HI,
I have replace all the bulbs in my elektra to find 2 bulbs will not light!!
anyone ever had faulty sockets or am I looking at a deeper problem?
Thanks
HI,
I have replace all the bulbs in my elektra to find 2 bulbs will not light!!
anyone ever had faulty sockets or am I looking at a deeper problem?
Thanks
Yes, it's very common on older pins. Sometimes it's a loose wire, or perhaps just a bad lamp socket.
Or if it's a feature lamp, ie; one that is lit by accomplishing something and not part of the general illumination circuit, it could be a bad SCR, (thyristor), on the lamp driver board.
Those Bally games had terrible lamp sockets. Is it a GI lamp socket or a CPU controlled insert lamp? If it is GI, you may have to do some soldering work to make it reliable, or just replace it. If it is a CPU controlled lamp, the sockets are always suspect, but you may have an SCR out on the lamp driver board. Also check the connections to the lamp driver board in the backbox, they can get flaky.
Sometimes it's just gotten old and there's gunk on parts that need to make contact. Wiggle all movable bits around, and take a small file and file at the spring inside the socket a little bit.
Its easy to determine whether its on the lamp board or a bad socket. Just rig up a new lamp socket like the one in your game, touch the wires to the same spots your questionable socket and see if it lights. If it does, then its a bad socket. If it does not then you need to replace the SCR as mentioned above.
Bad sockets are very common. Both wedge and bayonete sockets can crap out. If the lights are in a circuit board under the PF (like the light boards on WMS/Bally games), the solder joints joining the board to the header frequently crack as well (the inserts for those light boards also crap out, just like other wedge sockets, and some of the repro ones don't fit wms/bally machines without modification).
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Great to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/anyone-ever-had-dead-light-sockets and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.
Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.