Hi Everyone,

I recently purchased my first pinball machine. A Gottlieb Cue Ball Wizard. All of the parts are there, but I have been having a few issues. Let me start here with the first one:

When releasing the plunger the ball passes the first optical sensor which then triggers the ball shooter to send the eight ball toward the spot target assembly which contains targets in yellow blue and red. When the 8 ball hits the blue targets it is supposed to award 5 million points, but for some reason the game is awarding 5 million points no matter what color target is hit.

Any help you can provide on this would be greatly appreciated as I am not sure how to tackle this one.

Happy Holidays!

IMG_1126.jpg

BRI,

First of all thank you very much for your response and willingness to donate your time to help me out. People like you make this forum great, and I hope to learn enough on here to eventually pay it forward.

I took the glass off and tested each of the switches by launching the ball and then depressing two targets at a time. When I did this the game worked properly. I then went back to shooting with the eight ball and had the same problem as mentioned previously with the machine always scoring 5 million points no matter what color target was hit. My conclusion was that the gap in the switch must be so small for the blue 5 million point targets that the vibration from the 8 ball impact causes the switch to close resulting in a false switch hit as you mentioned. I noticed that the blue target had the smallest gap, so I placed a piece of paper in between the blue switch and launched the 8 ball again. This time when hitting none of the blue targets the 5 million points was not awarded, which is the correct way the game should play.

My follow up question now is what is the best way to increase the gap on a switch. Is there a special tool or good practice for doing this?

I was able to adjust the smart switch by bending it slightly and for a time it appears to fix the problem. I was also able to narrow it down to one switch specifically, so I will purchase one of these next time I put my order in at pinball resource. The part can be found on this page: http://www.pbresource.com/pfswitch.htm . P/N: GTB-29432B for the blue version.