Tomy ATOMIC Pinball Game from 1979 - Can I REPAIR it?

This Tony Atomic Pinball game dates back to 1979 and I purchased it from eBay for £9. It was advertised as ‘not working’ and sure enough, it didn’t work!

The main problem was immediately apparent once I opened the battery compartment - two of the terminals were broken so the batteries were not being held against each other firmly. A third terminal had also snapped off and had been previously repaired with a piece of copper wire.

I dismantled the game and tested it by bypassing the batteries with my bench power supply. This confirmed that the game turned on and worked as it should but there was no sound (other than the incredibly loud noise of the mechanism running, which it does the entire time the game is on!) Tracing the wires to the sound PCB made me suspect that the sound was on a different circuit to the main game and powered by a single battery at the bottom of the battery compartment. I hadn’t provided power via my power supply to this circuit so I assumed that this was why there was no sound.

I repaired the broken battery terminals and reassembled the game for a test. After putting it back together, I realised that I had put the flippers on the wrong way round so it had to come apart again! Fortunately, my repairs had restored the game to full working order, including the sound (my assumption was correct).

The most impressive thing about this game is the way the mechanism is engineered to run entirely from one small motor. That and the reactive bumpers which bounce the ball off them when it makes contact. I imagine any child would have been over the moon to have received this toy at Christmas.

#pinball
#repair
#asmr