Hi everyone. I have an issue with my ferris wheel. Long story short, the under-playfield relay isn't clicking. I have replaced the relay board (the original one was an interesting hack-job) and Q6 on the driver board, which was bad. I do get 31V at the driver board, but the relay just isn't firing. Any suggestions?

Hey everyone - wondering if I could find some help here on my Ferris wheel. I tried to work on it a few months back, but hit a dead end. Here is where I am. It stopped working, and after some troubleshooting I found that the previous owner had cobbled together a goofy custom relay board for it. I suspected that, so I swapped it with a newly-purchased board, but this didn't fix the issue. I tested and found Q6 to be bad, so I replaced that as well, but this didn't fix the issue either. It's not a mechanical problem - it's that ultimately the motor isn't getting power. I do get 31V at the relay board, but the relay doesn't energize (even when I short the Q6 transistor). From what I understand, this indicates that it is likely a connection problem. I'm assuming that this means a problem with the brown/gray wire coming from the aux board? I've traced that and I don't see anything obvious at the connectors. I'm kind of at a loss at this point - I'm not smart enough with pins to reason through it beyond where I have. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

I created a separate post before realizing I should have posted here:

This is more of a nit that I have with my game, but the skill shot is extremely difficult, and I suspect it may be a setup issue more than a skill issue. It seems like 90% of the time after a shot lighter than enough to clear the ramp altogether, the ball seems to 'stick' and hit the first (10K) slot. I can't tell quite what is happening (I might take a slow motion video to try to help), but it seems that if the small metal ramp leading up to the skill shot were misaligned, it could hit the gate off-center and 'stick'. I feel like this has gotten worse over time (or maybe I have!), and just wondering if anyone else has run into and resolved this (or a similar) issue.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I took a look, and the wire form does sit flush on the blue plastic ramp. What I DID notice (and hadn't noticed in the 10-ish years that I've had this game) is that my monorail plastic is mounted on the WRONG SIDE OF THE BLUE RAMP! Meaning it was mounted on the left-hand screw of each of the gates. Seems a likely culprit (will have to wait until morning to test). Okay, so now that I want to move it to the correct place on the right side, I'm presumably going to need some longer screws and some sort of spacer between the gates and the plastic? Would anyone mind (at your leisure) sending me pics of that area so that I can try to piece together what I need to get?

After putting my monorail plastic on the right side, I took a couple of slow-mo videos to try to figure out why I can't seem to hit the skill shot anymore (there was a time when I could). It seems like the ball has a tendency (particularly when hit lightly) to hook sharply to the left. Thinking through it, it seems like there could be a number of causes: machine out of level (checked), ramp sagging to the left / out of level, shooter rod off center to the right, wireform misaligned / warped, uneven wear on ramp, etc. Anyone else have this issue?

Weak shot:

(sorry, for some reason this one converted to full speed; view at 0.25x on YouTube to see)
Strong shot:

Yeah, I did that intentionally to rule that out, and I didn’t set it back when I took the video. I got it solved - among a few other tweaks, I put a very slight bend in the wireform to direct it more to the right (specifically, bending the mounting screws slightly to the left) and now it is working smoothly again. We have a winner!

So I have a (potentially bad) idea to design/print sticker to go over the top portion of the ferris wheel ramp, using the same sort of 'tree design' that's on the lower plastics in that area. It just seems like that side could use the same pop of color that the skill ramp brings to the right side of the game. I've put together a really crappy concept sketch below. Would like to get general thoughts and/or ridicule. And, does anyone have experience (or preferably, ability) in doing the printing? Obviously I did some Googling and found all of the normal options, but I was wondering if anyone could do something a bit better than inkjet to try it out.

cyclo_pf_render (resized).jpg

I printed prototypes of the Ferris wheel ramp stickers, to add some color to the left side of the machine. I made them separate pieces as a mock-up because I was able to do it for almost no cost, but the full design would be a single piece. I am pretty pleased with the result. Cheers!

IMG_4048 (resized).jpeg