Just got this machine. Looks like it took a few knocks in delivery and some weird stuff is happening. I'm not very experienced at this stuff, but I can use a multimeter and soldering iron and I'm decent at troubleshooting.
Most obvious symptom.. I get randomly ejected balls during game play and a lot of solenoid noise which I originally figured was the ball search kicking in because the trough switches were glitchy. I've gone through a bunch of tests including removing the apron verifying the switches are all working (with balls, not my finger), removing balls in the trough by hand to see if I can trigger the same machine response (I can't), and removing/testing/resoldering the right trough switch. Monitoring voltage on the right switch during game play, it seems to be working fine.
So what I originally thought was a bad switch now appears to be much more.. so I expanded my search and started manually triggering playfield switches. I now notice the following:
- Occasionally after launching a ball, the outhole kicker and the launcher will trigger.
- Touching X-Wing spot targets will sometimes trigger the outhole kicker.
- Touching inlane switches will sometimes trigger the launcher solenoid.
- The pop bumpers sometimes cause an unrelated solenoid to fire when hit. The knocker perhaps? It's really loud.
When I say "sometimes trigger".. I mean that sometimes the game works normally.. then suddenly it goes into weird mode and I can make these things happen over and over.. (touch x-wing target and outhole kicker fires, for instance) until somehow the game just quietly reverts back to normal operation. "Weird Mode" happens pretty much every game.. but not every ball.
So I'm pretty sure my extra ball launches are caused by playfield switches wreaking havok on the trough kickers.. and that all the extra noise I hear is because various solenoids are firing when the ball is bouncing around and hitting unrelated switches.
Where should I look to fix this? Thanks in advance!
Added videos:
Post edited by cheezywhiz : Added videos