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

The curious thing is that I only recall seeing ONE switch in the ball trough last time I had the skirt off. We don't have access to the manual either at the moment. (I do have the manual for this game, but it's stashed away in a box deep inside a storage unit so there's no way to get to it at the moment.) Anyone know how many switches are supposed to be in the trough and what part numbers I should order as replacements? Might actually get a replacement manual at the same time too if possible.

Or... I suppose the switch contacts in the ball trough may simply need a light cleaning... maybe that's all that needs to be done with the slam switch too? I do recall a LOT of black crud in the trough when I opened it up for my first time, which I took some damp paper towel to; wiped right off. What would be the best approach for cleaning these switch contacts? I've read that with many switches you really don't want to use anything that will strip the metal and that something as simple as a business card may be all it takes.

...actually, the guy in the league keeping the pin for me right now must know the answer to that. I'll ask him to try cleaning those contacts when he gets a chance and seeing if that solves the problem. : )

That'd be awesome! Again, I do have the actual manual but it's buried in a box behind a ton of other boxes and furniture in a storage unit and is kinda impossible to get to at the moment. : B

I'll send you my eMail address by PM momentarily.

But yeah, hoping it's just wires and switches, but want to know all the possibilities ahead of time so I'm prepared when I get a chance to take a look at it again. ; )

So I was able to take a look at my Hollywood Heat machine tonight. The contacts were pretty dirty on some switches so we cleaned those, but oddly enough the problem with the slam switch was resolved simply by fiddling with the wire bundle going from the coin door to the inside of the machine... Actually, I'm not entirely certain what I did to fix it. Slightly worried that issue might come back at some point but for the moment it's not happening anymore. : P

As for the ball trough, we took the skirt off and noticed that the metal flap that's in the trough to keep the balls locked in BARELY offers enough clearance for the second ball, as a result, the force of a ball being shot into the trough doesn't give gravity enough time to pull the flap down enough to stop the ball from bouncing out off of both balls already in there. We're probably just gonna drill a couple extra holes into the metal trough guides so that we can move the metal flap back a little, but if anyone with a Hollywood Heat machine could take a picture of the metal flap in their ball trough with the skirt off, I would be interested to know if the flap on my machine is actually the correct flap or not, because a part of me is convinced it's not the right one...

Or actually... I just came up with such a silly idea it might actually work... Take a large metal paper clip and some pliers and just bend it into the right shape to act as a replacement flap... That might actually be worth trying first... maybe? : o

Had another chance to work on my pin... The solution to the ball trough was kinda ridiculous. We first thought about drilling a couple tiny holes in the trough in order to move the flap back a bit so there'd be more time for the flap to come back down following the ball getting shot in from the drain, but oddly that didn't work... it DID however make it easier to see what was going on in the first place: The flap was getting knocked far higher than it was supposed to. In fact, once I noticed this and took a better look at the underside of the skirt I saw a chip in the metal caused by years of the metal flap hitting the underside! : O

So, we put a really thick piece of extra-strong tape on the underside of the skirt in just the right spot to deaden the flap when it flies up and to give it less range of motion. This solved the problem! : )

Mind you, I don't think moving the flap back a cm was a bad thing either. Heck, it could be the combination of both of these potential solutions which solved the issue. I just find it crazy that no one else seemed to ever have this problem, because I scoured the net and Pinside for trough issues like this one and couldn't come up with any results at all! D :