Industry's Worst
Cue Ball
Todd Erickson
Summit Amusements
St. Paul, Minnesota
Betson Crane
Meter Drive Diodes
Dave Bushey
Russell Hall Vending
Holyoke, Massachusetts
PROBLEM
PROBLEM
The worst cue ball in the Industry is being sold
by Competitive Wholesalers .. I purchased a box
of 16 of what was explained to meas the best cue
ball in the Industry for Valley Pool Tables. A trick
cue ball is closer to describing this ball! These
balls came in a box saying they were Valley
Supreme balls. Valley says they have nothing at
all to do with these balls. The box even had a
cougar on it. They appear to be old boxes that
had been made for Valley.
I thought I'd share this unique problem in the
hopes that it saves somebody else troubleshoot-
ing time. We switched to using meters on all our
games recently for bookkeeping purposes, and
of course, alot of them didn't work.
SYMPTOM
Most of the problems were faulty meters, broken
wires, etc. except for the Betson Crane.
SOLUTION
SYMPTOM
Rolling the ball down a ramp on a 10' table, the
ball will roll as much as 1.,.1 /2' to the left or right
or even straight depending on how it is placed on
the ramp. The best part of this is that Competi-
tive Wholesalers would not stand behind their
product past 30 days!
I don't generally check ball roll on balls that I
receive. But these are so bad that I had players
telling me! I would not run these balls under any
circumstances.
The problem with the crane, though, was that
the diode that is installed on the collector ofTR-
4 (the drive transistor for the coin meter) was
installed backwards. I changed it and installed it
correctly and now the meter works great.
NOTE
By the way, this crane has the large pc board in
the bottom of the machine as opposed to the
small board in the r ain entry door area.
Data East Pin Celebrates 5 Yr Anniversary
Gary Stern, Joe Kaminkow and Shelly Sax cel-
ebrate the 5 year anniversary of the formation of
Data East Pinball. 5 years ago at the AMOA, DEP
was born under the watchful eye ofT. Fukuda.
Today, employing more than 300 employees and
about to debut their new model Batman, they
celebrate a great 5 years of growth and technical
innovation such as the Dot Matrix Display and
the Solid State Flipper.
About to have their cake and eat it too, Gary
Stern says, 'You ain't seen nothin' yet!"