Hey everyone,

I've been working on my Bally Paragon for a little bit now. It was in secure storage for a few decades, but it's in pretty good shape despite that. I've got everything working except the bottom left pop bumper.

20220516_111509 (resized).jpg

Here's a look at the coil itself and solenoid driver board

20220516_111558 (resized).jpg

20220516_111523 (resized).jpg

And here's the solenoid drive diagram for that board

Board Diagram (resized).png

What I've tested:

1. I put the machine in switch test mode and tested the bumper switch, it read it with no issue, and I double checked that it was displaying the correct switch number on screen

2. I put the machine in solenoid test mode, the bumper coil does not fire.

3. I manually fired the coil by grounding the Q2 transistor, the coil does fire reliably.

4. I removed the driver board and tested the transistor with a multimeter, diode reading was between .4 / .6, and was about the same as the rest of the transistors.

5. I did a quick test of the related diode and resistors, I came up with similar results to the other working resistors and diodes. However, I wasn't able to find concreate information on how to do these test, so they may have been done incorrectly.

Additional Information:

After I removed the board to check the Q2 transistor, when I put the board back in, the bottom bumper coil was suddenly working. It fired in both sensor and solenoid testing modes, however, when I started a game it stopped working. When I rebooted the machine, it was no longer firing at all. I've removed the board a few times now, but it's only happen the first time.

This is the last major issue this machine has, so please help me anyway you can so I can play a nice game of pinball.

I've heard that from a couple places now, currently getting the parts to re-pin them. In the mean time are there any other things I could try / a way to test if my issue is related to the connectors?

Ground -> Q2 = Coil fires

Ground -> U1 pin 3 = Coil does not fire

TP6 -> CR2 top = Coil does not fire

TP6 -> CR2 Bottom = Coil fires

Is my assumption correct that this means that diode CR2 has gone bad?

Good to know, I'll see about getting it replaced and hopefully that fixes the bumper.

Still going to re-pin these connections though, I want it to be as stable as I can get it.

Looks like that did it, bumper now fires perfectly. Still got to iron out a couple other minor bugs, and re-pin those connectors, but good to have all the major stuff done.