Quoted from lifefloat:So................I have a topper. Got it early on for the MSRP BNIB. Had to send it back to Stern not long after that because it smoked. Got it back a couple of months later all good. They even threw in a few swag items. This was all back in 2020. Thank you Stern.
Anyway, recently I lost the side to side and rolling animations. Black Knight still rocks it up and down just no side to side and rolling. Finally got the time to take it down today and dust and clean the topper. Didn't go bugging around on the thing to see what may be wrong but I did a fairly decent cleaning and reinstalled. No change to the problem after cleaning but damn it looks nice. Would like to get it rolling again though.
Has anyone else had this issue and if so, what did you find or do to fix it?
Yes, I had that happen. Took the topper into Pinball Pirate (Benicia, CA) to fix it. He's a pro, and after about 1 hour of labor, was able to fix it.
The left-right movement had failed. No grinding or humming sound at all, just nothing happened. I was hoping it was something simple like a broken wire to the motor, but the wires were good. The motor had just randomly and silently failed. After replacing the motor, it worked again. The good news is that the motor is a standard component that's evidently used in other Stern games as well, so it's a fairly common part for pinball shops to have.
What's "rolling"? AFAIK, the head can only move in two dimensions: up-down movement, and left-right movement. It doesn't roll.
It is really tricky to disassemble. I wouldn't want to do it myself. To get at the left-right motor, you have to first remove the up-down motor. The head is moved by the up-down motor, and then, that whole assembly is moved by the left-right motor. So, the left-right motor has to move more weight, which is unfortunate, because it looks to be the same size of motor that's used for the up-down motor.
It's also really hard to align back up, after reassembly. Even the pro couldn't get it aligned perfectly. The head doesn't stare directly at the player anymore, it's a little too far to the left. I tried to compensate for this in the game settings, but it looks like they don't have much of an effect.
I wish the Stern software let me test the mechanism by letting me move the X and Y positions independently, like the Johnny Mnemonic glove test, but unfortunately, the software isn't that good. There's only 9 positions you can move the head to, in a 3x3 grid, when testing. I wish I had the ability to calibrate the values the game uses, for each of these 3 positions, on both the X and the Y axis. If I could do that, I could trim it nicely so that the head would always be centered, and also, avoid the chin scraping the bottom of the tray (which happens sometimes, as the up-down movement goes too far down).
There's a big wish list already for BKSOR software improvements, and this is pretty far down on the list, unfortunately.