Gottlieb Mademoiselle
 

Years ago when I was just a little nose picker (note: I said "little") I came upon one of these machines out on the curb.

The legs were missing and the backglass had been separated from the play field. It was all I could do to drag the playfield home with my little brother...when we returned to the scene of the crime the scoreboard was gone.

Played it for many years until finally I had to dispose of it when my father sold his house. I'm a borderline hoarder and it really pained me to do so, not just for myself but for historical reasons etc.

Wouldn't mind finding a replacement but I fear the price would be out of my range. If anyone stumbles across one of these please lemme know. Thanks!

http://www.jtamusements.com/mademoiselle
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?gid=1506

That's a shame you had to get rid of it. I've always wanted a pinball machine myself, but the pricing is generally ridiculous. I will keep an eye out in my periodic hunt for pins for that particular machine.

Thanks. The thing about all pinball machines is that they were built in pretty small runs. The were only 700 of the Mademoiselle made.

How were you able to use this pinball machine without the scoreboard? :scratch2:

As the guy with the suspended driver's license said about his car: "Runs fine without it!"

Seriously, about the only thing that didn't seem to function were certain bonus rounds (flashing lights and sounds) which were apparently triggered by a cumulative counter within the scoreboard. The machine came with a full scale blueprint (whiteprint actually) of the wiring diagram.

One of the first things I noticed is that one of the flipper buttons was plastic...found the other metal one inside and reinstalled it only to receive a shock LOL! Ya think that's why they went with plastic?

a Gottlieb sky
 

What is the value of a Gottlieb sky jump pinball machine?

Wait wait wait.

EMs from the flipper era had a TON of stuff that was required to get the game to start. Score counters had to be at zero...there were switches for that. Bonus units had to be reset, player units had to be at reset position.

The only games where the scorebox (backboard) did nothing were pre-flipper games where everything was in the bottom of the cabinet.

Solid State games have the computer boards back there.

I can understand why no chimes were going off...the relays that fire those are in....the scorebox!

I seriously have no idea how you got that game working with just the playfield. It shouldn't be possible.

I agree. For one thing, the scoreboard, and all the sophisticated electronics required to operate it, are in the scorebox; how on earth can anyone know their score in a pinball game if there is no scoreboard? Shucks, even mechanical toy pinball games have some kind of scoreboard, if only a dial with a pointer. I had at least one of those as a kid.

Also, as you mention, there will be no sound (chimes, bells, etc.) from a pinball machine if the scorebox is not present, as most if not all the electronics and computer boards are located in there. How the game worked at all without the scorebox is a mystery to me as well. I would think the power supply for the entire game is also somewhere in there. Unless the playfield was somehow being powered from an external AC power source, I cannot for the life of me imagine how the thing would work, and again, the whole thing is pointless because there is no way to tell what your score is.

What happened to the scorebox for that pinball machine in the first place? Did you rescue the playfield from a trash pile or a landfill? I'd try to find the matching scorebox, as the machine is just about useless without it.

He hasn't posted about the machine in over a year, but he did describe the process of getting it in his first post.

That machine is very old, and also quite simple-appearing compared to 70s/80s pinball machines. "Playing" it was probably nothing more than hitting the ball into the bumpers until it was lost, then repeating until bored (or told to go do homework!). On Gottlieb machines that I have seen, the power supplies and sound components (bells of different tones in this case) are all on the bottom in the playfield box, so it could easily have worked for basic operation (flippers, bumpers, and bells, no more, no less, as I mentioned above).

The thing sounds like a headless chicken.....Not enough left to really function, but just enough left to run.

You got it... Except, the pinball machine didn't die quickly. :)

That or else the machine may have had an AC leakage problem; if the latter, that may have been why the machine used plastic flipper buttons. Does it have a 3-wire grounded power cord? If so, the ground could have become loose or disconnected inside the machine -- a real setup for a lawsuit if the machine were to shock a child (or an adult, for that matter) using it in a public place. (There was a news item in the local Cleveland area newspapers and TV news awhile back about an eight-year-old boy who was shocked to death by an amusement park ride with a poor or missing AC ground connection at the fuse box, causing the rails on which the ride's cars traveled to be instantly charged with 110 or even 220 volts.)

These days the laws are very strict and specific regarding AC leakage in pinball machines or anything else powered from wall sockets and used in public places; units with any degree of AC leakage over and above a certain Underwriters Labs standard must be taken out of service and not used again until the problem is identified and corrected. I remember seeing a cartoon on television many years ago in which a man playing one of these machines was shown with sparks surrounding him and his feet well off the floor (that's how bad the pinball machine's leakage problem must have been); the game was called "Test Yours" and must have had one heck of a leakage problem or short to electrify the user that much. :yikes: