1973 Williams Gulfstream Pinball Restoration and Resource Page.

My father originally purchase this machine from the Salisbury Beach Pavilion Arcade in 1977 where it had saw a lot of use. It's was in home use at my father's house from 1977 all the way to 2016, when I was sold as part of his estate to someone local who likes to tinker with coin op stuff. Shortly after purchasing it from my father the new owner started having trouble with the flippers and the center Target and lost interest in it. They were kind enough to offer the machine back to me before they sold it. So I decided to take this on, as a project to bring to the Pintastic Pinball and Game Room Expo.

Although my father had owned this game for many years, it had been a long time since anyone had gone through the game. There were even still some questionable fixes that were still left over from the machine being on location. The fist thing I had to fix was the issues with the flippers. The left flipper would chatter pretty bad. I found that one of the winding in the coil had gone bad. looking at both flippers I found that none of the hardware was correct, or was even the same. The flipper brackets also had a few stripped threads. I replaced the flipper Brackets, both coils, and replaced all the hardware. Once all the new parts were in I made a few adjustments to the EOS switches and the flippers worked great!

The next big issue to deal with was the posts for the center target plastic had seen so much action over the years that the playfield was full of holes and could no longer support the posts screws. It looks like this may have been an issue for a long time, because there were multiple holes where the posts had been placed. Since this area gets so much abuse, I decided to replace the original posts with extra long posts with t-nuts on the back side of the playfield. Once installed not only did the area look much better, but those new posts should take years of fast pinball action without any issues.

Once the major work was done to the machine, it was just a matter of shopping out the machine. I decided to replace all the feature lamps with frosted LEDs and keep all the General Illumination lamps good old incandescent lamps. Replacing the feature lamps with LEDs makes them brighter and more reliable, and keeping the General Illumination lamps as incandescent keeps that original EM look with no "Hot Spots." I also added a lot of custom touches, such as Purple Acorn Nuts for the plastics, Purple Pop Bumper Skirts, and purple flipper rubbers.

Here’s a list of what was involved With this Restoration:
• Replaced flipper coils
• Replaced flipper brackets
• Replaced all flipper hardware
• Replaced original red flippers with white flippers
• Replaced original red flipper rubber with purple "Superbands"
• Replaced original acorn nuts with purple acorn nuts
• Replaced flipper bushings
• Cleaned and adjusted flipper assemblies
• Replaced all rubbers
• Replaced all Feature Lamps with frosted LEDs
• Replaced burnt out GI lights
• Replaced original white pop bumper skirts with purple skirts
• Touched up offensive graffiti on cabinet
• Painted inside walls of cabinet(custom green)
• Painted Backbox Frame (custom green)
• Cleaned and Waxed Playfield
• Painted in-rails & lane guides (custom purple)
• Added "Bonus" Lamps to Out Holes
• Cleaned and Polished Coin Door.
• Polished Ball
• Replaced Broken Plastic Shooter housing, upgraded to Metal Housing
• Reproduced Score and Instruction Cards.
• Cleaned Cabinet