William's San Francisco

mortarman

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Hi, new poster here! I recently purchased a William's San Francisco pinball machine and am looking for any information leading to the purchase of a manual for it. I have schematics and believe it or not all the original paper work that came with it including the never filled out warranty card! I believe it's 1964 vintage. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I was able to get it for $140! It turns on but has a problem, it doesn't reset and there are two relays or switches that keep cycling behind the back glass so I have some work to do before I start to restore her. Anyway, thanks for looking!
 
Congrats....

But to quote an old timer on here...


"without pics it didn't happen"

LOL we would like to see your new friend!
 
LOL, I'll get pictures up tonight. Thanks for the kind words Stinger! blitz, I did check out pbresource but no luck. For all I know there may not be one out there. I'll keep looking!
 
There is no manual for that game. Only Schematics were used for mid 60's williams games.
 
Ok, thanks FieroDoug! Oh well, at least I have those. I can see I'm going to have some work ahead of me!
 
Here are the pics, such as they are.
 

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I love that game, great player. I have a 1965 Williams Pretty Baby and would love to have a San Fran sitting next to it. Good luck with it!
 
Thanks! I'm looking forward to working on it! Hey FieroDoug, were in south jersey are you?? I live in Mount Laurel.
 
Hi, new poster here! I recently purchased a William's San Francisco pinball machine and am looking for any information leading to the purchase of a manual for it. I have schematics and believe it or not all the original paper work that came with it including the never filled out warranty card! I believe it's 1964 vintage. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I was able to get it for $140! It turns on but has a problem, it doesn't reset and there are two relays or switches that keep cycling behind the back glass so I have some work to do before I start to restore her. Anyway, thanks for looking!

That's a pretty fun game. I used it in a tournament I ran in February. The best score of the day was made by a 2 year old, believe it or not. I wish I had caught that game but I was too busy score keeping and all that.

There's a meter in the backglass that operates sort of like a mechanical parking meter. When you hit targets on the left side, it moves the needle left. Right targets move it right. As the needle moves it passes the different scoring colors and lights them.

The whole point of lighting stuff with the parking meter thingy is to then shoot the ball in the gobble hole in the center of the playfield. If you do, you get 100 points x however many lights you activated (total possible 500). But, you also lose that ball. It's still worth it because scoring 100+ points any other way is very difficult.
 
Oh and if anyone lives in the CA Bay Area, there are two of these you can play: one at Pacific Pinball Museum and one at Playland not at the Beach.
 
jcasetnl, Thanks for that, I'm still cleaning all the mechs. Do you know where that arrow should be at start-up? In other words is there a default position it's in before you start playing? Thanks!
 
jcasetnl, Thanks for that, I'm still cleaning all the mechs. Do you know where that arrow should be at start-up? In other words is there a default position it's in before you start playing? Thanks!

No the meter starts wherever it was left and doesn't reset between games or players.

That's one of my criticisms of the game, but also part of the strategy. If you hard plunge, you'll find that the ball typically goes to the right, which tends to move the meter right and can "peg" it there (espcially if it's already to the right). Makes it extremely difficult/lucky to move it back and light up the scoring features. It's sort of a skillshot in some ways.

I was playing with Michael Schiess, the owner of ju ju, on Sunday. Knowing this thing about the game I was soft plunging to move the meter left. Problem was I didn't get the gobble hole for the good points. Then he stepped in, and, since I'd worked on moving the meter right, he moved it left (naturally, just via the opening shot and keepin the ball in play) and got a couple gobble holes. He got over 1k and I got like 300. :-(

(regardless I would put my money on him on any short flipper game over myself) :)

On a very sidenote, ju ju will be at the Marin Fair for any CA Bay Area players.
 
Well cool! And I just confirmed that because last night I finally finished cleaning everything! Now the game works and that fixed my start-up/reset problem. It's amazing what works when you remove 40+ years of crud! Now the only thing I noticed is it doesn't advance the number of balls (stays of number 1). It's set up for 5 balls. I think the ball count unit may be mis-aligned. we'll see. I am glad to see I found a game that other people like!
 
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