I went to an acquaintances house to "shop" his superman. I ordered bulbs, and rubbers, and went over and cleaned it up and installed new rubbers/bulbs.

The old rubbers were original and crunchy and crispy, haha. NOthing rubber about them.

Anyway, I assumed the machine worked. It certainly powered on.

After changing the rubbers I thought we'd play a couple of games. Only it wouldn't kick out a ball.

A quick look through the gameshowed me several problems:

Under the playfield the 2amp slo blo fuse was blown. Changed it, powered it up, it didn't blow again. Game still didn't play though.

Went into the back box.
The far right fuse was blown 3amp slo blo was in there. Somehow I didn't have 3amp slo blo so I put in a 3amp fast blow.

Anyway it blew at power up 3 times.

I noticed on the bottom row of the I/O board there is a row of about 15 transistors that seem to be very similar if not exactly the same.

The 5th one over from the left was almost blown off of the board. It wasn't standing in it's oringal position (like the rest), and it looked like a trace may have been lifted/blown. Testing the transistors (whole row of them) in circuit, they all tested similar. Nothing seemed shorted. Even the one that was half blown off of the board with apparently bad trace(s).

Anyway. Sometimes someone else has had an exact issue . THought I'd ask. I may need to just call someone else in to do an on-sight repair I am guessing though.

Dropped a 3a slo blo in

Cut off the xsistor

Blew the 3amp fuse immediately at power up.

I am going to head over there again. Maybe I will take a look at all of the coils.

I am going to take the pcb home with me and test all of the transistors and diodes. I ordered replacement transistors in case I find more than 1 bad.

Pics

A couple pics of coils underneath. Does one look bad from these pics?

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FB64F393-6455-4102-B7E7-BB4C5C3EE4AA (resized).jpeg

It looks like the xsistor on the far right may have gotten a little hot as well.

sounds good, guess I will be buried in a schematic or on a resistor chart. testing the xsistors goes quickly enough.

In your opinion is that basically my concern right now.....that row of xsistors, and what coil it is attached to? Or am I going through the entire trace looking at diodes and other xsistors as well?

No other xsistors were shorted. The blown one doesn't even measure shorted.

So do I swap in a new xsistor, repair traces where necessary and go plug it back in? (Assuming i find no other parts bad)?

I agree that generally just putting in a new part isnt the answer. Upstream from this xsistor, is more xsistors. They test the same as every equivalent xsistor on the board. The resistors seem to test ok as well. I just wonder if a ball got stuck’ on a pop bumper, or a kid held a flipper for 10 minutes and overloaded something. I guess I need to look at the schematic. That 3amp fuse blowing has to be a specific symptom.

No, i don't know which one it is.

Or where I should buy the coil.

finally a follow up....

I replaced the blown transistor on the board. I went through and tested a lot of diodes and other transistors, they all seemed to be good. So I did a solder reflow on the header pins and took it back to the guys house.

I went through the coils under the playfield. 1 of them was basically shorted across the 2 points. (1 ish ohms) , the good ones read around 8.9 ohms. So I unhooked that coil, and plugged in this board that I had been working on.

We are in pretty good shape now. No blowing fuses, the ball kicks out , the game plays, but the flippers are not powerful enough. Well at first the left one was, but the right one wasn't. They both squeek a little bit (the game probably hasn't been played in a few years).

I should have measured the voltage while I was there, but I thought I'd just buy 2 new coils for the flippers, and the one blown coil for one of the 3 pop bumpers.

I have the part # for the flipper coils, but I couldnt read one on any of hte 3 pop bumpers.

Again.....I would appreciate any help picking the correct coil, and suggestions on a good place to buy the 3.

found this on marcos

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/A007030-01

man I'd love to spend less than $63 on 3 coils, if anyone knows of another dealer. :

I had some coil sleeves but they were way too long, so I assume they were newer stern equivalents. The left coil did look a little mushy . if I had any coil sleeves on me, I would have done a full breakdown/cleaning right then.

This guy gave me the $, so I may as well buy the 1 bad coil, the 2 replacement flipper coils (for the future if nothing else), and some coil sleeves that fit.

Is Marcos the place?

they dont' seem to have any atari coils.

I"m with you there. I am on marcos and found the coils, but I am unsure which coil sleeves I should buy . Or coil stops for that matter.

I guess maybe I need to find a superman flipper rebuild kit somewhere.

thanks for hte help so far!

OK so as I keep going over to this guys house for repairs. Some ups, some downs.

The pcb that had issues seems to be holding up. Everything was working fairly well, except the center pop bumper which had some broken pieces , and a burnt coil.
I have a few things to address:

how do you remove a pop bumper unit? I really just need to get the metal arms out, but I can't get any of it out.

The right flipper was sticking a little, after I had changed the sleeve last week, so my friend wanted to try a new coil. We did, and it did some lightning flipper thing. Almost like it was stuck. I looked at it and didn't see any problems. It just was lightinging off and on flipping. My friend thought maybe we connected the wires backwards, so he swapped them. I think that burnt the coil? Is that possible? The 3 amp fuse on the top right backboard box started blowing again, similar to when I had the blown center pop bumper coil.

So, now I think we need to change that right flipper coil again. I will report back on that, but......

I can't get the pop bumper removed , for repair. Any insight? I will try to come back with pictures that I have on my ipad.