Working on my friends Gottlieb Buccaneer last night. He had lost a contact (nib) off one of the switches in the "P" Spinner Relay and the game would spin the yellow advance light but not award the number.

No problem with soldering a contact back on but then I spend another hour and a half trying to figure out why it still would not work as is should....

- Reassembled the relay (cleaned it first)...... nothing

- Tried to follow path to other relays (not my strong suit).....nothing

- Wondered if it was maybe a bad capacitor or rectifier (cleaned the Jones type plug as I did not have spare parts).........nothing

- Finally noticed the the relay armature was not moving very freely. I dis and reassembled again.... nothing

- Took a bunch of notes in preparation of sending in request for help on Pinside and right before I closed up the game told the guy - "let me switch springs with one from another relay, it probably won't matter, but I'm here"......BINGO - game works perfectly!

Hopefully a lesson to me to look for the simplest issue first. We had a good laugh though.

As goofy as this was, still illustrates why I like EM repair - if you stare at it long enough, a potential fix (usually) comes to mind!