G O R G A R

Finding! This pinball collecting gets addictive you know. Once you've bought one and played it in your own home something nags at you until you have to go out and buy another. Sometimes something nags at you not to. So I had to get Fran as hooked on pinball as I was! My father and I set off by buying a job lot of six machines. We had two sets of living rooms and spare bedrooms to put machines in and, having filled these, we had to find something that we could store in the garden shed... Well, it seemed logical to us anyway! I fancied a Gorgar and a Space Invaders. We had played on Space Invaders a lot when it had been in the arcades as a new machine and liked the wide body and fast play. Gorgar was just a must because it was the first machine to talk. The firm we had bought our first machines from had a Gorgar in pieces in the warehouse. Well -- some pieces were in the warehouse. The cabinet had spent several months outside in the yard, exposed to the elements. As the glass was missing it had been thoroughly soaked inside aswell as out. The only thing stopping it from filling with rainwater was the plughole -- sorry -- loudspeaker at the bottom which had let water soak through the cone. Now, I pride myself on being an english eccentric, but I'm not certifiable (despite what most of my workmates think)! We tried to find a Gorgar somewhere else. We found one in an antiques warehouse, perched high on a balcony above the warehouse floor amongst a few electro mechanical machines.

This place sold everything and anything. A Williams Liberty ten pin bowling arcade game was almost hidden under light fittings from a closed down cinema and a full-sized replica of a German World War One fighter plane hung from the ceiling over a collection of Wurlitzer and Seeburg jukeboxes.

We also found a 1930s Mills Official counter top pinball, next to the kettle hat that Freddie Mercury wore in one of Queen's videos. Outside, a speedboat perched precariously on top of half a dozen cars from a waltzer. I remember wondering if I could turn one or two into armchairs... I enquired about the pinballs and an assistant found some ladders and climbed up to the balcony. "Do you want the big ones or the little ones?" he asked, pointing to the body cabinet of a Gulfstream and the backflash of a Starflite. We explained the true meaning of life and ascertained that Gorgar was complete except there were no legs for any of the machines. At least there was a big box and a little box...

The asking price was two hundred and fifty pounds plus VAT. "Is it guaranteed working?" I asked naively, thinking of having paid only slightly more for six machines. The salesman seemed rather put out at this impertinance and answered stuffily that he doubted very much if it would work -- upon which we bade him farewell.

Acquiring!

When we looked again at the water-logged cabinet back at the original firm it looked much worse than I'd realised. The stainless steel side plates were missing, as were the flipper buttons and switch contacts. The plunger and its housing had been removed to be used as a spare part on another machine. It had been removed, not by unscrewing the nuts and drawing the bolts out, but by sawing the cabinet around the plate housing, leaving a large V-shaped hole in the front. "It was raining..." explained a mechanic.

The backflash was in a good condition with a faultless glass. The playfield had been left standing close to someone with a paint spray and dodgy aim. It was splattered all over the playing surface and plastics with blobs of silver paint. One of the plastics was broken and the two halves had been held down in the centre by the biggest screw it had been possible to find.

I'd gone back to the firm with a view to buying Gorgar plus a Gottlieb Haunted House, which my brother had decided he wanted. The Gottlieb had looked immaculate when I had seen it, but it transpired that a snooker cue had gone through the backflash glass and the firm had simply thrown the entire backflash, complete with all circuit boards, onto the local tip. We doubted whether Gorgar was a viable proposition but having struck a deal which was worth it for the spare parts which Gorgar would have offered, we stuffed all the bits into my estate car and set off home.

Fettling!

An ever-so-gentle wipe with white spirit removed the silver paint and the playfield was cleaned using my usual method of spit and polish. Detergent is a bit abrasive and wire wool definitely is but a gentle drop of saliva, lovingly applied can work wonders! We agreed that the cabinet was a write-off, but the playfield fitted neatly into any of the other Williams cabinets. I haven't room to have all the machines up and running (or not running) all at the same time so this was not a problem and Time Warp's cabinet was press-ganged into pretending it was a Gorgar cabinet.

Gorgar's backflash was set in place and all the plugs and sockets that join the playfield to the circuit boards in the backflash were examined. At some time one of these had got extremely hot. Hot enough to melt much of the plastic plug so that there was a danger of at least four wires not being properly insulated from each other. What's black and crisp and hangs from ceilings? Not me! Be warned, if you buy pinballs in the sort of condition that I do, keep them far away from mains electricity until you are confident that you are in no risk of a shock. Use a battery and a test meter and check all accessible metal parts that you would not expect to be live to make sure that they won't be.

Only Frankenstein still believes that electricity will bring you back to life! The rest of us accept it works the other way round. My house has an earth leakage shut off switch so that if there is the slightest leak of electricity the whole system is shut off. This means that we can't use one of the rings on the cooker but it does make things safer!

I removed the offending plug and socket by clipping one wire at a time and joining them using two strips of joining block (see diagram). Doing one wire at a time meant that I was certain that the wires in the plug end matched the wires in the socket. Using two strips meant that I could take the machine apart without having to unscrew all the wires and label them. Having done all this and a few hours of checking, cleaning, soldering and prodding later we were ready for a trial. We weren't expecting Gorgar to work so we were not too disappointed when it didn't.

Brain Dead

There are a few standard things to try with a machine that is brain dead and has not been switched on for years. It is fairly obvious that any machine having been left for such a long period without being switched on will need new batteries on the CPU board. But we have found on most of our electronic games that the spring clips which both hold batteries in place and provide the conacts at either end have a tendency to become weak and do not squeeze the battery to make contact.

Sometimes the lack of contact is due simply to leaked battery goo but mostly it is a combination of this and a gap between contact and battery. As the battery goo (technical term) builds up over a period of months or years the contact is slowly bent away from the battery. When the goo is cleaned off a gap is left. Bending the clip back normally just results in them snapping off. We wrapped copper wire around them until it was thick enough to contact the battery. If we snapped a contact we soldered a wire directly to the end of the battery, knowing that it would need doing again when the battery ran out.

Also plugging and unplugging all the connections to the various boards a few times (with the game unplugged from the mains!) would sometimes do the trick as the repeated sliding of pin into socket cleaned both to allow passing of current.

A delicate operation is the cleaning of contacts of plug-in chips. Chips can be removed by a gentle (and I do mean gentle!) levering with a screw driver a little at a time from either end. If you do this the chip will eventually come free and stay intact. If you lever too much at one end or apply too much force then one end will come free and cause the tiny pins at the other end to bend if not break. If they bend they can sometimes be bent back, but they tend to break easily. If they break you must insert a small length of stiff wire into the socket and plug in the remaining ‘‘legs’’ of the chip. Once it is in place the wire should be making contact with the stub of the missing pin. A tiny blob of solder ensures electrical contact and any surplus wire can be clipped off.

A chance remark by an arcade owner who was also an enthusiast had me looking closely at the soldered joints on the underside of the printed circuit boards. "You know how you can sometimes get them working by warming the solder on dry joints?" he had said. Tell-tale signs to look for are discoloured solder, or in particularly bad cases, a crack around the soldered wire, circling it and breaking the electrical circuit. Clean off the old solder and resolder, taking care not to join a joint to its neighbour!

Playing!

A lot of work had been done on Gorgar and it was with a sense of achievement that we fired up a game to be rewarded with the thunderous voice booming out "Gorgar Speaks!" There was still some work to be done. The bumpers were not very strong, in fact one hardly diverted the ball. The gap between the contacts beneath the bumper were part of the cause and a general decay to the struts made up the rest of the problem. These just needed smoothing off and the bumper, whilst not perfect, certainly improved in performance no end.

Saying Goodbye...

And to finish this episode, I have bad news for all those people who write to me about Gorgar... Here it is in the car of its new owner, Allan Thornton, after I exchanged it for some serious tinkering to get my silent jukebox working again. Allan was supposed to be coming in a van.. How we managed to get the pinball into it I'm not sure - I thought he was going to lose a window at one point but the proof is there and although he reckons the car is now two inches wider than when he bought it, he got Gorgar safely home!

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