Introduction
After years and years of fascination with pinball machines (and startlingly little actual playtime — I generally preferred peering at pinballs to actually playing them), my wife and I purchased a 1989 Williams Police Force. Here’s a shot of the upper playfield:
I was shocked by the size when it arrived; the backbox loomed tall and the cabinet itself was larger than I’d anticipated. It was in 100% working condition, the seller said, which turned out to be mostly true. I found myself giddy and rather bashful about it when we plugged it in and the seller insisted we play a few games. I’ve literally lost no more than $3.00 in pinball coin slots over my 28 years, and now we’d gone and bought a whole machine. The glow and flicker of the lights when we plugged it in seemed proof enough that it was working, and though we had no idea how to play Police Force, we stumbled through a few quick games.
Our only resources when picking the game out were the photographs supplied by the seller, a few Google searches, and reading the reviews on the Internet Pinball Database. Rather haphazard when you consider that this is a pretty big purchase to be making blind, but we liked the artwork, the moving police car looked cool, and it had a very respectable number of ramps. This was a device that had more moving parts than our entire house!
The configuration options seemed limitless and fascinating. After a few days we applied the Easy preset; the next day my brother in law quickly set an impressive high score in his second game on the thing. Apparently playing a lot of video games, and probably a few pinballs too, makes you a formidable opponent. By the end of the evening my wife had captured the jackpot and held the top high score. I had been knocked off the Top 4.
Earlier that day we had opened up the machine and taken inventory of burnt-out bulbs. (The game was 100% functional, except for about 3 lamps.) We determined what we needed and went to the local hardware store (a whole ‘nother story) and bought all of their #47 bulbs and one #555 equivalent for what I would later find out was not a good price. Once home we successfully replaced one bulb; the other two wouldn’t work. Subsequent testing with our new multi-meter told us that we had one dead diode and one possibly faulty lamp socket. Without a soldering iron and a new diode, we were stuck.
Over the next couple weeks I played quite a bit, and now consider my skill to have improved remarkably, although I still haven’t worked my way back onto the high score list. Even with four bulbs out (we found two more a day or so ago), Police Force is a lot of fun to play. So much that it makes me want another pinball. Or maybe a project/fixer-upper.
That nearly brings us up to date. I started this blog to chronicle my experiences with Police Force, as well as record what I learn so that other newbs might find it informative. I called it Solenoid because, in my readings thus far, the word seems to be used remarkably infrequently, and to me it describes exactly what makes 95% of a pinball move. Enjoy!
