So it's been awhile since I've made a tech post... I actually haven't had much of a chance to work with my Hollywood Heat pin the past while. Long story short, another member in the league is taking care of my pin for the time being and we have it set up at his place.
However, he's hoping to host a league night soon and we'd like to be able to have the game working well enough for tournament play. As it stands, it's only working well enough to play for fun, as there's a couple longstanding, intermittent issues which crop up once every dozen or so games. I plan to fix these myself the next time I'm over at his place, so what I want to do with this post is pose these two problems to everyone here on Pinside and see what recommendations there are for debugging and/or fixing them.
Problem #1: As with many System 80B games, the slam tilt is a normally closed switch. While I have the switch adjusted to make a very strong connection, the slam will go off at random moments, about once every 10 or 12 games, and will almost certainly trigger if you open the coin door, even gently, but then won't trigger again for awhile no matter how much you bang on the door or how many times you open and shut it. I'm guessing it's probably just a problem with the wires or their connection to the slam switch, which will be the very first thing I check, but if it's more complicated than that is it possible to "remove" the physical slam switch from the circuit entirely so it never has to be worried about again?
Problem #2: Hollywood Heat normally has three balls loaded. The trough is having this weird issue where if there's already two balls in it and a ball in play is drained, the ball may not get caught in the trough properly when it's shot into it and will dribble out back onto the drain switch. If this happens, continuing normal play is impossible because if the next ball starts with the drain switch closed, the ball on the drain switch will never enter the trough no matter what, and if the ball in play drains it simply rests on top of the ball already sitting in the drain. Yet, if you reset the machine and start a new game, it detects the switch is closed and loads the balls back into the trough. The drain switch works perfectly fine, and if there's only one or zero balls in the trough already a drained ball won't fall back onto the drain switch. This ONLY happens when there's two balls in the trough already and it only happens about one in every dozen times a ball is lost under these circumstances. I haven't had a chance to test this yet with the skirt removed, but what should I look for when diagnosing this and what kind of problems could cause this behaviour?
Again, these problems are very uncommon, but they do happen from time to time, which is why they need to be solved if we're going to be scoring league points on this thing! :B