Hi guys, I am having a little trouble with my lower racetrack magnet. First of all, the magnet works perfectly if the ball is traveling quickly around the track. It will do laps forever if the ball has momentum. But, if the ball is just leaving pit lane or the ball has jumped onto the track and has little speed, the lower magnet often fails to "slingshot" the ball around the track. I have done the track diagnosis and everything seems to be working fine there, but that is at full speed and I have not had any trouble with that before. I am planning on checking all wiring and opto's in that area in the next day or so, but I wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this game and the magnets. I am wondering if anyone knows exactly how this mechanism works? Also, how often do these magnet need to be replaced, and if they do, how can you tell? I almost seems like maybe the magnet is not on long enough to fire a slow ball properly. Is there any adjustment for something like this? Anyway, please let me know if you have any thoughts on this. Thanks!

BTW, the game does a pretty good job of giving a "shoot again" when this happens, but I lose one of my multi-balls every time. It cannot seem to detect the failure during multiball.

OK, I think I'll be taking it apart tonight anyway. Just by looking at it from above, it looks like there might be 2 opto's per magnet. I cannot figure out exactly how these magnet do their thing ....not sure how they actually propel the ball. Obviously the first opto must energize the magnet, but if there are 2, not sure what the second one does, unless it simply turns it off.

hmmm, I haven't had it apart far enough to know what you are referring to, but I will take a look for an alignment issue when i get it apart. Thanks!

Also, I should mention that when it fails, it doesn't even have any momentum. It's not like it goes halfway around, it just slowly falls into the drain.

One more thing I should mention is that when it's going slow and it DOESN'T fail, it seems to stall a little on that magnet, then zings quickly up the the next one, then goes naturally after that.

yeah, I heard about that....how sad.

OK, so I got the glass off and I am doing some testing here. So I fired up the track diagnostic test and I slowly put some balls through. I entered the balls directly at the first opto, much slower than they would ever be in real play. It had not problems for the first 20 or so balls. The switches showed goods and the magnet was working. Then all the sudden the magnet just went dead. The switches still showed to be working, just no "zoom-zoom". Then safter a few dead passes, it just started working again. Then it went dead again after some more passes. So at this point I think I can safely say the opto's are OK. I will start looking for a loose connection under the play field. Any other Ideas would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Ok, I will give that a try. I didn't see any loose wire while I was under there. There are actually two magnets and three optos and two driver boards under there. Is it safe to assume the problem lies on the high voltage side of the boards? I am thinking this because the opto's themselves seem to function perfectly. Maybe they are not getting the signal to power the magnets.

OK, I tried just re-seating the plugs, but it is still failing. I will try to re-flow the opto's, but there are a LOT of joints on all three of those PCB! Again, when the magnets fail, the opto's still seem to be firing properly.

I just wanted to let you guys know that I think I got this problem fixed. First, I will try to explain what I found in the process in case anyone else runs into this problem. So there are 2 magnets and three opto's in the lower track. It took me a while to figure out how this works, but I seems to go like this:

The first opto is positioned a couple inches before the first magnet, the second opto is directly in front of the first magnet, and the last opto is in between the 2 magnets. So the third opto triggers the last magnet and it seems to be pretty direct, meaning if I trip that opto, the magnet fires every time. The first magnet is a little trickier for some reason. If I trip the second opto by its self, this magnet will not fire. If I trigger the first opto it will not fire either. The first opto has to be trigger within a certain time of the second for this magnet to fire.

So, come to find out, DavidC was correct about the guide....thanks for that! The other night I had looked at every other guide but the bad one. The one that was out of whack was the one before the first magnet. What appeared to be happening was that the ball would sometimes slightly hang on that guide which would not allow the above time conditions to be met...that is also why is was so intermittent. So I re-aligned the guide and all is working well now, it sounds much smoother now as well! Thanks again to everybody here especially DavidC