question: anyone know if replacement parts are being stocked locally? Just curious what opening tickets for hardware turnaround is?

Is it possible to post a picture of the plastic parts you speak of? If need be I could possibly print them…

No, it's just a suggestion, HW-ALIEN is different to the needed spare in PB-ALIEN.

Thanks Brado

Looks to me like the mech is dragging on the vertical post on the left that it slides up and down on - when it works or you were raising it by hand the screeching sound is the metal on metal as the airlock drags on the post. And as you say with the weight of the ball it's twisting the mech and I believe it's actually snags on the post that is stopping it from moving.

It'd be interesting to see how much play there is on someone else's airlock mech and also whether they get as much screeching sound when the mech opens & closes (the screeching is a result of the drag/friction on the post)

Alien - Airlock (resized).JPG

Yes.... the hard part of fixing this is no frame of reference for how it is supposed to be.

The good news is my first experience with Pinball Brothers tech support is super positive. They're offering to do a Skype call and seem totally comitted to fixing the problem. Will keep you posted.

CT got back to me today. My game was not on the floor (#32). Now, where is that next container?

GREAT NEWS!!!!!!!!!!! I am back in now. On the list for a LV. If it's really only a few items then the regular one is fine. If someone were to buy today , anyone know the time frame?? we talking 3-6 months??

Awesome update and nice shrine for all things Aliens.

wow 24 hours .... wonder how fast Stern would be to reply ?

They nearly sent me another. Must not have taken my name out of the system when I picked it up and another was nearly shipped to me. Got a FedEx delivery email and had to hurry and call them to cancel. Thought for a moment CT was doing a BOGO sale. haha.

Nice Alien corner!!

I know you bought some mods awhile back , remind us what they are and get to work bro putting them in. It's been 24 hrs now...lol

Now that you have it and you upgraded the glass, anything else come to mind?

I remember now ONE thng...it was a hatched egg for the pop up bumper. or did you not buy it....been like 6 months..HAA

To be fair, PB has 2 dozen games to support, Stern likely has tens of thousands.

Here we go....

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I removed the hypersleep lock and put it back in and it seems to be working now. But it seems the real problem is that I have a defective BALL LOCK 1 opto. All the other optos are working fine, but I disassembled the optos to ensure that it wasn't an alignment issue and no matter what, they won't register. PB is sending me replacement optos.

Where is this located in the game?

Which is why you hire and train more people to handle the volume of games you sell and need to support. That isn't a valid excuse IMO.

They're inside the perimeter...

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you bastards with your TWO aliens...

True but 1 or 10 thousand! Customer Service for big dollar items should foremost ... with Sterns revenue stream they should be able to reply in a faster manner than most., as opposed to we are not taking any calls because of Covid! Owned Spooky and AP games and they blow the doors off most for quick game questions or tech help !
Giving PB the same positive as they are located over seas..... Good on them and wish them lots of success !

Edited

Decided I don't care.

FYI, when I first got my Alice Cooper pin, I changed out the stock balls with the Pinball Life ones and after a time I started having this intermittent problem with balls not setting down in the trough. Turned out to be magnetized balls. There had been a defective batch at that time, and I got a bad set. Changed them out and never had another problem.

FWIW I went in on a box of 100 of those with a couple people, they don’t work in my TOM , trough problems, the ones I took out work fine. Similar probs in my TAF, I Tried a couple sets, I think they get magnetized as soon as they touch a magnet. I won’t buy them again.

Definitely sounds like the balls had become magnetised (I've seen this sort of behaviour in other games). Ball Baron state that "if a machine has aggressive magnet usage, there is still a small chance the ball may become magnetized over time", however given it's only been a couple of days it does sound like the batch you received are quite susceptible to becoming magnetised.

Suppose to get my game delivered tomorrow!! Hell yeah!! Can’t wait.

I have no idea as I haven’t received mine yet but those are the nicest ramps I’ve ever seen in a pinball game. Damn they are sexy

As for the lock, keep us posted as I’m sure others might have a similar issue

I had the same issue with my first OG alien and the trough and it was due to be changing the balls out for shiny ones. Once I put the original balls back in, no trough issues. I never tried to figure out why….. but not surprised to hear it’s happening with PB version

In hypersleep until unboxing tomorrow evening

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I'm not going to touch my balls tomorrow

I'm waiting til my buddy comes over so we can film it

Avarell might be able to weigh in on this one. Are European balls heavier than American balls?

Meanwhile Avarell:

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According to Ball Baron chrome balls weigh 2.8 oz (80 grams) while carbon balls weigh 2.9 oz (81 grams) - both have a diameter of 1-1/16″.

Interestingly their website also states "All carbon ball are made outside the USA. The US manufacturers all contract with foreign sources to make carbon steel balls for the secondary market as they cannot be used for high stress, low friction or low noise mechanical applications."

Does the game have normal trough switches or are they magnetic?

Also curious for OG ppl what balls they replace with eventually? R&M is my only game with a magnet and I know there were certain balls you could use, and certain ones you couldn't.

Did you check this grey plastic opto support ?
As said earlier i had a hair-thin uncut plastic wire across the optos beam hole.
Your issue reminds me mine, and we found out that if you move the ball in the really center of the front edge of the chamber (V shaped spot) then the opts was detecting the ball by generally when playing the ball used to lay on the left instead of being perfectly centered.

Yeah mine must have been magnetized. Solution is not to change the balls it comes with

Cato (he is a super cool and nice guy) told me about the possibility of the optos not lining up and even the possibility of needing to make the opto holes in the ball lock mechanism 1 mm bigger. But that's not the issue in my case... I disassembled the optos down to the bare PCBs and pointed them at each other and get nothing. So PB sent me replacement opto PCBs. They shipped today and should be here on June 30th, which is awesome! I thought it would take a couple weeks. For now, I stuck a paper towel up in the ball lock ramp to prevent the ball from going in there and the game is STILL fun as hell to play!

Great, and nice to see you're taking this positively !
... and yeah, Cato is a really damn great guy

Got mine set up yesterday. Arrived with no issues from shipping.
After opening it I found that the legs were just sorta lying on top of the front of the cabinet in the box, not secured to anything, which doesn't seem like a good idea. The legs were individually wrapped, but after taking them out of the wrap, they all had major gashes in them. They don't even seem to have a finish or anything either, just raw metal. Probably the worst looking legs I've ever seen on a pinball machine.
Rest of the game looked good, got it set up.
There's no holes for head bolts of any type, just a WPC style latch on the back, which is concerning.
Left speaker makes a buzzing sound at certain frequencies, other two speakers sound great.
The back box lock location is really ugly, not sure why they couldn't just put it on top like a normal machine. Translite doesn't have lift trim, and is really hard to get out.
Lockdown bar uses clasps like Sterns, which is nice, however these aren't designed well. They hit the playfield support rests when the playfield is down, so you can't easily lock the lockdown bar down without forcibly bending them past and lifting the playfield up slightly. The lockdown bar also doesn't actually seem to hold the playfield down (sort of its main job!). Instead, there's two little thumb screws to anchor the playfield into the cabinet. Seems fine to keep those out besides when moving the game, but I'm sure I'll forget them or lose them at some point.
The flipper cap switches were really sensitive at first. I looked at them and found that the blade wasn't touching the tensioner, just floating there. Once I adjusted it to have some pressure they worked good. But they're not dual stacked! No way to stage the upper flippers, which is a major downer. My Alice Cooper was the same way. I don't understand how manufacturers think this is acceptable.
Tilt bob had fallen off during shipment and was rolling around the back of the cab. It's not a standard tilt bob. It's only about half the diameter, and is threaded so you adjust the height by spinning the whole bob. No set screw or anything that I could find so I'm sure it'll vibrate back off again. Why did they reinvent the tilt bob?
On first boot, the main screen went black once it got to attract mode. Rebooting fixed the issue. Seems to happen maybe 1/5 times I turn the game on. Other than that, I was able to start and play a game fine.
Also, on every boot, the xeno does a calibration test, but the tongue goes super slow, while making a loud grinding sound. Seems to work fine in game though, not sure what the issue is.
My left spinner got stuck the first time I hit it. Turns out it was misadjusted from the factory, microswitch needed to be tilted down more as the leaf was hitting it and preventing the spinner from making a full rotation. Not hard to fix, except: all the screws are gd torx bits! Not only that, they're not magnetic! I don't even know how you manage to find non-magnetic screws.... What should have been a 10 second job instead involved multiple rounds of dropping screws into the machine, fishing them back out again, etc.
While playing I noticed that the flippers were occasionally sticking. After investigating, I found that the flipper cranks were installed too low on the flipper bat shafts, so they were dragging slightly on the coil sleeves when the playfield was down. I needed to move them all up a bit to fix it. However, now the cranks are almost dragging on the bushings instead. There's just a hair's width clearance where it still works. I assume some tolerances are off on their flipper mechs, since they decided to for some reason manually redesign the williams flipper mechs rather than just use regular ones. Stupid.
I also found out that pop bumpers have the same problem as the cab switches with the tensioners. I adjusted the switch so the lower blade presses against the spoon, and then pushed the upper blade down close to it with the tensioner, and now the pops have much better action.
Left eject hole is super messy. The ball goes all over the place once it's kicked out. Someone posted a fix in a thread earlier, will have to track it down. Again, the mech is not well designed. Not sure why they couldn't just use a standard eject mechanism.
After that, was able to get some games in fine. Playfield looks amazing, although it's already showing a few dimples. No pooling or planking like my sterns have had. Standup switches have all been working ok so far, although I wish I could up the sensitivity of the one at the back of the lane going into the pops, since that's such a hard shot to hit to begin with. Wish there was a one way gate there or something so balls couldn't miss the target and go into the pops when you make the shot. I may try to mod one in, or replace that standup with a normal once since it's not lit.
Flippers feel a bit weak, even at max strength. Seems to be a common issue with smaller manufacturers besides Stern/CCG.
The whole game is a bit laggy too. Not sure if the original was like that. There's often a noticeable delay between hitting a standup target and hearing the sound effect play.
I also found that the trough eject coil was coming loose. One of the two screws was missing completely, and the other was loose+stripped. They seem to also be metric. I'll have to stock up on metric screws next time I'm at the hardware store.
In attract mode, every time it displays the PB logo, it makes a really annoying loud sound. No option to turn off attract mode sounds that I can find
Ran into a few software issues. One time I got a tilt warning right as I activated the revive in the outlane, and then the game seemed to get confused, and didn't give me my ball back or end the ball. A few other times the revive didn't give me my ball back and the ball just ended. Occasionally it launches a second ball after I plunge, but I can just drain it and the game continues on okay. No issues with the game crashing or anything though like other people have reported, so those seem like simple issues that can be fixed in software.
My one big concern so far: one time, I drained my ball, and the ball didn't end. I checked the trough, but all the balls were in their proper positions, and the status leds showed that the optos were all working properly. I went into switch test, and pretty much all the switches on the lower half of my playfield had stopped working. Tried wiggling cables on the boards under the playfield, etc, but nothing helped, so I was forced to reboot it. Hopefully this is just a bug in the firmware or something and not a sign of more connector issues down the road.

Of all the reports, this is the first one that has me going...we just got our asses kicked..in a bad way. Lots to digest here.

It probably sounds like a lot from that, but most of those things are so small that I'm sure many people would never notice them. Really wish they hadn't felt the need to reinvent the wheel on so much, but they mostly just ripped off standard parts. If these flipper mechs prove to be an issue, I can just buy some real williams mechs and install them. Same with the trough, etc. Not something that we as owners should need to do, but not something that can't be fixed. Same with the non-magnetic torx screws. I'm just gonna buy a big box of hex head magnetic wood screws at home depot and start swapping them out whenever I run into them. For all those issues though, the game *does* play pretty good. I've finally got an Alien! Time will tell whether they fix the issues with the code and whether the boards are reliable.