Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Raven: transistors in, almost done!

Wow, what a busy night for Raven.  I am ready to swap this machine out for another, and my dreams titter with what might be next.  Hopefully not another Gottlieb/Premier.  :)

it kind of looks mysterious like this.  WHAT WONDERS MIGHT IT CONTAIN?


The big thing done was taking out the driver board and replacing all the bad transistors!

So what got swapped?
Q35 was the only MPS-A13 transistor swapped, and that controlled the 1X light.
The other transistors were all MPS-U45s, which are in limited supply, and only seem to be available from Marco.  There is a somewhat similar equivalent you can get, but the legs are in the wrong spots and need to be bent.
Q22: spinner light, which was locked on, and is a VERY crucial shot.
Q25: 3000 light
Q45: #1 right spot target
Q46: #2 right spot target
Q48: right side rollover (fed from ramp)
Q52: left side rollover (fed from ramp)

well hello there, driver board.
 
After all this, 2 lights were still OUT!  But easy fix, just changed the bulbs and omg things work so much better.

(you might wonder why bother writing all of this?  Well the pinball community here is small, so chances are the next owner of this machine will be someone local, or maybe even someone I know, so whatever I can easily log here might really help the next (few) owner(s) as well.)

It becomes pretty obvious which are the old ones and which are the new ones.


Next issue was the GI.  I had found the issue with the Tilt relay, but finally gapped it properly tonight so we have some nice GI lighting.

Upper right sniper wasn't dropping:
The computer can raise or lower each of the 4 sniper drops, and if they stay up that is a gameplay annoyance, especially for this upper right one since that is the spinner shot, and you're not making it to the upper rollovers if the target has remained up.
There is a tiny coil up near the playfield that pulls in a metal disc on a fulcrum to tap the drop target off it's ledge and have it fall.  This was no where close to happening for this one target.  We tried bending the metal piece, but to no avail.  Cramped quarters, hard to get to at all, and pretty hard metal made for a bunch of zero fun.
In the end what worked was grabbing some adhevsive padding I used way back in a Rocky and Bullwinkle backbox animation repair.  Putting some on the bottom of the playfield limited the range the metal plate could rise, keeping it closer to the magnet coil, and ensuring it would get drawn in properly each time.

Ground mods?  DONE!
Ok, well most of them.  there are some further optional ones, but we connected all of the grounds at the transformer, added an extra ground to the driver board, an extra interconnect wire, and a ground for pin2 on the power supply board.

Oh and the lower right pop had gone out, blown fuse.  I replaced it and it was fine.  I inspected the hardware and was unable to see any strain, resistance, or anything that would lead me to believe it was suspect.  Wait and see on that one.

Last but not least, the fluorescent light was put back in.  The holders needed to be reattached, but in the end the light wouldn't go.  Unbeknownst to me, older fluorescents sometimes had a starter required, and the one here will need to be replaced.

So at this point, I think I just need to grab a $3 part?
Woot.

keep it classy, Raven.

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