Sorcerer
Williams, 1985Just one day after posting the story of my best game of Sorcerer ever, I open the backbox to find this...
It's a System 9 CPU board. The transistors control slingshots and jetbumpers. The only symptom I noticed was a stuck jetbumper. Is the root cause likely to be the transistor failing or might it be something else? I don't want to get the board repaired and then immediately have it happen again. What should I check? Diodes on the coils?
Quoted from NinJaBooT:That sucks! Have you recently replaced Q82 and Q74?
Soldering looks kinda sloppy?
Should be a simple fix. Order the parts, remove the board, desolder, clean the board so you get to a clean trace (scraping the green stuff off gently with an exacto knife), resolder the parts on. If you need to, grab a small piece of wire and solder it from the transistor lead to the clean area on the trace so you get a good connection.
I'm pretty new to pinball. What is a likely cause for damage like this? Do transistors just die on their own, or is there likely a cause elsewhere? Being that these are on a coil circuit, is there anything else I should look into aside from replacing the parts on the board?
Quoted from kyle5574:I'm pretty new to pinball. What is a likely cause for damage like this? Do transistors just die on their own, or is there likely a cause elsewhere? Being that these are on a coil circuit, is there anything else I should look into aside from replacing the parts on the board?
Yes, transistors and other board components can fail. Keep in mind too that this board is over 25 years old.
You'll want to inspect the coil that's being driven by the transistor as well. Look for signs of heat damage (burn marks, melting...), a short, or loose hardware.
Quoted from ReplayRyan:Yes, transistors and other board components can fail. Keep in mind too that this board is over 25 years old.
You'll want to inspect the coil that's being driven by the transistor as well. Look for signs of heat damage (burn marks, melting...), a short, or loose hardware.
Absolutely.
Q75 drives the left kicker and Q83 the right jet bumper. Q75 looks like a previous repair where the legs of the transistor were soldered to the board trace directly probably because either the previous transistor fried the through hole or whoever removed it damaged it.
The two coils need to be checked and then the two transistors should be replaced with TIP 102s (8A) instead of TIP 122s (5A).
viperrwk
Follow-up...
I sent the board to K's Arcade. Keith replaced Q81, Q80, and R17. He also replaced all the capacitors, replaced the 1J7 header, cleaned up the board including the messy solder shown above, and fixed me up with a really nice remote battery holder.
I replaced the 1J7 connector (it was really crusty) with crimp trifurcons, replaced the popbumper coil controlled by Q81, ...held my breath, ...powered it up, ...and finally got to hear that crazy SORCERER startup sound for the first time in a couple months!! Back in business!
Thanks Keith!
Victory shot...
It was just the one pop bumper on Q81 that was affected. The other Q's must have been an old repair, like others said, and were still functional. The coil showed 4 ohms and the sleeve slid out easily. That coil was far too hot to touch when it happened though, so I replaced it anyway just in case. After I pulled it and took the wrapper off, the windings I could see looked fine. Probably could have saved $10. Piece of mind though. And I got to have my first experience with the pop bumper mechanism.
I thought this was gonna be about a new snack food. Dang. Kind of like fried shrimp or fried snickers
Check your fuse values and make sure they are right. Stuff burns up sometimes even with the right fuse values, but if you are overfused, stuff burns up in a spectacular fashion and generates more magic smoke. (And costs more to repair.)
^^ Good advice. I did that while I was waiting on the board repair. Solenoid fuse was indeed a half amp too big.
I got five minutes of play time this morning before something else broke. Another popbumper stopped working. Talk about disheartening.
I think it's just a switch out of adjustment this time.
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Great to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/fried-transistors and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.
Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.
Fishers, IN
Bucharest
