quick updates: LOTR & Stars

Hey all!  Summer's been going great.  We had a mini pinball flea market / convention / tournament out in Hawkesbury, Pinball Women Ottawa has been going strong, and the weather has been wonderful.

Stars:  
I installed a proper sized lock.  It took forever to get the old drilled-out lock mech out for whatever reason, then the first lock I installed was a bit too long.  That means the door has wiggle room to move out, and when you move it back in, you can trigger a tilt/slam switch.  There are actually like THREE different standard replacement lock sizes, so I will start to stock them all.

The metal inlane rail also popped out again, but a friend who was playing at the time glued it back down.  Just in case it happens again?  I noticed over the the PBResource Specials page they actually have NOS Stars inlane guides!  WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
Steve Young is a precious treasure to pinball.  He has been sitting on these damn things for probably 38 years waiting for me to start work on an old Stars with bent-to-shit metal rails.

Another great thing from Hawkesbury:  a friend brought me 2 old Stern/Bally displays.  One had a sticky that the 10s and 10000s were out.  The other had no sticky.  And at the flea market I bought one that was degassing for $5.  One of these would do the trick!
I  popped in the one with no sticky and it works!

Now, if we look closely, we can see that it is not perfect:

note the damage to some digit segments

But hey it's readable, bright, and better than no score.  And only $5 was spent!

I took a look at the display that had the 10s and 10000s out.  Do you think you can spot where the problem might be?

I think I am going to also order some replacement fuses.
Check the fuse chart in the machine.  Most pinball machines use slow-blow fuses, but the early Sterns are one of my first odd-duck examples.   the slow-blow fuses are marked, so the rest of the fuses here are fast blow.

Lord Of The Rings:
LOTR was down for want of the gollum hole.
Or, as a friend exclaimed "GOLLUM'S HOLE IS BROKEN!" as she laughed to herself.
Well, Mr. Gollum, I will RESPECT your hole, and I ordered a replacement switch.  At first I thought it was just out of shape and I could bend the wire to register properly, but no.  With my multimeter in continuity mode, I checked the switch and there was no continuity when pressed.
The switches are kind of cool that they have their center connector, then you can connected to one node for NO (Normally Open) behaviour, or the other node for NC (Normally Closed).  The NC terminals registered as expected, the NO one not at all.
Part got delivered to me in Hawkesbury the other weekend, and I was stymied by not being able to unscrew the darn switch screws:

I remembered something my tech friend Andrew taught me:  when in doubt, tear the whole damn thing down.
So I disassembled the entire VUK assembly and removed it from the playfield.  Only then, with a clear 90 degree angle on the plate, could I impact the nuts in any meaningful way.
Removed switch, desoldered, soldered in a new one, and reassembled.  Then played my first game of LOTR in maybe a month.  JOY!

Stars: basic progress

I have really not had much time to spend in the back room, so things have been slow and erratic.  And things have been a struggle.


First up, this game needs to be properly leveled, but all of the casters were seized something fierce.  I took one leg off (swapped in one of my spares I keep for issues like this) and went to work on it.
24 hours in evaporust, no help.  WD-40, no help.  I even went and bought a product called PB Blaster, an intense penetrating oil, but still couldn't get it off.
With the help of a friend's extra muscle, it came off.  So much effort for one damn caster!


I had stripped the playfield for a cleaning.  The plastics were all quite dirty, but cleaned up well. 
New rubbers everywhere, and that revealed how both flipper bats had a small hole smashed in to them, so ordered some replacements.


Time to change the flipper bats!  What could go wrong?


Ugggggh how about shards of metal in the flipper shaft, making it nigh impossible to remove?  After 2 days of on-and-off struggle, I finally got face to face with those goddamn little shards.
Go to replace the right flipper bat, then afterwards notice that the coil needs replacing.  No worries, can get a new coil, but ummm  wow one screw has had it's head cut off, and the other was weak and stripping with any torque.  MORE FUN!

ugggh

Then there was the kickout hole.  This era of games, there is no bracket to slide the game forward on so I accidentally shorted the playfield kicker coil.  Uggh.
Got a new one, put it in and it played great.  Put the metal apron back on, started up and it fires right away.  DAMMIT, there was no real clearance under the apron and it shorted the coil leads, blowing the transistor.  So now the transistor gets replaced.  Thanks to my friend who had a spare, and to my other friend who swapped them on the board while I wrangled my daughter.
Now with that coil, I'm bending the leads down, but yeah, I have to remember this is a 1979 game and a lot of common-sense things in later games, like proper clearance, support rods, etc, weren't yet implemented.




Another thing to tackle was that the left inlane guide rail had popped out.  It was previously rebent, so the flipper was smacking it and it eventually popped out.  I struggled to bend it in a way that would give clearance from the flipper, but also good gameplay.
Then I went and got some Gorilla Glue.  Then I read that that stuff expands 3-4x, according to the label.
So then I returned it and bought some Gorilla Glue GEL, which doesn't expand, and that did the trick.


Next up?  Order a bunch of extra light sockets.  In this game you are chasing a lit target, so it is quite essential to gameplay to get all of these old and corroded sockets working 100%.
Check this thread on MAACA for more bulb discussion.



More fun:

looks like at some prior time, something fried on the CPU board!

Introducing... Meteor???

Meteor?  Really?

Where is it?  It's not here...  oh wait there it is!

So yeah Meteor is at my friend's house.  He was converting his Blue Chip to LEDs, so I asked him yo also do Meteor, and that's when things spiraled out  of control.
Did you know that 1979 Stern games weren't made to handle LEDs? did you? DID YOU?? 

First up you need to add some resistance since LEDs have very little draw, and that's solved by this clever little kit.
Then you need your LEDs.
Then you need to fix the bulbs that aren't working by replacing a logic chip.
Then you need to realize you fixed the wrong thing and replace the SCRs for the lamps.
Then you need to realize the schematics were wrong and you replaced the wrong SCRs.

Follow the saga:

Sealing backglasses with Triple Thick

So I have this friend and...  well at first I sold him a pachinko I didn't have room for.  and then wouldn't you know it he had a basement and I needed a home for a pinball machine.  So he took my Sinbad.
Then I got a Meteor, and didn't have room, so he took that too.
Oh and hey he also bought a Blue Chip!

So oops, my bad, suddenly he has an arcade in his basement.

He is also a licensed electrician and breezes through tech issues in a tenth of the time they take me to address, so I will be posting up videos of his work as we go. 

But first up, I wanted to share his great videos about sealing backglasses with Triple Thick.  If you have any machine with a backglass, YOU NEED TO SEAL IT NOW.  Those things are falling apart more and more by the day, especially if you have incandescent bulbs back there.

Introducing... Stars!

Let's all gather to welcome the newest entry in the basement... Stars!
From 1978, it's one of the earliest solid state games, and the 3rd SS from Stern, using their M-100 MPU.

Apollo 13 is Done and Gone and I am so relieved.  From one space themed game to another, and to be quite honest I've already gotten more enjoyment out of Stars than A13.
One thing to note is the new preferred method for getting games up and down the difficult turning staircase:  removing the playfield.
After trying and failing to arrange for 3 people to help get Apollo 13 up the stairs (it is a very heavy game even with the head off!) I decided to see what it'd take to get the playfield out.
This was inspired by Rollergames, where we quickly realized that once you disconnect the head, the playfield is already disconnected and easily lifts out.
On A13, there were just 3 additional connectors to label and detach.  I can only see this being an issue on 90s Williams machines, where they have the brackets+sliders that also secure the playfield in.


So with the playfield removed, A13 was able to come up with just the two of us:  playfield, body, head.
The owner came and grabbed it, leaving Stars in the garage, which I got down a few days later another day.




First thing I noticed about Stars is that I hate these ridiculously thin and fragile board connectors. 

This game also has the back left leg plate busted, and so the leg only attaches there with bolts on the inside. I am NOT the person to work on this cab and get the plate back.  Perhaps the next owner will take a stab at that.


The playfield is super dirty, but the plastics were in great shape.  Only the left sling was warped, but I can fix that in the oven. 
Backglass is in good shape, and seems to already be sealed with triple thick.

yeah that might need some fixin

that's gonna need some fixin

warped plastics? that's a fixin

seized solenoid in the school's canoe?  you best believe that's a fixin

Lots of lights out on the playfield.
Needs all new rubbers.
4th player display is non-working. 
Casters are seized in to the legs, making levelling nigh impossible.




Let's fix some pinball!

Mr. Gorbachev:  TEAR DOWN THOSE RUBBERS

cleaned plastics!

Rollergames progress

The upper flipper is where all of the points are, so if that's out of whack, the game is wack.
I saw "magnet grab" pushed the ball down in to the flipper, demonstrating that it was too far out.  I adjusted the flipper position, and it made the shot SO MUCH better.
But then when the ball came from the popper, it was having trouble getting stopped by the magnet.  I had overcompensated:  Now there was no friction of the flipper and the ball sailed past.  After a second adjustment, both the grabs and shots seem to be on point.

too much!

too little!

The big thing to work on was the wonky display issue.  Thanks to this pinside thread, we got the problem solved.

Tracing back in the schematics, we can see that those characters come from the main CPU board, specifically SRC2.
I took a moment to inspect the component on the board, didn't see much.  But then I bent it upwards and WOAH there was our obvious issue:  the bolt on the battery holder must have rubbed that component when it was installed.

UHHHHHHHHH NOPE

But that's just one part of a larger issue:  there had obviously been a battery issue in the past as there was corrosion on the board in the general area.  I am told any contacts that are tarnished do not shine are most likely corrosion.
Someone dealt with a bad battery and battery holder, and did a bit of a hack fix with the bolt on the battery holder, leaving corrosion on the board, and damaging SRC2 in the process.

segment g and comma are always on

here we see g and 'com' are next to each other, pins 25 and 26 of the data cable, which I inspect for damage but find none.  (CLICK TO EMBIGGEN)

trace back to MPU board we see that 'g' and 'com' are pins 8 and 9 of that same SRC2

So here's the thing with these "SIP Packs" as they are referred to:  they are banks of resistors, with a small capacitor to assist in filtering.  They are also unobtainium.
Someone has made exact replacements, but they are ridiculously pricey.  (search for R/C Module)
You can get by with just using a 40 cent SIP pack that is just resistors, which is what we did.  A pinsider kindly sent some my way, we clipped the 10th leg on it (only 9 holes, and this is fine as long as you align the dots,) and now the display is working just fine!

But if you read the bottom of the pinside post, this board might be unseavable in the long run.

Tutorial: getting all the bulbs working

My friend Lee (cdnpinballer) had posted up this great tutorial last year that I wanted to share.
When you get a new game in the shop, how do you get all of the bulbs working?

His response, in regards to his Big Game:

I always start diagnosing non working lamps by trying a fresh new bulb with a few turns of the socket and in my case I had to replace probably 10 burnt out bulbs. If the new bulb doesn't work I then reach for my aligator clips. 

I clip one end to the questional lamp socket and the other end to a working lamp socket. If the lamp turns on then I know the socket and bulb are good. If it doesn't turn on then I know to replace the lamp socket. So, I had to replace a few lamp sockets as well. 

Then I turn to the connector pins on the lamp driver board. I just replace the 0.100" connector pins of the suspect bulbs because it takes a minute or two and it's easy. So, that fixed maybe 2 or 3 broken bulbs. At that point I was left with 4 non working bulbs. 

The only items left in the chain are the transistors, chips, some resistors and possibly broken solder joints on header pins or the header pins themselves. So, I removed the lamp driver board for a closer look. 

Solder looked good, no cold joints. Header pins looked OK. Tested the suspect transistors and 2 of the 4 definately tested bad so changed those along with the other 2 suspects because it doesn't take that long to do and they are cheap. 

With the board reinstalled 2 of the lamps still didn't work in attract mode. WTF? Do I need to replace a chip now? It doesn't make sense because they're driven by different chips. Hummm.. I was stumped until I put thr game into test and everything started flashing. Lesson learned! Not all lamps flash in attract mode!