1983

Since the beginning of pinball.

Ken

define "Cut corners"? Every engineer's job is to cut costs while maintaining quality. In many ways, pinball has added corners.

That's what I was thinking!

The switch to electronic pinball machines from electromechanical (1977). The first corner that was cut was switching from cloth covered wire to cheap plastic insulated wire. Then came connectors. Gone were the beefy Jones "jack-and-plug" connectors that never burnt up to be replaced by cheap Molex connectors.

Just take a look at Hunted House and Black Hole.

That is brass tax business there. I am sure every maker found ways to do this.

October of 1970.

"We have too many flipper bats? Then use them as lane guides!"

http://ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=79&picno=10482&zoom=1

Me and my posse played the hell out Aquarius in the early 70's. We didn't mind the extra flipper bats.

I remember on Chris Hutchins' site how he would strip cabinets from Williams, and there would be a different decal underneath.

Then I saw this thread where a MB had cabinet decals from NGG, CP and MM. http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/surplus-cabinets-recycled-on-cc

Even the "good ole days" weren't as great as people remember. Cutting costs is not a new trend.

The day B/W went out of business......

Bally in 1986 with cheap cabinets..
Gottlieb removing speech boards and single backglass from export black holes
Stern removing speech from export Obitor 1.
Wms with p2k making a cabinet design that minimized wood loss.

You are kidding about the switch from cloth covered wiring to plastic insulated being bad right?

I was thinking the same

With what passes for a complete game today, (PF art photoshoped and in many cases not even complete, game rulesets "codes" incomplete yet sold to the public, single lit backglass, decaled backbox and cabs).............NEXT QUESTION

When Gottlieb went from metal jewel posts to plastic, around 1966-1967

They always have cut costs. B/W would pay bonuses to designers if they could produce a cheaper game than the last one the company produced. I've seen that paperwork.

GnR is only as good as it is because Slash wanted a bunch of stuff and Gary almost couldn't say no.

+1 To think all games were built with the very best of parts is a dream.

Right, B/W built perfect machines, straight from the factory every time. Nothing ever went wrong with them. No burnt connectors, no bugy code, no cheap flimsy or missing toys... whatever.

Its manufacturing, and a for profit business. Companies are always looking how to be more profitable.

Then why are there so many B/W games in your collection? The thread was defined as inferior machines.....

Absolutely not! Cloth covered wire had more strands and was more flexible as well as had better tinning. I rarely had any wires broken off of anything with cloth covered wire. It holds up very well in vibration-prone applications. When the pinball manufacturers switched to plastic covered wire (especially Williams), it was stiffer from having less strands, and was not tinned very well. In some cases (again Williams in particular) manufacturers went to using solid wire as jumpers between banks of switches. That's when wires really started breaking off alot from vibration. Just look at all those yellow jumper wires Williams uses. I'm always having to solder those things back on.

While you are relating your personal experiences with reliability to the change in wiring, I think that you've incorrectly associated the two.

Plastic covered wire is technologically leaps ahead of cloth covered wiring in terms of safety and reliability. If crappy joints are your issue, that's something different entirely.

Go look inside old Midway video games like Dog Patch, Sea Wolf, Boot Hill, etc. and look at the plastic wiring now. You'll find big sections of plastic insulation cracked, fallen off, or big exposed sections. How safe is that?

Look inside old radios from the late 1950's and into the 1960's where they used plastic covered wire. You'll find it all busted up and falling apart. How safe is that? Older radios used cloth covered wire which never had problems.

Cloth covered wire is still manufactured today and I have bought several spools (different colors & gauges) of it to use in repairing modern pinball machines.

Plastic vs. cloth vs. "safety" aside, do you plan to rewire an entire game in cloth? I'm not sure why you would need any lengths of wire to repair a machine. If a wire comes off a coil, solder it back on, don't need a spool there. Plus we have fuses on our driver boards in case things do go wrong.

Ontop of all that, these machines were not designed for cloth wiring in their game, assuming there is even a difference. Changing things out of spec could be less safe, or one could argue that.

Finally, a collector buying an AFM with cloth wiring in it might shy away, also making it difficult to repair when the wires don't line up with the matrix, unless you have so much wire you can match the color codes correctly.

These are pinballs, not radios. Maybe plastic wiring from the 50s were not a good idea in radios. But I doubt pinballs are going to get hot enough, draw enough current all over the place, to cause heat to make the wires that old and brittle.

My thoughts.

I use the cloth covered wire in particular to replace those crappy yellow jumper wires going from switch-to-switch in a bank of switches. It is particularly helpful on the Pinbot visor target bank which moves up and down. I NEVER have any more broken wire on that assembly when I replace the plastic yellow jumper wires with cloth covered.

The quality of the cloth wire is so much better and more flexible.

I'm not rewiring entire machines with cloth wire, just repairing or making more reliable.

You do realize you can buy modern wire that is extremely flexible, right? Plastics in the 1950's were terrible, and lame compared to the insulation used on even cheap wire nowadays. If you are expecting Radio Shack wire to withstand thousands of bends, you are just buying cheap ass wire.

The cloth insulation is not what is giving you the desirable traits you keep referring to.

I would say December 1995 when Attack From Mars came out we saw a big change. Though it didn't show up for some time.

AFM is the game where we started seeing more switches that would work in test and fail in game play because flux was getting into them and slowing the action down and the game would ignore it in play.

I think we saw the change in a cheaper, less skilled assembly line people about then.

LTG

AFM is a huge cut corners game. Looks like an econo game. I can't think of a game that has less shit on it, than AFM. It's the NBA of the williams world.

Funny; I always considered Junkyard to be the worst, by far.

I hear this complaint about Stern often but didn't Williams also use florescent bulbs in pinball 2000?

I don't see where owning a Brand of machines has to do with cutting corners. And I would state that a circuit board which melts connectors is an inferior product. Thankfully, most people have fixed these issues themselves by now.

If you spend your time pining for the past, you'll miss the future.

Play a 1979 Gorgar then step up to an Stern AC/DC. I don't see, feel or hear a quality difference. If "cutting corners" means technological advance then I'm all for it.

Hand whittled playfield toys made out of walnut don't equate to quality.

Capcom did this as well, and they are well built machines.

Suprised nobody mentioned translites. That was a major cost cutting measure vs. the traditional backglasses.

I'm working on a 1987 Bally machine that has a single household 40w bulb lighting up the entire backbox. yep, the same kind you screw into your table lamp, smack dab in the middle of the backbox. It's stock from the factory. Makes a flourescent tube look fancy.

Stuff like that has been going on for a long time. The whole Gottlieb Premiere line of machines was a calculated effort at cost cutting, but that was primarily in design decisions.

IMO, machines started to "feel" cheap in the DE/Sega/Stern era. Although admittedly I haven't touched that many new sterns.

That actually doesnt bother me so much. I actually think translites can be a benefit. Personal preference though.

in the early 1930's. You see many examples of "shoddy" pinball construction starting back then.

In the 60's when they started using two stencils instead of 4-5. Also games started to look very similar, particularly Gottlieb. Great art, mediocre machines.

even my zaccaria robot has a florescent tube backglass lighting. Hell. Atari games use a regular 25W home light bulb in the backbox. So it's nothing new.

As far as translites go, I prefer them. Dont' get flaking and if the glass breaks, you have a chance that your translite is still ok. Lot less risk. I worry every time I have to take out my POTO, Farfalla, TM or Miss World backglasses. Always a risk. It was cost saving for the company, but also an upgrade for us and ops.

I think Stern replacing the service rails with those dumb posts is the latest and most egregious.

+1. Well put.