I’m in the process of cleaning up and repairing a 1970 Williams Dipsy Doodle machine that I obtained from a neighbor who owned it for roughly 30 years. From what I can tell, he didn’t do much to the machine over the years. It doesn’t look like he ever opened it up. It was filthy inside, many of the bulbs were burned out, and it had some broken and/or stuck parts that I’m repairing. I’m not doing a full restoration on this machine, I’m just returning it in good working order.

This week, I’ve been rebuilding various stepper units and also the score reels. They are remarkably dirty. As I’ve gotten into it, I’ve found “MacGyver repairs” that were obviously meant to temporarily return the machine to working order without really taking the time to properly clean or repair it. These include the use of rubber bands to act as helper springs in sticky stepper units, modified springs to achieve the same purpose, all sorts of non-standard bolts and washers, and more. It’s seems to me that whoever did this could have achieved a better result in about the same amount of time by just doing it the right way. The machine isn’t damaged from these temporary repairs, but it’s dirtier now because of the neglect.

Is this common in EM machines? I suspect that the owner prior to my neighbor did most of these shoddy repairs, perhaps as the machine was used in an arcade or other commercial application.

What kind of fun MacGyver repairs have you seen? I’m guessing there are many scary examples....

Wow, I feel better now. The things in my machine weren’t as bad as some of the stuff in that thread.