great info for everyone. The gear sets are sometimes pricey and unnecessary to replace if the electrical motor is the issue.

I’m following up on what I’ve found so others may have more resources and access to these motors. The motor (331521) with the bracket attached is what came off the original Popeye gear box. Motor bought from Action Pinball (331411) is an exact match in voltage, amp rating, and speed for the Popeye gearbox assembly. Just minus the original eye shape bracket. That bracket is attached using two small machine screws. Easily transferable. The new updated gearbox assembly from Multi Products no longer uses the eye shape bracket and directly bolts it to the gearbox but you can disassemble it to replace the motor. So basically the average cost for the complete assembly (gearbox and motor) is around $150 plus s&h. Motor with bracket is between $70-$90 plus s&h. Motor alone is $50. I’m sure with some more deep searching, you’d find this motor even cheaper and possibly in better quality (brushless).

So if one of your Bally/Williams motors dies out, there’s no reason to purchase a complete gearbox assembly if your gearbox is fine like my scenario. I hope this helps others with their quest to keep their machines running.

Resources used:
Macrospecialties.com
Actionpinball.com
Ministryofpinball.com
Multiproducts.com
Pbresource.com

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Exactly. From what I also understand about brushless motors is that you’d have to run a few other parts and basically make a small board to regulate power and speed. My Popeye motor was original to the machine which was manufactured in February of 1994. So like you said, not sure if’s it really worth doing all that extra work to make a brushless work with the game. Good point though.

The amp rating of that radio shack is at 1.3amps and the original runs at .3amps. May overload the circuit or the circuit won’t have enough power to turn it with a gear box. In theory though. Sometimes you just have to experiment and see what your multi-meter sees. That is what I did to see if Bally was just a parts shelve builder like I assumed. Gear boxes were custom to the particular game but Multi Products kept the motors for all WPC games very close in spec if not exact so the power board wouldn’t have to custom to the WPC era. That was my theory and what I have found, it seems to be true.