An good bingo repair person must have three skills:

  1. ability to interprete the manual and schematic
  2. know how to use a voltmeter
  3. have enough of an understanding of the machine operation to map symptoms to circuits

By a remarkable coincidence, the above listing is ordered from most difficult to least difficult to learn - mostly because understanding the schematic implies a basic knowledge of electricity and electrical circuits.

OK, maybe the third one takes some experience, but you can figure out what the machine should do if you can interprete the schematic.

For those of you looking for course credit, the successful completion of this material may be applied to all unaccredited universities as 1 unit of philosophy, 1 unit of remedial english, and 1 unit of physical education.

I'm sure there's a lot of excellent presentations on the net about electricity, but to guarantee that you have an inaccurate idea of what it's all about, I'm going to make up my own explanation. We'll refer to it as "The Fundamentals of Electricity as Found in Bally Bingo Pinball Machines Manufactured Between Approximately 1952 and 1980".

The Fundamentals of Electricity .... etc.

When people chat socially about electricity, they often discuss "Voltage". Eventually some geek will try to impress the ladies with the term "Current", and when he does, he'll encounter the third thing we care about - "Resistance". So what do those terms mean?

I could get into the discussion about the flow of positively charged particles (that don't really exist, but too late to change all those textbooks and formulas now), but I won't. Instead, let's just talk about a flashlight.