Yeah that will have to be cleaned very well to stop the corrosion from further damage. I had NVRAM installed on mine just for the peace of mind factor. Chris Hibler did mine and he did a fantastic job to say the least.

That sucks. Sorry to see that. Lesson learned. It always sucks that the hard lessons learned in pinball are expensive. But I doubt it will ever happen again to you. Next time cut out that battery pack right away and to the trash it goes. Hopefully your board repair is somewhat cheap. Good luck.

Ugh. Tough lessons

A good 10% of my first visits with a new client, are fixing this very issue.

Either way should result in a reliable board. Assuming you send it off to someone good, like Chris, it will return to you bulletproofed. Or, you can save the downtime, buy the Rottendog and also have a bulletproof system.

Cheaper to have it fixed and like I said Chris Hibler will do a great job for you and is reliable.

Hmmm, Radio Shack batteries? Gotta figure those were a bit old already.

Chris did a nice job fixing some sound boards for me. A few years ago Jerry Clause up in MI cleaned up my RCT mpu that had a bunch of battery damage (Not my fault, I bought it that way!). Also did a very nice job, machine still works perfect. Labor, parts and shipping was right about $165. That also included the NVRAM and install. Repair time was just about 1 month.

Good luck, hope it's up and running soon!

Clive at coin-op cauldron does a great job as well.

Rottendog are ALWAYS a move of last resort.

Try and get your original fixed first. You will be much better off.

If it was mine, take me a hot 2 hours at best to clean that up and repair. No offense to Rottendog but no reason to replace that board at all.

+1 for Jerry Clause, he's worked on at least 3 of my boards, professional and reasonable.

At an absolute minimum, my policy is never use alkaline batteries at all. Use AA Lithiums. They pretty much never leak.

Remote holders are also cheap and take almost no time to install and move the batteries away from the MPU board.

NVRAM when possible is usually best of course.

Alkalines are unreliable and I suspect the market has been flooded with bad quality fakes (or just bad quality batteries) for years.

Death Sticks

RM

That sucks. Hope you get it back up and running soon. I just recently started switching to remote battery holders and NVRAM for all my required games. I've decided to not test my luck anymore.

Second and third that opinion.
Everything I've ever sent to him has come back looking new.

He rebuilt all my Star Race boards a few years back and I have not had any problems since. I sent Chris my Circus boards and he did a fantastic job as well. We are fortunate that we have so many choices from great people that can be trusted.

Actually I read a great thread a few years ago on another board which was very in depth on the subject. A lot of the current alkaline issues are related to the "arms race" among battery companies trying to get the maximum life out of batteries. Changes in formulations and battery venting has a lot to do with the current problems we see today.

I'd much rather have batteries that last half as long but never vomit corrosive goop all over everything but hey that's me.

RM

That sucks. I always do either NVRAM or a remote battery holder on all my games.

I recommend John Wart Jr, I've used Jerry Claus and my buddy has used coin op cauldron, both are good but John's handiwork was top notch.