Hello Pinside Folks,

I'm starting to get into fixing my Freddy. Got a couple questions:

1) There's an opto switch in his head upkicker (spits balls out of his mouth). When I turn the machine on the upkicker constantly fires. I was reading online and some people said one of the ends of the opto can get dirty resulting in it thinking there's a ball constantly in there needing to be kicked out. I tried cleaning the ends with Windex/QTip but that didn't help. Next I took the two side opto boards off and brought the transmitter and receiver right next to each other; it then detected fine. So I'm wondering if it might be a weak/faulty transmitter that would allow it to work from close proximity but not when they're installed in their usual spot. I've also read about weak solder points on the mini opto board(s). Any ideas/experience debugging this?

2) Tournament Mode. I cannot get my machine to get into the Tournament mode settings in order to put it into Free Play. I checked the Tourney Mode switch inside the cabinet and it checks out (not to mention it shows up in switch test as well). From what I understand I should be able to flip this switch when the machine is in attract mode and it will bring up the Tourney (free play) options. Any suggestions/experience with this guys?

Thanks all!

Okay..figured out issue #1. Resistor had a loose leg on the Quad Opto board. Re-soldered that and that seemed to have fixed the opto issue.

For #2, I've read a few posts online and there seems to be references to checking the coin door for bad wiring. Apparently it can affect this switch. Anyone?

Fixed #2. In case anyone else runs into this problem it seems someone removed the secondary door switch (not the interlock switch) and just soldered the wires together so that the machine always thought the door was closed and it wouldn't recognize the tournament switch. Problem solved.