I picked up at Fish tales last week and I am having problems with the reel. When it spins the plate that holds the reel on touches the metal at times. It seems like it does not line up perfectly with the hole. This causes The reel to not always launch balls when it should when it goes into multi ball and the third ball does not launch and has to go to ball search. Any suggestions?

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Joe sold me a decent fish tales for a fair price and he's a nice guy and reached out and tried to help. I was able to get the reel working properly. A combination of unsetting the screws a little, bending the plate and lubing the gears and it works great now. I had not realized he had modified it but what he did works and probably stronger than the original. I still have a problem though. Some times when the ball ends the game goes dark like it should before it gives bonus but a ball then launches in the shooter lane and continues the ball. This is long past ball save and happens about 1 out of 5 times. There does not appear to be a problem with any of the trough switches so any other suggestions on what to look for?

All the switches were fine so I took off the apron to get a good look at them and after sending several balls from the outhole to the trough it finally kicked a ball straight through from the outhole to the ball shooter like it was firing too hard. It turns out it had a AE-23-800 coil instead of a AE-27-1200. Should I assume the AE-23-800 is stronger and is too strong?

I still can't seem to get my reel working correctly. It will work fine in test mode for a while and then it sounds like its struggling and the motor will move slower. Nothing is impeding the wheel from spinning. If I remove the motor from the gear box the gear on the motor spins freely and the gears spin in the gear box. When playing a game it works properly at times but will then just spit out balls from the reel in the middle of a game. Any suggestions? Do you guys think I just need a new motor?

I hadn’t really considered that board, thinking it was some thing with the motor but upon further inspection I see the board had been worked on before so I’m thinking that probably is the cause.

I Purchased the fishing reel board and installed it today and I am still having the same issues. I got it from Marco and it does not look like the same board. They sold two different ones so I Purchased the one that looks like the one I had but it appears as though they sent me the other one that says EMI board without brake. Would this make a difference?

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They are not on the other side if you are talking about the copper coil things.

It also does not have the transistor. They had two of them on the Marco website so I Purchased the one that look like the one I have and they sent me the other one

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I had tried calling them a half hour ago but have not heard back yet. I think they had the 2 boards and the wrong picture with each and wrong description on one of them.

When I power up my fish tales, at times it starts to boot and then shuts down and then boots up regular. Sometimes it starts to boot and shuts down up to 3 times before booting up like it should. Other than that it works fine except for an occasional reboot during a game. I have reseated all the connectors and ribbon cables and replaced the voltage regulator. Any other suggestions?

I bet its the opto, loose wire or maybe the opto is dirty or bad. It's easy to get to.

I had all kinds of problems with my reel and although there was multiple contributors the main culprit was the board underneath the playfield that powers the reel. https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/A-15340-1