The subway kicker doesn't seem to be as strong as it should be, i.e. sometimes the ball just drops right down the drain instead of hitting the right flipper as it should. The mechanism moves freely, the core moves through the coil smoothly. The manual describes how to aim the ball guides, but that doesn't provide much movement and didn't help anyway.

The coil that is on it is an aftermarket A-1496 (same as the slingshots, kicking rubber, and pop bumpers); being aftermarket it has obviously been replaced. I can't find mention of the specific coil in the manual, only a generic listing of common coils that doesn't mention the subway kicker and a somewhat less than helpful note saying coils vary from game to game and that I should consult the manual.

Could someone take a look in their Volcano and tell me what coil you have in there, and if it looks original? Is there a way to give it a boost, say with a capacitor or a stronger coil?

@OzPaul: Great pictures, thanks for that. Unfortunately since that coil is also aftermarket, I have to wonder if it is the right one. You hit the nail on the head regarding the chart: it's not terribly helpful, showing coils for features I don't have, multiple coils for features I do have, and no listing for the one I'm looking for.

Here's hoping another Volcano owner will chime in.

Steve, you're a genius: I spent another hour staring at the schematics and found a little chart down in the corner listing the coils. Lo and behold, it is supposed to be an A-4893. Thanks for the tip!

So, I got the right coil (ordered on Friday, it came on Monday; the guys at PBResource are great!) and put it in, the kicker didn't work. It would fire when grounding the case of the associated transistor on the driver board, so I figured that transistor was marginal and blew under the higher current. I pulled out the old transistor and it tested good with a meter, so I put it back in. The coil still didn't fire in play, so I went to test it by grounding the case and all of the coils would fire (all of the coils fired by UPTs, not the direct ones fired by big transistors on the driver board), just like the 'thunk' sound when turning on the power.

Not knowing what the hell to think about that, I replaced the transistor with a new one. Now the coil still does not fire in play, but the transistor gets hot, I mean makes-a-funny-smell-and-you-can't-touch-it hot. The other two big transistors do not. The coil still fires when the case is grounded (and only that coil), so it's not stuck on. It would also fire when I put 5V on the base leg, so I replaced the upstream transistor too, but nothing changed. The only thing out of place is that this transistor did not have the mica gasket under it, but the solder pads around the holes on the component side of the board did not look big enough to contact the case and the last one worked fine without it.

Any ideas?

If the IC were driving it constantly the coil would be locked on. It can't be backwards, the pins are closer to one mounting screw.

I suppose I could make sure the pin pads aren't touching the case with some electrical tape or by floating the whole thing off the board with some washers, but I wasn't sure if either of those would be copacetic. Besides, one of the pins (emitter) goes to ground (which would make the coil lock on if it were making contact) and the other (base) is fed by the upstream transistor and a 9.1Ω 1W pull-up resistor, and I don't think either could feed it enough current to make it heat up as fast as it does. I could be wrong, though.

Yeah, metal washers around the mounting screws between the transistor case and the component side of the board, just to lift it up a bit to keep the pins from hitting the pads on the component side of the board. I can't imagine why the pads are there at all, the pins are connected on the solder side. The circuit relies on a good connection between the case and the board, so any standoff would best be conductive, especially if you trim the mica as suggested in Clay's guide. Instead of doing that I ended up making my own insulator out of some plastic I had lying around, I made sure it wouldn't melt by hitting it with a heat gun on high.

Today I pulled the new transistor (the one that gets hot) and it tested bad with the meter. I didn't test it before I put it in, so I have no way to know if it was DOA or it burnt out after installation. Does anybody test new components before installation? I might do that from now on...

I put the old transistor back in (it was still testing good), and it went back to firing all of coils at once when grounded. I then pulled the transistor out, reinstalled the board and grounded the pad where the case contacts the board. It was then that I noticed that it wasn't just the other coils firing, it was every durn controlled light on the board! Turns out the new coil reads about 0.6 Ω, so I put the A-1496 back in and everything's back the way it was in the first place. I still haven't figured out how a shorted coil could make other transistors fire.