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Red & Ted's Road Show
| Manufacturer: | Williams |
| Model Number: | 50024 |
| Produced units: | 6,259 |
| Widebody: | Yes |
| Num. players: | 4 players |
| IPD No.: | 1972 |
| Serial Nr: | 51124104264 |
| MfgDate: | xx/xx/xx |
In january 2009 I found a Road Show pinball in very good condition. The playfield is in excellent condition and has no broken or missing plastics, cabinet has slight fading. Red & Ted are working 100% and the shaker motor really shakes!
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Thoughts about the game
Being a gamer since the days of the C-64 I found the idea of a linear pinball game intriguing. In computer games you mostly go from level 1 to the last in succeeding order and Road Show is somewhat similar to that.
You travel across the USA from city to city starting i either Miami or New York. You can choose what city to visit next as long as it's a neighboring city, you are not allowed to skip directly to the east coast.
The same goes for the different modes. While completing a city event you cannot go for multi ball or any other event. Most pinheads dislike Road Show because of this as they want to have many things going at all times.
For me this gives the game a welcome break from other games.
Past & present issues
Mini flipper
The mini flipper was bad from the day I bought the game and could barely flick the ball over the outlane when used. The EOS switch was not properly adjusted but correcting it did not improve much. Checking the coil sleeve and link assy showed the usual wear and tear with a mushroomed coil stop.
New parts have been ordered but until they arrive I will file the mushroomed parts off and use the old sleeve. UPDATE: After filing the stop and plunger the flipper came back to life and is almost too strong, I suppose I'll have to re-adjust the EOS switch again.
 Mushroomed coil stop |
Blasting zone plastics
The plastics above the blasting zone take a lot of repeated beating from "super blast" shots and rubbs on the printed graphics. I suspect that the plastic will eventually break unless a plastic protector is installed. I created my own protector using a dremel and a sheet of acrylic glass. I also touched up some of the print using water based acrylic paint.
 Shot of the touched up paint |
 Almost finished grinding |
 Close to perfect fit |
 Installed with the blue backing removed |
 Playfield view |
Reds Eyes
While playing RS one day my girlfriend noticed that Red stopped moving her eyes. Using the test system we could see that Red no longer would look to the left (Red's right). Knowing that opening Red up for surgery was no quick fix did not help either so I started by looking under the playfield for anything suspicious. Apart from a few loose bolts it all looked fine to my dismay.
Red came off from the playfield really easy unlike the assembly controlling the eyes. Having removed the complete eye assembly, except the eyses themselves, I shuddered to think about re-installing it all back again. Using a DMM to check resistance of the coils one of them seemed to have a bad connection. On closer inspection you could see that the coil wire had broken off and was no longer in contact with the lead.
Re-soldering the wire and verifying resistance with the DMM showeed that the coil was once again operational. As I had already anticipated the reassembly was a bitch and I had to bite my lip not to go mental on Red. This is not something I want to do again in the near future..
 Removed eye coil assembly |
 Removed eye assembly |
 Eye coil with broken wire |
Left ramp bounce outs
I kept getting perfectly good fast balls aimed at the left ramp bounce back out for reasons beyond logic and decided to investigate further. By manually launching balls from the right flipper and carefully studying it's trajectory while going up the ramp I could see how sometimes the ball got airborne and banged into the bottom of the signpost above the ramp.
The spring steel was flexing too much near the transition to the plastic ramp and turned into a springboard for pinballs. Since ramps & loops are such a central feature of the game and this only happening on perfectly lined up fast balls made it even more annoying.
Solution was to fold some tissue paper flat about as thick as the pastick ramp to fit the void under the spring steel. Re-testing by manually launching balls from the right flipper confirmed that the problem was now gone, no more airballs!