No pics, but many years ago helped a buddy pick up a bingo, that had the awesome tin-foil across the fuse hack.

My GnR came with a cut down and shaped southpark plastic.

My HS had two of the pop bumpers tied into each other, so they would both fire, but only if a certain pop was hit.

Lots of weird board hacks all the time.

Previous owner had stuffed a toilet paper roll down into the UP KICKER on my Space Station pin to keep the ball from entering since that coil wasn't firing.

_{Post edited by moderator: forgot some info}

A previous owner solder wires straight to the pcb because they were too lazy to replace the molex connector.

This was on a flight 2000 I bought last summer, wanted to fix it for the experience but for the money I couldn't pass up just installing a new one from great planes.

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Too many to count. I'll take some pics of my latest hacks I have to fix.

The Addams with the sawblade flipper switch was one of my personal favorites from another thread

yikes! That poor t2.

I hate, hate, hate when I come across System 11s and WPCs where some wise ass has direct soldered the wires to the pins rather than using a connector. Have seen that multiple times now.

Most of the "repairs" described (with the exception of the toilet paper roll and foil across the fuses) were normal operator protocol to keep the money flowing into the cashboxes.

Welcome to the club. I think alot of people make this mistake in the beginning. I know I did.

Love this rectifier board. Half plugs, and half soldered direct. The best is the 8 pin connector, split into a 4 pin plug, 1 hard wired, and a 3pin plug piece mounted upside down. (Look close)
"Hey instead of an 8 pin connector, I'll use two tiny bits, and solder the rest directly!"

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Thats what I had on my T2....was pretty pissed about it, but it cleaned up alright.

I don't have pics, but in my first pinball machine, Alien Poker, I found alligator clips being used to make a few connections under the pf. I thought it was weird, but accepted that's the way it was supposed to be. It wasn't until I got to the point of troubleshooting some odd light and switch issues that I took them out and fixed the wiring. To this day I'm not sure what the alligator clips were supposed to be connecting because every wire I needed was there. I think it mostly had diode issues, so maybe they were used to get one light to come on at the same time as another. Fortunately they were easy to remove and come in handy when checking stuff with my DMM.

My Stern Big Game had every wire direct soldered to the rectifier board. It was a fun project replacing connectors and pinning new headers. It's something that should probably be done anyway on these classic Bally/Sterns, so it's just a major motivator for getting that taken care of.

I also have a T2 with "enhanced" wiring. One example in it was a burned up molex, the female half was replaced with a much shorter connector, the rest of the wires that should have been part of that connector were soldered to the board, and two of them had the last 6" replaced with speaker wire which was also soldered directly to the board. I believe a different burned up connector on that machine had some wires that had been partially replaced with what looked like a lamp cord, of course, wired directly to the board.
Luckily after these gems were pointed out to the seller, the price came down.

Found a 35 amp circuit breaker wired into the solenoid circuit of my Black Knight, in place of the required 2.5 amp slow blow fuse.

-Hans

we kind of covered this topic before... again here is my latest "winner"

- electrical tape flipper
-duck tape sling rubber
-painters tape hole cover (instead of fixing drop target)
-the "classic" rubber band outlane to make the game "more competitive"

ALL ON THE SAME GAME! sweeeeeeeeeet

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Winner!

Not a great pic but when I first bought my flintstones it was constantly having goofy issues after playing multiple games in a row and power issues on the board. It wasn't until I pulled the board to discover some McGuiver tried to retrofit (under the heat sink) a bridge rectifier with tabs (instead of the correct one with wire leads) to the board using massive amounts of solder. After I removed it, cleaned up the mess and added the correct rectifier the game plays like a champ!image-865.jpgimage-497.jpg

I once saw a Champion Pub, where they covered a hole in one of the plastics, with a large washer NAILED INTO THE PLAYFIELD. Wish I had the pics.

Game was in such bad shape, I was sure the op would just sell it for parts - so many things wrong with it. When I asked him if he'd sell, he told me $5200 firm. With a straight face. I just laughed and walked away.

Guy said his game had not worked right since he got the board back.

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Doh!

I had a thread a while back on the worst hack you ever saw. There are some great pictures and stories that people posted.

3" deck screw used to "secure" multi leveled plastics to the playfield.

Fixing the HACKS on my WCS GI!
Also No flashers and F111 blowing fuse.
Good Times!

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Fix the pins. Had to do about 7 stitch repairs total.
Here are some fancy connectors that were made. I fixed the first connector. Now on to the second one.
I would seriously kick the tech in the nuts who fixed this. $&!?$&@)

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