I once had a bizarre trough issue on a Gottlieb Cue Ball Wizard. It would not consistently eject balls. I adjusted the switch multiple times. I ended up solving it by replacing the switch.

I once killed my Night Moves, had all sorts of issues from a bad ground and then I went and did the mods to it.
It wouldn’t turn on at all! Dead as a door nail!
I was so upset, having gone through like crazy!
Finally I troubleshooted on the phone with someone and ended up re-testing the fuse but with a meter, lo and behold the fuse WAS bad but looked fine. I ended up breaking it open and it popped WAY at the top of the cap where you couldn’t see the break.

That’s when I learned the lesson, ALWAYS use a meter, never eyeball the fuses lmao. Took like a week.

Well, been downloading with no luck so far an ehoh update. Bout 3 hours into it. Bad internet today

I got a good one.

Picked up a Flash Gordon and noticed displays were semi-ghosting. I took game to a pals place and he checked voltages which fluctuated a little on the high side. Unplugged all but one display and tested each 1 by 1 and nothing changed. Noticed the credit / ball count display worked great when it was lone one plugged in. Plugged displays back in and noticed only 6 digit high scores during attract mode. Turns out the displays were 6 digit instead of the 7 digit required. Plugged in a lone 7 digit display and all ghosting went away.

Every machine I buy I meticulously go through all assemblies and compares them to the manual to see if there are missing parts or any ugly hacks made. On my ToM trapdoor assembly I realized It missed a spring (should be two, there were only one). Was thinking, "ok, it's an easy fix, let's do this now". Checked my spareparts boxes, no correct spring. Checked pinball shops in Sweden where I live, spring not in inventory. Checked shop in Germany, nope not in stock. Checked Marco's, nope out of stock. Finally found it in a shop in Netherlands I think it was and ordered. Waited about a week to get it. Time to put it in, this should go fast, it's only a spring right...

Opened game and studied the assembly. Realized that I had to remove the whole assembly from the bottom of the playfield to get proper access to add the spring. Removed all screws that hold it in place and then realized it was hanging on the trapdoor itself also. Remove another screw with some hassle as it's hard to reach properly. Finally assembly is loose, but the switch cables are really short so hardly any slack to rotate the assembly. Finally able to remove the coil and add the missing spring. Put everything back and turned game on. Directly at start game started pushing the trapdoor up over and over again, f*ck! Turn off game and check switch, looks good. Never had this problem before so had to be related to my recent doings. Looked like the switch actuator arm was getting stuck in the first spring for the VUK so tried to adjust the screws holding the switch to make it swivel away from the spring. Turn on game, nope nope, trapdoor still messing up. Got fed up with the switch and removed it completely, took a plier and bent the whole metal piece the switch was fastened to so to make sure the switch arm won't get stuck in the spring. Reassembled all and tested, fuuuu*k! Trapdoor still think it's a busy elevator in a two story building. Time to calm down and think.. why did it work before but not now... Finally realized that the second spring I had added were probably forcing the plunger further down than before, making the switch being activated from start when playfield was swiveled down in play position. Verified my theory with my arm through the coin door, yep, switch actuated from start by gravity + second spring. Damn.... Raise playfield for the 2345 time this evening and thinking how to fix it. At this time I was getting really annoyed to put in so much time to fix something that was already working before I started messing with it and seriously thought about removing the spring again. The thought of going through all the hassle of removing the assembly AGAIN got me really pissed, but thankfully I then realized that if I just made the new spring a tiny bit weaker it would work as before but still have the second spring mounted, as intended from factory. Got my nipper and cut away a few turns of the spring making it weaker and tested again and finally it worked as it should.

TLDR; I waited a week for a part, then spend about 3 hours cursing and sweating before I "fixed it" and my pin got back to working exactly as it was before I started messing around

Got a Demolition man where the top flipper didn't hold. I changed the diode, changed the coil, checked the wires, changed the ribbon cable to the fliptronic card, changed transistors on the fliptronic card ... spent at least a week troubleshooting this.

Then I decided to swap the fliptronic card with another machine - now it worked !

That was when I noticed one of the pins on the connector for the ribbon cable was broken off
.. 5 minute fix and it was working

Removed a couple of plastics to change a minipost rubber. Tried to reassemble and couldn’t for the life of me remember how the plastics went back on. Hunted around for pictures online for quite a while before I figured it out. I learned to always take multiple pictures before dissembling ANYTHING no matter how minor.

I just downloaded it, and it’s worth the wait!

Its good, seems harder for me to score now tho. I pick up topper fri, that will make it funner for sure

Almost every one minute fix that took hours turns out to be either a grounding issue or flaky chip sockets. But finding the source I swear must be a lot like looking for the air leak on the space station. And half the time it involves getting out schematics to try to narrow down where the hell it could be

Not sure if this counts but often I go to adjust something, set the screwdriver in a ramp then look for it for the next hour. Umph

After many hours, I am still working on the crypt scoop on my EHOH. It's working, but not the way I expect it to so I'm going to have to throw some new parts at it. And it's getting those parts is going to be a real chore.

Rob

Way too much of the time I spend working on machines is wasted on looking for a tool or a piece that I JUST PUT DOWN 2 minutes ago, or a piece of hardware that rattles and drops into the cabinet. Also, if you are looking for E-clips there are several hiding in various locations on my basement floor...

I know....I need to improve my work methods and habits

They are also called Jesus clips for a reason.

How many times have you snugged up a leg bolt just a little....bit....more....just to have it strip.

4 flashers were out on ToTAN, I checked the wiring, fuses, was just about ready to start swapping chips/sockets when someone suggested re-seating the connector from the MPU to the driver board.....fixed.

I replaced the cabinet flipper switches in an Elvira and the Party Monsters and rebuilt the flippers. I was also doing some board work. Immediately after that the flippers stopped working. I spent over an hour poring over schematics, checking continuity, verifying the flipper enable relay, etc.

Turns out after all that time, both new cabinet switches were bad. There was some sort of oxidized layer on the copper contacts. The strange thing is the switches showed continuity during a multimeter test, but not enough to actually engage the flippers. Not sure if that happened during manufacturing or during storage. Sanding the oxidation off the contacts fixed the problem, now I have strong flippers!

One of my early games was a Bally Cybernaut. When I bought it, I thought the head needed to be removed, so I pulled off every connector in the head before realizing the head just folded down. I moved the game home and reconnected all of the connectors and the MPU wouldn't boot. I spent probably a couple months trying to fix the MPU (it booted fine on a power supply) before realizing that there were two identical connectors that were pinned the same. I swapped them back and then realized that it burned up some header pins on some lamp boards under the playfield. Hours of troubleshooting over about 3 months before I got it fully working. Lots of lessons learned on that one.

My Sopranos safe switches are one of these instances. They seems to work fine in test mode and even in-game with the glass off, testing by hand. As soon as the glass is in place, a direct hit does not seem to register about half the time. Glancing blows almost always register though. Had it apart many times and adjusted over and over, but still the same story.

I was at my buddy's house and he was telling us about that he had a tech out to look at a baywatch with no coil v. Tech spent an hour and I think over $100 but went unresolved.

Opened up the head. Squeezed the fuse clips back together. Worked.

Took apart the entire idol mech on Indy for what ended up simply being a cable in the back box that had come unplugged during transit.

Some good stories here, we have all "learned" stuff the hard way I am sure.

Every "I was just doing a simple adjustment with the game on and now I broke something and can't figure it out" post also could be added here with a link to the help thread discussion.

Not for any sort of shaming purpose, just to keep a running log of what seems like a 2-3x weekly occurrence. I have come to the unfortunate realization that there are very few "1 minute fixes" in pinball . At least for me. Even doing something like a clean and wax, 50% of the time results in me pulling the glass off the next time I play the game as I noticed some wax residue on a wireform or siderail or whatever that I missed.

Replacing a faulty display while power on in Gtb Sys 1 game... then taking out the MPU board, going home to replace two IC's and back to location. One minute fix took three hours.

Or how may times have you removed a switch or something under the pf, adjusted it (90 seconds) then dropped the screw only to have it vanish for 20 minutes til you find it wedged in some ungodly place?

While we are at replacing switches, how about replacing flipper EOS on BSD, with power properly off but some charge on capacitors, so shorting the EOS to flipper solenoid wire while removing switch screws... ZAP! and a burnt LM339.

That is a rough one; how long was the machine off for?

WMS too cheap to add a $0.003 cap bleeder resistor =D

I have noticed that WPC solenoid capacitor sure does hold V for a while. I drew a nice spark one sliding a playfield back into the game, something touched ground near the back of the PF on Johnny. Saw the blue flash and heard the snap, luckily nothing fried.

This is a fun topic, I've got a few of these

When I bought my HS2, I did a full flipper rebuild including cabinet switches. They worked fine afterward, but I started occasionally noticing the flippers would give a weak flip or sometimes no flip. Over time I tried cleaning the cab switches, re-pinned/reflowed connectors at the fliptronics board, new ribbon cable, even changed the pair of LM339 chips on the board--all to no avail. To make matters worse, the flippers would always seem to work fine after the attempted fix but sooner or later the problem would start to come back. It took me *years* before I finally realized the flipper cabinet switches I used had high-voltage tungsten contacts. HS2 was one of only 2 or 3 WPC games that didn't use opto cabinet switches, but instead used leaf switches with *gold contacts* to handle the low voltage between the flipper cabinet switches and the fliptronics board. Had that revelation one day, and finally fixed the issue with gold contact cab switches. After a couple years, those contacts wore out and it became clear to me why they switched to opto-style. Just this past year I finally installed opto switches and it works beautifully. That certainly took more than a minute though

Picked up a LAH in non-working condition a while back, and among the issues was non-working general illumination. Replaced the GI connectors, checked for voltages at the sockets, everything checked out. After scratching my head for an hour or 2 I decided to just try replacing one of the bulbs. It worked! Tried another...it also worked! Every bulb in the GI was shot. Every one!

Last one--my buddy got a BK and rebuilt the flippers along with new cabinet and EOS switches. Worked fine initially, but after a couple days the flippers stopped working entirely. Tried damn near everything we could. New switches, new coils, new flipper ground connector on driver board, even attempted to remove the flipper relay from driver board but finally gave up due to lack of proper equipment/skills at the time. Voltage was proper at coils and switches and grounding the coils with an alligator jumper would work. Spent probably 3-4 hours fighting the thing to get the flippers to work. Finally had to just give up for the night, but luckily I decided to pull the power supply board from his game, so try it on my BK at home (since I couldn't seem to prove a fault on the driver board). Tried the power board in my BK, and the flippers still didn't work! I took a closer look at the connectors on the board. Sure enough, the header pins supplying the voltage to the flippers looked dull/gray compared to the other shinier pins I'd been observing elsewhere. I decided to try a new header for that connector, and bam--flippers were working...in fact the flippers on *my game* were working better than I'd ever seen them work in years! Excited at my discovery, I replaced the same header on my power supply board before swapping it back into the game--by golly the flippers are *finally* where I thought they should have been all along!!! I had the game for nearly 10 years before that fix finally took place! Better later than never though, lol!

This one is almost embarrassing to tell.

Recently I bought an original MM that I renovated thoroughly (pf swap and much more). Finally almost everything was working again, only thing left was the lamps in the start and launch buttons who didn't light up at all. Well, this will be easy, let's fix it now (we all know where this is heading)!

I had recently replaced the whole launch ball button assembly so I knew that one was brand new and thus most probably not faulty. Started measure voltage at the lamps, there were voltage present but as I only have a DMM (and not a logical probe) the voltage looked a bit low in my eyes.

Looked at the schematics and started tracing the cables to the coin door interface board, through the board and finally up to the backbox while measuring for continuity. Everything looked OK.

Removed coin door board, inspected solder and contacts, measured diodes. Still found no problems, weird...

Removed power driver board and inspected the involved row and column connectors, measured connectivity, all seems fine, what the hell?!?

By this time I've spent several hours and basically tested the whole circuit for the two involved lamps (and as all the other controlled lamps in the same column and rows worked I knew the involved transistors and such were good too).

Took a break to gather my findings so far. Really stumped, then it hit me: the only thing I hadn't tested yet was the actual lamps inside the buttons, oh no...

Opened up the brand new launch ball button and saw it was a LED...no, could it be a polarity problem? Switched cables on the two lamp connectors and yep, it worked! I'm an idiot...

Ok, now let's have a look at the start button lamp then. Removed it from cabinet and opened it up. What the heck, some previous owner have removed the lamp completely?!? fuuuuuuuuuu... Put a lamp in and of course it worked right away.

Spent 3-4 hours over two evenings trying to find the problem before realizing the issues were two 1 minute fixes. I know what I will check first the next time a lamp won't work, the actual lamp!

A minute maybe.

AC/DC Pro Vault. The cannon drove me batty, sometimes firing, sometimes not.

Turned out that when the E lane (in FIRE) was lit, the cannon didn't work because the LED was shining into cannon optos, preventing the game from knowing what was where. Took about a minute to unscrew the mount and move the LED to another angle. Fixed it right up.

Rodent chewed PTO switch wire on my big tractor . Went from my 15 foot mower to the 6 foot since had to mow ( weed seed ). Took most of the day .

Moral story buy service manual when you buy something . Asking for delay if manual not available when needed !

Shane

After reassembling an EBD following a hardtop, my upper flipper would no longer hold. Everything checked out voltage wise and the double stack EOS appeared to be gapped correctly. Appearances can most definitely be deceiving! Spent a couple hours troubleshooting, replacing the coil, asking Pinside for tech help, etc. Moved the outer leaf .001 inch and all was solved

1 minute to remove cue ball from playfield.
2 hours to get all the glass from playfield.

Thank you; I will have to keep that in mind...

Thank you for sharing, I am sure we have all had those "oh no" moments. For me a similar story was trying to figure out why a flash lamp was not working on my LOTR (the one that faces the black rider on the right ramp, it is facing away from the player). I tried new buibs, traced the wires back, even eventually replaced the driver transistor as a hail mary. I eventually bent my head forwards enough to see the inside of the socket and realized... the inner socked was mangled. I unmangled it an it worked fine...

Ouch

One Friday about 7pm, no customers. I saw a light out on my Monster Bash. I'll quick fix that.

Start sliding the glass out, about 2/3rds out. F'in glass crumbles into millions of pieces. 1/3rd in the game, rest on the floor.

So now people start coming in, have to walk over to see the mess and track the glass kibble all over. So now I have a game down, a lot of time to clean it out, and replace the #555 bulb. And hours vacuuming all over to clean up the glass.

LTG : )

I got that beat. My father's arcade about 1971, upstairs at 6th and Hennepin in Minneapolis.

A pool shooter got made and threw a cue ball through one of the huge windows.

There were wood slat shades on the window so we didn't discover the hole in the window until the next afternoon. The manager of the Aster Art theater across the street found a cue ball in his lobby and thought it might be ours.

So the glass company had to get a permit, set up scaffolding, and replace the window. Whole thing ran about a grand. After the second one we covered the windows with chicken wire.

LTG : )

Yep, that one would really suck. Good thing it didn't nail a car driving by or somebody at the theater. Although the angry customer threw the ball... we all know exactly who would have been responsible for damages.

That's not bad all things considered. Glass under pop bumpers suck. I'm assuming Frankenstein was in the clear? Drac maybe? Course a playfield is never the same with those tiny scratches.

Worked on a Bally Elektra several years ago. Lower playfield flippers would quit occasionally. Previous tech replaced cpu and driver board. Wife wanted it thrown out on the curb. Found cracked solder joints on the relay board underneith the playfield.

I bought a project EM that had a missing insert. After checking the entire cabinet for the missing insert, I sourced a used one with similar yellowed color due to age. Sanded off the incorrect artwork and created a waterslide decal with the proper artwork in photoshop. Installed and touched up the keyline ink circle. Looked fine but not great.

Then I did a playfield teardown to tumble all the parts. That’s when I found the original missing insert stuck between the upper apron sandwich layers. I wasted many hours over 3 weeks.

My Girlfriend. I couldn't find a damn vein!

My first multi-ball game, (Firepower). Not loading the game with pinballs after working on it.

Well another one. This is a Bally 8 Ball. Random flameout of the cpu board. Turns out a plastic wire hold down screw was shorting 190vdc back to the cpu board. This may have been factory and just over time became an issue. Took a half hour. Used multimeter to follow burnt resistor on cpu board back to displays. Found continuity between red and orange wire. Jiggled harness short went away and found the screw piercing insulation.

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Spent my time trying to figure out opto issues in my BSD. Ball would not stay in right gate. Replaced caps and pin connectors and even tried different boards.

Turns out it was loose solder on the opto itself when I pressed on the wires during test mode.

This was a Comet. Every week or so fuse would.blow for coils. Was a little tough to find. Customer was getting frustrated and so was I. But after 2nd examination finally found it. Its tougher when your eyesite gets worse as you get older.

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I once looked for ground on an AC circuit for 20 mins. To this day I still haven't found it.

Very common, my Fireball Classic the disc would stop spinning randomly.

Cracked joints.

Learned that one working on Data East pins.