1985 Williams Sorcerer Pinball Machine - Sold

I have a knack for finding the most mistreated dirty machines. This one was buried in a guys workshop. The playfield glass had broken and the millions of tiny cubes of glass were scattered everywhere. All of the dust and dirt and smoke from his workshop made this machine quite a mess.

These pictures represent how dirty it was after the extensive vacuuming of the playfield and cabinet.

The biggest issues with the machine were that the ball wouldn't kick out of the ramp lock and the drow targets wouldn't reset. The owner had tried to fix them unsuccessfully. I wish I had taken a picture of it but he used a small "C" clamp and a length of angle iron to stop the drop targets from dropping so the game could still be played without them.

I went through the boards and replaced the transistors that should have been causing the issues. No luck. I worked on it for a couple of months off and on and finally gave up and sent it to a board repair expert. It came back looking pretty with a new NVRAM to eliminate the batteries, but still didn't work. Everything tested on his bench like it did for me. Finally I added a small wire to bridge the ground connection to the transistors and "Magic" it worked again.

The machine cleaned up pretty well and played great. I played it for about a year before I decided it was time to move it on.

This picture shows a chunk of missing paing and inserts that have raised and then been chipped away by balls on their edges. The correct fix would have been replacing almost all of the inserts and repainting the damaged sections. This game wasn't worth that to me, so I sold it.