Hello,

I am new to solid state pinball repair. I've brought a few EMs back to life but I am finding that SS is a different ballgame. I acquired a Jungle Lord about a year ago and one evening while the machine was on I heard a pop and came to find some smoke around the machine. The coil on the right side 3-bank drop target had burned.

To start the repair I replaced the coil and after turning the machine on found that the drop target would not reset. After reading some posts I came to the conclusion that I likely burned out a component on the board. Wanting to get my game back up and running I decided to install a Rottendog and deal with the board repair later, keeping the original board as a spare.

After powering up with the Rottendog in place, the right drop target still does not reset. The coil tests ok in terms of ohms and all of the fuses that I could find under the playfield and in the backbox are good. Everything else on the game is working fine.

So I'm reaching out to the experts to help point out my rookie mistakes. The old difference I see between the original coil and the replacement is that the diode is on the bottom on the original and on the top in the replacement. Could the diode direction be switched and I didn't realize it? If I wired the coil backwards and it has a diode could it cause the coil not to fire?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Thanks for the comments. I did not check for voltage. The coil would only get voltage for a moment when the targets try to reset right? The targets drop easily when touched so I don't think there is anything preventing motion. I'll reverse the wiring and report back.

Just wanted to update this thread with the resolution in the event that anyone encounters this problem in the future.

I invited Bill from the Pinball Gallery in Malvern PA to my home to diagnose the issue. As it turns out, my suspicion was correct about the backwards coil wiring. We switched the wires and the coil powered up. We did find however that it was now locked on. Bill suspected a board issue at this point (which I may have caused with my backwards wiring) so we replaced the Rottendog with the origional boards and all is fixed.