nice to finally be a part of the pinball community. I have been waiting a long time to start my collection, and i I finally landed my first one a few months back. its Gottlieb's Mario Andretti and its super cool. I am a race car engineer by day and I don't have the room i'd like to have so I have pick and choose the ones I really want. its in pretty decent shape, and I am pleasantly surprised at how much my wife has taken to it too.. I thought I would get the rolled eyes when I brought it home!(she is better than me which doesn't add any peace to the household) I have been going through a lot of basic clean up, new bulbs, a few solenoids, switches here and there.
I am battling an occasionally stuck flipper which is annoying, even after going through the mechanism.. still working on that. It has a center post between the flippers that is supposed to pop up, and it does but it doesn't stay up... Curious to know if anyone might have some input on what might be responsible for commanding the post to stay up..? I have replaced both solenoids and the driver board is new, but thus far has had no effect on performance. does anyone believe that it might be a control board issue? I hear you guys are the guru's and any thoughts would be much appreciated.

thanks, yes I have a manual - and it does help !

and yes - there will be more coming, no doubt !!

so far what I know about the post mechanism is that it has two coils back to back, with the post running through the center - I am assuming one to pull the post up and the other to retract it.. I have replaced the coils as a matter of course, and given the cost and age I don't consider it a loss.. from what I can tell it looks as though the driver board supplies the ground signal for the coils switches, etc, and I though again given the age I would rather have spares so I tried a new one.. no luck yet..

and yes, I used a rebuild kit from Marcos to rebuild the flipper mechanism.. new coils, sleeve, spring, switch, etc.. no luck with that yet either..

I will snatch a few pics tonight

thanks!

Ok! Good info. I’ll check it out.. i suspect shaft bind or coil staying energized - and yea, totaly makes sense to easily determine how to narrow it down. Simple logic !

My sticky flipper test indicates that it is a logic problem. I played it until the flipper stuck, and powered off the machine. as soon as I killed the power the flipper released.. so at least now I have some kind of a direction.
I have learned that Gottlieb sytem3's have a problematic grounds, so i'm going to start by implementing the ground improvement tasks I've been reading up on.

100% right. I found that the leaf switch was all used up! It was easy to decide that it was bad after it basically welded itself together. haha. Thanks everyone for your kind input