Hello,

I have been cleaning up and restoring a Cleopatra and I have one issue left that I cannot pinpoint. The 1000's chime is not working correctly and it's behavior is very odd to me. When playing a game the 1000's chime will fire initially and then it seems that it does not have enough juice to fire again. The 10's and 100's chimes are just fine and fire without issue.

For example, I put the machine in test mode and for the 100's chime I can press, press, press to get ding, ding, ding. But when I advance to the 1000's chime and press, press, press, I get ding, slight plunger movement with no ding, even less plunger movement.

After a minute or so I can repeat the test with the same results. I have tried different driver boards (2 old original, and one new rotten dog replacement) with the exact same results. The connectors in the head have all been repined (fun!). The power board is reading correctly at contact points and firing 2 of the 3 chimes ok.

Could it be the 1000's coil? I would think it would just not fire at all if that was the case.

I appreciate any help you can offer to me!

I had a chance to play with the chime box a little over the weekend. The foam padding looks like it is in pretty good shape and is even across all three chimes. I measured the resistance across all three coils and they were the same.

I think the issue may be the coil sleeve or the chime knocker rod (in the coil sleeve). The 10's and 100's knocker rods seem shiny and move freely. But the 1000's knocker rod seemed tarnished and seemed like part of the chrome is flaking off.

During game play I can hear the rod try to move up and it seems like it is taking half a second sometimes for it to fall back down. I cleaned up the rod a little bit trying to smooth it out and I think it helped a little but did not fix the issue. I guess I will see if I can get a different coil sleeve and/or rod. Is there any oil or lube that can safely be put on these?

For now, I will try to change the rod and sleeve from one that is working (10/100) and see if the problem moves around.

Well I think I have it solved. I happen to have a second chime unit which though missing some parts did have a spare coil sleeve and chime rod. I switched those with the existing 1000's and I also added some extra cushion to the foam padding underneath while I had it apart. The existing foam padding didn't look that bad but this raised the chime rod a bit higher into the sleeve.

Between the two changes when I started it up again it seemed to be fixed.

Thank you very much for the input and assistance!