I've been helping Gobster with a Corvette he picked up over a month ago. We've been slowly going through everything and last Thursday we thought we finally had everything taken care of. After I leave, Gobster contacts me and says after 10-15 minutes of playing the fuse for the 50v coils blows. Everything works fine, but after playing for a while, it blows.

We go through everything. Nothing looks out of place, coils measure fine, connections good, transistors seem fine. Only thing I can figure is a transistor is flaky, or maybe a coil is damaged and its windings are shorting when the game is being played. We're thinking about removing every 50v coil and inspecting it for damage. But before doing so, I take another look at the driver board. I look at everything on top, then turn the board over and something falls off. Gobster picks it up and asks what it is. It is a small piece of a clipped lead from a transistor. Someone who did board work in the past left a little souvenir. It had been hanging out somewhere on the driver board.

So now we're hoping that maybe this little piece was resting somewhere and causing all our grief. We put the board back in the game and it has been playing fine, no blown fuses. So the moral of the story is, watch where those little pieces go when you clip off a lead. I'm also going to be sure that I shake a board before I reinstall it whether I've done any work on it or not. You never know what might be hanging out and stuck somewhere.