I was trying to test resistance on the coils of my System 80B Raven last night, and no matter whether I did it with the machine on or off, I got the same results. What I saw was that sometimes (~25% of the time), the DMM (auto ranging) would correctly show ~9.4 ohms resistance. However, about 75% of the time, the numbers on the DMM would fly all over the place like crazy, from 0 to K ohms to M ohms, and sometimes it would eventually settle at the real ~9.4 ohms, but sometimes not. I first figured it was because I had the machine on, so I turned it off, but got the exact same results. Any reason this was happening? Again, it occurred with all of the coils, and they operate fine, so I don't think it is because they are faulty.

Thanks

Ah ok, thanks. It seemed odd to me how I was really only reading the coil itself, given that it's connected to everything else in one way or another. Ouch, seems like a lot more difficult to simply measure coil resistance than I hoped since it involves unsoldering 34 year old bits!

My rear sniper mechanism wasn’t operating properly and the piston would stop halfway into the coil instead of releasing all the way down into it. End result was the sniper could not drop when hit. Was troubleshooting bad resistance first, and then took the sleeve out and cleaned it after the resistance tested ok. After cleaning it works great. New sleeves on the way now, just to be sure.

This is probably quite true. Explains why every once in a while it showed the correct normal 9 ohm resistance when other times it showed ludicrously huge numbers. Dang, I used to have a fiberglass pen somewhere for fixing car paint chips. Don’t think I have it anymore though.