If you do a nice clean job on the repair, the value will not be affected in anyway. If you ruin your DMD board, then yes you have decreased the value by the amount of the cost of a new board.

Pinball machines need repair all the time, replacing bad components on boards is part of that repair.

depends on whether your repair job ends up looking like this...

P1010381.jpg P1010387.jpg P1010388.jpg

I tried repairing the HV section of my JM dot matrix driver board...lol, it wasn't pretty. all a learning experience for me.
Ended up buying a new rottendog replacement.

to kinda answer your question, I'm sure I raised the value of my JM by putting a new RD board in it. That old board was toast before I started working on it.

Personally, I'd place no additional value on a replacement board versus a well repaired original, with only a few exceptions like Pascal's excellent Gottlieb replacements.

Note that WPC DMD driver boards have a tendency to get a bit crisp around the HV area, making repair difficult sometimes. I've seen one or two that had suffered from prior repair and had been burnt badly in the first place - those boards were just about unrepairable.

On a game like TZ, it's probably a lot cheaper to repair the board than to replace it, assuming that the board isn't burnt beyond recognition. Several guys on this forum do excellent work if you are apprehensive about doing the repairs yourself.

Rad,

What I love about that hack is that someone really had to know what they were doing to assemble that. Some real thought went into it. Is that a custom welded up a heat sink (bottom edge)?

I always wonder when I see work like that why a few extra minutes of planning did not go into it so things looked cleaner and less like a fire waiting to happen. If everything was put on the homemade board nice, square and orderly and the wires were tied/strung together cleanly that homemade board could probably look pretty acceptable.

Also it is normally faster in the long run, just easier to work on/install things when stuff is well organized.

What I love about that hack is that someone really had to know what they were doing to assemble that. Some real thought went into it

I got a 2 for 1 with my machine
I also replaced with a rottendog board... as far as value, I don't think it really makes it worth any more, but it sure doesn't make it worth any less... I would rather have all brand new, updated boards in my stuff anyway... just mho

100_5191.JPG 100_5216.JPG

here's another pic of that custom HV section rebuild. It is a masterpiece - it is going on the trophy shelf. The thing about it is that when I bought the machine, I couldn't get into the backbox (got it from an operator) - I was floored when I saw the unusual work hidden in there. The custom engineering job worked. I ended up putting a replacement board in it rather than worry about the risks of that hack (looks like it was in the game for a long time based on all the dust, etc).

P1010389.jpg

that really is pretty cool

I am sure the hack works great, probably better than factory. Look at the huge piece of metal everything is mounted to, what a great heat sink, no manufacturer would want to pay the money to put one that big in every game.

Everything is soldered in, nice heat shrink tube on all of the transistor legs, huge gauge wire, a cooling fan.

No electrical tape, wire nuts or "twisted-together-and-hope-for-the-best" wire junctions.

It is probably hugely overkill for what the pin actually needed.

But it just looks so untidy which just makes it look scary.

Whenever I see work like that I think of times when I have had to do work like that (not on pinball machine though). Someone is hounding you to make something work now and they don't care how.

It is always happens at a bad time of year to find parts (like between Christmas and New Years). So you go to your junk pile and spend 10 times as long as it would have taken if you could have just gotten the replacement parts and cobble something together and you wildly overbuild it. Way stronger/heavier/thicker/powerful compared to whatever the original part was, but you don't want it to break and you want to know it will work when you are done, so you over build it in every way.

Sometimes the fix is so ridiculous and over the top that you don't even replace it when you can get the correct replacement part. It just seems like a shame to "down grade" to the "correct" part, when so much time went into the homemade replacement.

I wouldn't be concerned about the value of the game as far as the DMD controller.

Rebuild it or replace it, just get it to where you can enjoy the game again, as that's where the value resides.

Buy a replacement board, or a piggyback board, and try to repair the original. If you do a good job, you've learned something, and you can reinstall it.

Dang near any of these boards are repairable, but they may not be economically repairable. It all depends on how burnt the board is, and how finicky the traces are.

I've seen people repair the board itself, lay new traces, and go to town. Most of us don't have the equipment to do that, and to invest in it would far outweigh the cost of a replacement board.

I prefer to have original boards in my game, so if I have a board that is not economically repairable, I set it aside and rebuild an original from my stash. Maybe someday, I'll be in a position to repair the board and lay those new traces, today I'm not.

Yeah that looks like some pretty good work. We're all used to seeing printed circuit boards that we sometimes forget electrons don't care a whit for tidy, two dimensional layouts. Working point to point is easier and just as likely to work. Growing up I used to help my dad maintain a TV he had built, all point to point. Slightly more symmetric than this repair, but the same kinds of ad hoc circuit layouts all over the place.