Respectfully, are you sure it wasn't just old dried out capacitors that needed to be upgraded with fresh units.

I'll also go out on a ledge and say that more capacitance does not equal stronger flippers on a #Pheonix.

I'll sit back and wait for the electronics gurus to chime in, incase I'm dead wrong.
-Mike

I really miss Ed at GPE.

It's helpful to have an actual electrical engineer who knows about this stuff comment.

Why don't you put massive amounts of GIGANTIC capacitors in your pinball?

Because, unless you consider inrush current, you are putting far too much strain on your components and wiring.

The wiki on Inrush Current is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inrush_current

By design, capacitors in a perfect world would charge instantly, and use a nearly infinite amount of current to do so. In the real world it takes a little time, but when power is first applied, a capacitor will try to take as much current as it's ESR, the parasitic capacitances, and inductances and suchlike allow.

For 10 milliseconds, current draw is crazy high. Thus in pinballs they have in 'Inrush Current Limiting device' A NTC resistor is a device that is selected to match the expected (high) inrush current of the capacitance expected in your power supply.

If you add a lot of extra capacitance, you will be adding a lot more inrush current, and for the first 10 milliseconds, the current draw can exceed the NTC, the fuse, the Bridge Rectifier's tolerance, (if the cap is after a bridge rectifier), etc.

Bottom line is... you are changing the circuit. Circuits are designed with tolerances, and will probably be ok, or won't fail immediately if you do something unwise.

It's your machine, but inrush current can be remarkably high... like potentially melting wires and starting fires in your house high when you are charging ridiculous amounts of capacitance with no consideration to the inrush current.

I'm not an electrical engineer, if anyone else could chime in here about what you would want to do when doubling capacitance in a pinball, I'd appreciate it!

I've always thought that this is one of those that if you don't know what you are doing... don't do it.

Are you talking about this large capacitor, mounted in the backbox? The one that filters the controlled lamp supply voltage in your game?
pinballCap (resized).jpg

I think you have been mislead. That cap has nothing to do with the coil/solenoid/flipper supply voltage in your game. In fact, you can just remove it from the game completely and then you don't have to worry about the lamps working at all!
And, your flippers will still work great without it.

Or, are you talking about the large brown cap on the board in the 2nd picture here? You guessed it, that cap doesn't have anything to do with the flippers in your game either, it filters the 5V logic supply in your game!

s6-PWR (resized).jpg

There are ways to make your flippers stronger. I would buy a stronger flipper coil or, remove a few hundred windings from the actual flipper coils before I started jamming oversized capacitors into your game where they don't belong. (Having said that, I would not do ANY of these things to any of my games.)

Do you have more info on what you have done specifically? I have not heard of adjusting caps outside of as close to original spec as possible.

A 45% bump seems huge. def. many things to consider for anything which is going to bump power like that.

I am thinking the OP might be drinking. 45% more power? Maybe if you rebuild the flippers but not from changing a cap.

Especially since the caps he mentioned have nothing to do with the flipper circuit.

That cap filters the feature lamp voltage. Has nothing to do with coils/solenoids. If you disconnect it, the flippers and all coils will still work.

Unfortunately, increasing capacitance in the power supply's electrical path will not affect coils in any way.

I would suggest taking a look at your game schematics and follow the electrical path for power to the coils.

Like others have said, increasing the capacitance too much can cause other problems, such as stressing other components to the point of failure.

I would recommend using the proper capacitance rating.