OH HEY, IT'S THE FLINTSTONES!
The opportunity came up to get a beautiful copy of The Flintstones and I had to go for it.
Breakshot is still here, off camera, and sold already. (So don't ask, sorry)
I came to the idea I really wanted to push towards kids-friendly pins to make things as fun as possible for my daughter and friends for the next few years. Eventually she will have niche tastes, and HEY if she loves dinosaurs, I can get a Jurassic Park or something like that.
My next focus? MOUSIN' AROUND.
Others on the wish-list? No Good Gophers and World Cup Soccer.
BUT BACK TO THE FLINTSTONES!
My first Bally! After a Gottlieb EM, a Data East, a Capcom, and a Gottlieb DMD, I finally see the light: it feels damn nice to own a Bally.
Of course I had to do the usual thing: photograph the boards, label all connectors, unplug them all, remove the head, take all pieces down the stairs separately, and the reassemble.
The guy I bought it from was scheduled to help me get it down, but was in a rush and so had to cancel that part. While I was disconnecting things in the garage, I had the garage door open and some construction (sewer replacement) was taking place on my street. The foreman came over to take a look at what I was doing.
After talking for a while, he offered to help get it down! After they were done their work, and I was done mine, he grabbed a worker and those two guys brought the body down my difficult stairs!!!
What a blessing those men were.
I got it all reconnected, flipped the switch and... POP. After my SF2 incident, I powered it up with the backbox open, and so saw the F112 fuse go out like a camera flash. Turned the power off right away.
I soon discovered I had mis-attached a connector. Don't ever do this.
 |
| awwww damn. Always spend the extra time to get up on a chair and inspect from all angles. Slacker. |
Here's a clip from the manual of that area:
I went through and checked fuses at this point and found F104 was WAAAAY overfused. 15A in there when it should be 3A. holy crap.
I decided to check all of them. The Flippertronics II board should be 4 x 3A. It was 10, 10, 10 and 7. W. T. F.
A disaster waiting to happen.
After properly setting the connector, getting proper fuses and replacing the blown one, I turned it on again: F112 popped again, right away.
I read that F112 shouldn't really be popping here unless BR3 is bad (most common scenario,) so I got Geoff my repair tech in since he's a whiz at board work.
He checked BR3 and it wasn't shorted! Before turning anything on he did a major inspection under the playfield and found that one of the flippers did not have a diode across the coil.
It makes sense that at initial power-on my misplaced connector could have put the flipper "hold" (EOS) power to ground and caused F112 to pop, especially since F104 was over-fused to 15A.
But it is a headscratcher that with a proper 3A in F104, with the connector in proper position, and with BR3 NOT shorting, that F112 would be the one to pop and not another fuse.
 |
| I had a hard time accepting that THIS was the cause of my woes, but well.... I am playing the game now. |
But, that seems to be the case. After attaching the diode, the game works fine.
He also noticed the knocker was totally fried and stuck, so we disconnected that. The traces for the knocker on the board are even fried, but oddly enough, the transistor that controlled it was totaly fine. What is up with that?
Quick and dirty, unplugged the knocker. They aren't even relevant in home games anyway.
He did notice a pop bumper solenoid missing a metal plate against the bakelite:
QUICK NOTE: WILLIAMS MANUALS SUCK COMPARED TO GOTTLIEB! They do not have the full board schematics like a Gottlieb or Data East manual.
The WPC schematics come in OTHER special books, because, I am told, the field instructions for board issues was to swap in a new board.
TODO
special + bowling lights out
Get metal plate for underneath pop bumper bakelight
File down upper flipper (bottom two were done)
extra GI mods: lights in the city plastics, dinosaur plastic
something scores for 800,000 points when the right flippers flip
Flintstones is super fun. Enough of this blogging, back to playing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment