Revere, MA
I was working on a Captain Fantastic for a friend, and the initial problem was that none of the lights in the game would work. No GI, no insert lights. The game played fine otherwise. After some poking around, I found a connector with a burnt pin right next to the plumb bob.
At the recommendation of another pinball tech, I cut the wire from the pin and soldered it directly to the lug on the female side of the connector. That worked for a while, but then things started flaking out again. We didn't do any more work on it other than cleaning and re-seating all the various connectors, but by the time we were done, we had no GI, no playfield lamps, no flippers, no pop bumpers, so slingshots, and little to no scoring from switches. The credit knocker still worked when we would manually trigger the coin switch, and the drop targets would reset when all were knocked down.
I don't really know enough about how EMs work to be able to know where to isolate the problem. It has to be centrally located. I have the schematic, but it doesn't quite help me get a general idea about how an EM actually works.
The guide on pinrepair.com (as well as most guides) tend to go over the scoring reels and stepper units, which is understandable. But while I have an understanding of how special solenoids and GI work on solid state machines, I'm still a bit in the dark about how they work on an EM.
Can anyone give me some advice, or at least a quick course in how these various circuits work?
