A chime unit – at last!

I’ve been scouring the internet for a chime unit to go in my 1973 Gottlieb Big Brave pinball machine. What is it? A three-note xylophone which dings away as points are scored.

Many electro-mechanical pinball machines have had their chime units removed over the years. Some say it’s because they made too much noise. But, whilst that may be partly true, it isn’t the full story. If you were just bothered about that, you would simply disconnect it. What happened was, owners of more modern electronic pinball machines (which just have speakers, not metal bars that actually get struck) decided to pimp them with good old chimes from earlier generation machines.

This has created a shortage beyond what you might expect in parts for amusement machines more than thirty years old. People who own and restore electro-mechanical machines have a hard time replacing the chime units plundered for installation in machines where they don’t belong.

My 1974 Sky Jump came without chimes. I managed to find a unit in the Netherlands and got it for €29.95 delivered. Turns out that was a real bargain! Still wanting one for the Big Brave, I was offered chimes for $100 from a guy in the United States. Then I saw a unit on eBay but I bid too low and it went for £29.53 delivered. I’m still kicking myself about that.

So then I saw a Gottlieb chime unit, minus its three coils, for sale in San Jose, CA, United States. (What a wonderful thing eBay is!) The coils sit underneath the unit and when energised fire a plunger upwards to strike the bars. Someone had cannibalised the coils for use elsewhere, which is a pity, but it serves me right for underbidding on the previous one. Cost me $22.03 pus $28 postage which comes to just under £24.

Now I have to buy three coils, but fortunately that’s easy. There is a place in the United States which stocks millions of vintage and new parts for pinball machines for the pinball hobby market. Nowhere in the world comes close, and as the official licensee for the now sadly defunct Gottlieb business, they even manufacture spares from original tools and equipment. It’s called Steve Young’s The Pinball Resource.

I say easy, but they do have an unusual payment policy which makes it darned difficult to actually send them the money. They don’t accept credit cards or on-line payments, and in practice this forces UK customers to use Western Union, which is expensive, or to buy US dollars from a foreign currency exchange bureau and send the cash in the post. Paradoxically, they will trust returning customers to pay after receipt of the goods.

All this seems like a lot of fuss about something inconsequential. Why work so hard to replace a chime unit in an old amusement machine anyway? Indeed why own one (or in my case, two!) in the first place?

All I can say in answer to those very sensible questions is simply that it’s a hobby or interest of mine right now. Some people like to restore old cars or steam engines. Some like to paint or draw, or knock a ball around a golf course, or go to dance classes. I’m not ruling out any of those for myself in the future, but at the moment I get a lot of pleasure out of taking some care over a machine which by rights ought to have been scrapped years ago.

It’s a piece of history. The artwork is distinctively ‘of an age’. The technology very definitely belongs to an era when things inside the machine physically moved to make things happen on the outside. There is nothing virtual about these pinball machines. The ball hits a target, and somewhere a relay clicks into action or a motor turns with unseen blue sparks. Great bundles of muticoloured wires snake around inside and hundreds of little bulbs glow hot and twinkle in their sockets.

I could go on. And that’s without mentioning the fun of actually playing a game of pinball!