the
pool table with
the Velvet Touch
innovators of
the industry
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Zenith , Crest, Adjust-a-price
Pool Ta bles
Sportaca rd
Sportaball
TV Cockta il Table
Bimbo
Unit ed-Sardi Soccer Tables
United Billiards Inc.
51 Progress St., Union, N.J. 07083
(201) 686·7030
new
P1a'-l-Right
Also 6, 7, & 8 ft.
Play-Mates
~BOnIT~ .7i
Ebonite Corporation 14000 .W . 57thCt.
Miami Lakes, FL 33014 . (305) 821-0150
10
circuit and look at it and figure out what's wrong.
Lots of times people will send us a PC board and tell
us that it blows the lamp fuse in the TV monitor and
we'll check the board and come to find out that the
board's okay; that it's blowing the fuse in the TV
monitor means that the TV is broken. So we've
spent two hours checking the board out and we've
still got to charge $25 or $35, and the guy still hasn't
got his game fixed. We've spent two hours and he's
spent the time to send it in, but he sent us the
wrong thing. So what the operator ought to do is
concentrate on figuring out where the problem is.
In other words, he should take note of the basic
symptoms and indicate all of them to us.
PLAY METER: Let's say that an operator is big
enough to hire his own digital repair technician-
where would he find such a person?
BUSH: Well, he would have to be a pretty good
sized operator, I'd think. But I understand that a
couple of colleges, like Texas State Technical
Institute in Waco, have digital courses. I have run
across some people, too, that came from a school up
in Tennessee somewhere, where they teach digital
logic, not necessarily to work on game boards
although they do have that as a sort of side feature.
They teach them to work, I think, on TV cameras,
but they mention during the course that they can go
work on game machines, too. I've run across one
guy who had gotten out of that school-and I don't
recall the name of it now-who was pretty good.
Cal's Coin College up in Oklahoma-I don't know
of anybody who has really gone through it for the
electronics portion, but I know some pinball
mechanics that have gone through it, and it is
apparently quite good from that point of view,
phonograph repair, pinball repair. There's also a
school in Vegas that I understand is pretty good
too.
PLAY METER: Have you ever been to any of the
schools the manufacturers give?
BUSH: No. I have been to some of the smaller
distributor seminars they put on.
PLAY METER: Are they a valuable thing?
BUSH: They probably are to the pinball mechanic
who doesn't know the difference between a 7400
and an 8080. They're pretty basic, but they can
teach the mechanic what to observe. And I
understand that that is what they emphasize. They
don't teach them how to fix the PC boards, they
teach them how to figure out which piece of board
to send in, and that's the best thing they can do.
PLAY METER: Assuming this big operator found a
digital repair technician, what would you imagine
that he would have to pay him?
BUSH: Well, we can't find anybody for less than
$300 a week. And we've got a whole lot more work
than anybody else in town.
PLA Y METER: What sort of test and repair
equipment do you have in your shop?
BUSH: The technical electronic type equipment,
oscilloscopes and voltmeters, and we have a couple
of logic probes. We tried the Kurz-Kasch machine,
but ended up basically building our own, so we have
a Kurz-Kasch type test jig of our own for standard
boards. We've also built a special test jig for all the
Midway game boards, Sea Wolf, Gun Fight,