Quoted from reviewzonehd:its really disappointing reading some of the responses on here, basically blasting me for not knowing how to pronounce solder, and claiming that i broke the machine or made it worse by checking for loose wires. the 5 hours spent under the playfield wasn't just studying wires, it was spent looking through the book of a manual that goes with this thing, learning the diagram and string of boards and trying to determine where the problem was coming from.
Also, to the 2 or 3 people that said the problems were just minor and would be a simple fix for a know-it-all technical pinhead with more experience.. i spent at least 2 hours on the phone with lloyd plugging and un-plugging wires to narrow down the problem. At the end of the call he stated he thought it was 3 or 4 bad LED boards, so it definitely was not a "simple" fix that i could have corrected on my end.
The lights not working properly wasn't the main concern, that could have been easily fixed with a tech and some new boards installed. I was more concerned with the fact that every time i cut the machine on a different part of the playfield was malfunctioning, with the final end result being what was shown in the video. To recap, when the machine booted up for the very first time only about 8 led lights came on, the rest of the lights were dead. I spent an hour or two looking for a loose connection and when i moved a wire the whole thing lit up and started working, so i put the playfield back down and that is the only time it actually worked right. After i turned it off and came back a couple hours later only the left half of the machine would light up.
There was also an issue with the audio cutting in and out, this i assume could be fixed but there were no loose connections anywhere that i could find with the sound wires, i checked those before i even called lloyd and checked them again with him on the line, nothing was loose. I couldn't even guess what was causing that issue but again im sure a tech could fix it.
The problem with the machine not booting up at all 2 or 3 times is what worried me the most, and lloyd didn't really have an answer on that one.
There was also an issue with numbers popping up in the crystal ball, and sometimes there was no display at all in it. Jack stated that a loose wire to the crystal ball could cause the entire machine not to turn on lol.. i don't know what to think about any of that.
For someone that everyone keeps raving up the walls that i didn't know what i was doing i did fix the right flipper broken wire myself, with very little effort. I have also fixed various minor issues with the other 6 machines that i currently have in my garage without having to call any tech support.
I didn't call JJ tech support on christmas eve or christmas because 1) i assumed they were closed 2) I assumed i could fix the problems myself, i just figured it was a loose connection somewhere that i would eventually find, and the problems just started popping up that week everytime i turned the machine on. There was never once an instance that i went under the playfield, jiggled a wire, and then something else stopped working. That didn't happen.
If these issues were minor i wouldn't have swapped out the machine and lost over 1,000 dollars getting a Star Trek premium if i felt like these were issues that could be simply fixed with a tech visit. I honestly believe that machine either has a very serious electrical problem, some sort of power issue, or the computer itself that i never opened up wasn't working correctly.
I didn't even mention in the video every single issue i saw with the machine because i didn't want to make a 20 minute video... but there were many, MANY other issues. I have somewhere over the rainbow activate a few times and the playfield didn't go dark like it is suppose to, i had some other modes start that didn't work correctly, and the only reason i know this is because the machine actually did work for 2 hours at one point so i knew what it was SUPPOSE to be doing.
So again, its disappointing reading some of these posts from people that just assume i was down there wrecking the machine when i was trying to find loose connections. I did not break any piece of that machine, i was very careful with everything i did.
As far as there being 2 or 3 sides to the story, what reason would have to make this stuff up? Reviewzonehd's subscriber base is just a drop in ocean of youtube, my current main channel DCTC just broke 1 billion views this week and has a subscriber base of over 1 million people, and 1 or 2 million people hear me review toys on that channel everyday (the channel itself gets 5+ million views per day but there are other people that work on the channel). I'm not in the business of making stuff up or sharing BS stories with people, Jersey Jack called me pissed off before i even said one word because he just assumed that i broke the machine trying to fix it. I don't know if his tech fed him some bad info on what was going on or what the heck his problem was, but no that didn't go over well with me. I didn't like how he handled the situation, i didn't like the way he was speaking to me, and i had absolutely no patience for being blasted on the phone for a situation that wasn't my fault.
Wished you had purchased thru me, we were setting up Woz pins in South Carolina on New Year's Eve and even dropped a Stern off in Ft Mill SC. We often include in person delivery and set up within our service area, which covers a good part of the country when you can cover a 300 mile radius from Norton Va. It's only 202 miles to Charlotte NC. If we had known we could have looked at it also, we even have a repair shop we use that's been in business for over 35 years in downtown Bristold TN/VA. This is just one of the many waysler a distributor helpe, we are not here just to take money and trade ins. Sorry all this happened and no I was not the dealer who sold this pin.