The New Project Begins

On December 6th, 2014 I bought a 1968 Gottlieb Fun Land pinball machine at a local auction for well under my budget, with plans to fix it up. This is my third pinball machine - I bought a Data East Rocky & Bullwinkle at the same auction about 18 months before and then bought my dream machine, a Williams Tales of the Arabian Nights, about eight months later from a seller online.

I've learned a lot from these machines but the most important thing I've discovered is that I'm far better at dealing with mechanical issues than I am with circuit boards. So that's why, for this project, I've chosen an electro-mechanical (EM) machine - no transistors, capacitors, opto sensors, or complicated dot matrix displays. Fun Land works on magnets, levers, simple solenoids and relay switches, and those I can handle.  To simplify things further, I even made sure to find a one-player game with four score reels, so I'd have fewer components to deal with.

With a little help, I disassembled the machine and loaded it into my tiny Yaris.