My first modern machine - Julie the Pinball

[webdeck]

Restoring the vintage single shot got me hooked on pachinko (surprise!) I have an Addams Family pinball machine, so the modern pachinko machine that appealed to me the most was Julie the Pinball.

I purchased it from Slot-Pachinko.com, and it arrived yesterday. It was packed in double boxes with some foam padding, and FedEx was very kind to it - it arrived uninjured. It only took two days to get from TX to northern CA.

The first thing I noticed was that there was bare wire exposed on all four splices that were made to install the transformer. Wire nuts were used, but the bare wire was exposed below the nuts. I taped up the wire nuts with electrical tape to avoid that hazard.

The 400 balls that were included were a bit dirty and a little rusty, but I bought 2000 balls from Hiro that are pristine, which is what I'll be using until I get a tumbler to clean these.

The lock was filed down and a makeshift key was included. Feet were stapled to the bottom with numerous staples. I added felt pads to the feet to prevent scratching my desk (its home for now.)

I removed the installed card reader dongle and replaced it with daverob's card reader emulator dongle.

Everything else in the pre-flight looked good, so I fired it up. Everything seemed to work fine. I noticed that some lights were out in the frame - that turned out to be a connector that was only half plugged in.

I purchased an L-Pad from Parts Express, but I didn't have any wire or a box for it, so I left that for now. When I got my first spin, I was blown away at how loud it is, even at the lowest setting. You all say they are loud, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined! I stuffed socks in the speakers until I could get around to installing the L-Pad.

I saw PhoneGuy's idea for easy and cheap counters using pedometers, so I picked up a few for a couple of bucks on Amazon. I'll post how that turned out on the modifications forum (with photos.)

Here are some photos of those bad splices (taped up).

Thanks for all the great posts here - it allowed me to have all the parts I needed in place before the machine arrived.

-Mike

[hanabi]

Yep you need Volume Controls

Hope you get some quality playing time with Julie, it's a super Pachinko!!

[new in town]

Yep you need Volume Controls

Hope you get some quality playing time with Julie, it's a super Pachinko!!

In the meantime, SOCKS are Authorized.

[rubberratt]

In the meantime, SOCKS are Authorized.

Compirate has at least one tube sock

[johntofva]

[new in town]

Compirate has at least one tube sock

BAD Really BAD

[compirate]

Do you people even know what he's referring to?

[new in town]

Yep ! ! !

[compirate]

And that would be? Now be specific, no innuendo!

[dattia]

OK...perhaps I am wrong, but I am thinking since you are a pirate... you may have a need for only one sock... How wrong am I?

[compirate]

Good answer, but no. I wanna know what Johntofva and NIT think it means (no telling Rubberratt!)