Quoted from chad:Nice drill through on the alum bar
Quoted from trueno92:Wait, the coil plunger has been striking it so much it punched through???
Bingo! The nylon tip was gone and the plunger was sitting below the chime box, having punched its way through. Little aluminum chips everywhere.
The pinball equivalent of how many licks does it take to get to the center of the tootsie pop.
How. How long did that take?
When I first started out repairing machines in homes in the mid '70's; I worked for a guy whose dad had a route in Cleveland. The EM's were pulled for home sales. Some of them had the same "holy" chime bars. Simply replace the solenoid plunger with the missing nylon tip and rotate the chime bar 180°.
Quoted from Beatnik-Filmstar:The pinball equivalent of how many licks does it take to get to the center of the tootsie pop.
How. How long did that take?
No idea how long that took. I assume that it broke through since the last time I serviced it, which was probably 6-7 years ago, because I didn't notice it then.
Quoted from MrBally:Simply replace the solenoid plunger with the missing nylon tip and rotate the chime bar 180°.
That was the solution today.
So about that hole... I can tell you from personal experience that if the tip falls off the plunger it does not take all that long to drill a hole. Home use for a little while but not long, I could hear a difference and investigated eventually but not right away, I have a chime bar that’s about 1/5 drilled through on one side. I admit if this was done with a tip on the plunger that is kinda almost unbelievable.
It must be common. This happened on my Williams Gulfstream.
When I bought the machine, I noticed all the aluminum shavings around the chime box but didn't really think much of it (it was my first pinball machine so I didn't know any better). I played the heck out of the machine after I got it up and running and then one day, I heard a loud pop and opened the machine to find a hole in one of the chime bars. I found the plunger and sure enough, the nylon tip was missing. As a temporary fix, I turned the bar 180 degrees and borrowed the plunger from the knocker.
By the time the new plunger came, I had cut and drilled all new chime bars. I just purchased aluminum flat bar at Home Depot with the same width and thickness as the original chime bars.
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