Bingo Pinballs - How They Work

Techno Stuff
How They Work - Ball Lifting

Lifting the first ball

ball lift circuit
surf club

The most likely problem you will have with a game the first time you turn it on is a ball doesn't raise to the playfield. You'll shake the machine, push the manual lift button under the shooter, and finally pull out the schematics. You'll find this little guy called the Lifter Start Relay and you'll start hitting it with a large mallet because it's not closed. Eventually you'll figure out that it isn't supposed to be, but we'll get to that later. First, let's look at the ball lift motor circuit itself and see how the lift motor gets turned on.

To get the ball lift motor started, we need to get 50V through all that junk starting at wire #21-3 and going down through the ball lifter switch. The circuit through the ball lifter cam switch on the right is the carry-over circuit. It keeps power on the ball lift motor until it makes a complete revolution. It doesn't get you started, so we'll pay no more attention to it.

The first thing we see is the extra ball disc and some trough switches. The trough switches in this circuit are open when no ball is on them, closed when a ball is sitting on them. The extra ball disc, as usual, is drawn to confuse you. It's drawn in the position it would be in if all three extra balls were enabled. For now, just ignore it...it doesn't do anything for the first five balls. Instead, all we need is trough switches #1-3 closed. So we need four balls in the trough.

Going down through the circuit, next we run into the lifter start relay switch and a shutter cam switch. Both are normally closed. We'll look at the lifter start relay and lifter start relay switches later.

The ball lifter switch should be closed, because a ball is sitting in the lift mechanism, so we should have 50V at that three-way branch point.

Since the game has just been reset, the timer unit is at step zero. As the note says, the circuit marked [B] is open. The extra ball trip relay switch at [C] should be open as well, since this is a new game and we aren't playing for extra balls right now. That leaves [A]. If trough switch #8 is closed, we get power to the ball lift motor.

So, we see that to raise the first ball, all 8 balls must be in the trough.
The reason that the circuit was designed this way is a tribute to that most ingenious human urge - cheating. On very early bingos, someone figured out that you could:

deposit one coin/credit to start a game.
get four balls in the ball runway by shooting a ball partway up the runway, and pushing the manual lift button when the ball is not on the runway rollover switch.
Once you had four balls sitting in the runway, tilt the game and reset it. Play lots of coins/credits to get the odds up, and shoot the balls. The game thinks all four balls are the first one, so it happily raises four more. You get an 8-ball game without needing to play/pay for extra balls.

The combination of using ball trough switch #8 and the timer unit prevents this cheating because the shutter panel cannot close until the timer unit steps up one step. The timer unit steps up when the ball lifter raises a ball, and the ball lifter can't raise a ball until all the balls are in the trough.

This is also the reason why standard 1-1/16" pinballs won't work in Bally bingos. Ball 8 won't be on ball trough switch #8. I've seen people put 9 standard pinballs in a game, which will get you going, but you will get the extra ball at some point, depending on the trough switch contact gaps. You'd either get to play 6 balls, and the extra balls don't work right, or you get the eighth and ninth ball at the same time.

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