A capacitor blew under my playfield, and although the machine did not catch on fire, it made a pretty good burn hole on the underside. This made me wonder if anybody has experienced a pinball spontaneously catching fire. I personally will never leave my machines on while unattended again.
I have not had it happen to my machines, but i have seen some customer machines that had some nasty fire damage inside them.
The varistor on my Black Knight randomly caught fire one day during a tournament. In the end there wasn't much damage beyond a blackened area on the board, but there was smoke billowing out of the holes in the back box, you could picture the entire board set being on fire
Only once, but I was prepared for it. I was powering up my T2 project for the first time, and the only thing that wasn't tested was the sound board. As far as I was aware, it had not been powered up in several years. And on that sound board, those tantalum caps sometimes blow on power up. And of course, on power up, a couple of them exploded and caught fire, but since I was ready to flip the game off in case that happened, it was only on for a couple seconds. I turned off the game, replaced the caps, and all was well.
Mr first Fireball almost turned into one when a coil locked on. There was a lot of smoke.
It is good to make sure all your games are using the correct fuses in every location, but sometimes that is not enough.
The worst design is the System 6 to 11 bridge rectifiers that were never fused from the factory. This is a true fire hazard particularly for games on 24/7. How this could be overlooked by the designers for so many years is really baffling. We always fuse the rectifiers on any game being worked on .
I never heard of a fire in a pinball machine. Hyperball with all the black on the playfield and plastic top, can warp in sunlight.
Namco had a huge sit down video game with a fresnal screen. The screen acted like a magnifying glass and could light the game on fire if the game was in direct sunlight.
LTG : )
Quoted from LTG:Namco had a huge sit down video game with a fresnal screen. The screen acted like a magnifying glass and could light the game on fire if the game was in direct sunlight.
LTG : )
Wow! Crazy.
Yes.
I was picking up a Williams EM from a guy and while there checking out his other pins the EM caught fire from a stepper advance coil being locked on.
We were across the room and like "whats that smell?"
Quoted from Bryan_Kelly:[quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
Embers Ave in the background? Appropriate street name for the thread. I think I see my old house as well.
Quoted from gdonovan:Yes.
I was picking up a Williams EM from a guy and while there checking out his other pins the EM caught fire from a stepper advance coil being locked on.
We were across the room and like "whats that smell?"
I always feel it's risky business leaving EMs on location now, even though they were on all day back in the day. Toasty old coil wrappers don't help. Perhaps underfusing them or adding fuses might be the answer.
Quoted from LTG:I never heard of a fire in a pinball machine. Hyperball with all the black on the playfield and plastic top, can warp in sunlight.
Namco had a huge sit down video game with a fresnal screen. The screen acted like a magnifying glass and could light the game on fire if the game was in direct sunlight.
LTG : )
That was Starblade. But it wasn't a fresnal lens that was the fire hazard, it was the huge concave mirror in the front of the cabinet (The monitor was over your head and was a backwards image).
starblade (resized).jpgQuoted from girloveswaffles:That was Starblade. But it wasn't a fresnal lens that was the fire hazard, it was the huge concave mirror in the front of the cabinet (The monitor was over your head and was a backwards image).
Thank you !
LTG : )
Never seen a pinball catch fire. However we had a clean sweep crane with a big ass ceramic resistor that burnt the inside of the cabinet, I don't think it was in flames but it was smoldering enough for smoke to be pouring out the door. Luckily the gas station it was at noticed and unplugged it. Another time a great big bleeder resistor melted off of an old WG monitor and dripped all over the manuals inside the game. Luckily that was in a pool room and everything was so wet that nothing happened.
I had an interesting experience with a DE JP. The stock power supply HV section wasn’t working. Put in a repro PS and it went up in smoke after a few minutes. Turns out the sound card didn’t like the repro board. Was able to get it all sorted out eventually, but that was the only fire I felt semi-responsible for. Just glad I had the backboard open to recognize it as soon as it happened.
Quoted from Pin_Guy:[quoted image]
great post/poster avatar synergy!
WARNING! Pictures in this thread are NOT for the faint of heart.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/star-trek-tng-the-mother-of-all-restorations
I’ve been collecting pins and arcade games for almost 25 years. Never had to ever use it but I keep a halotron fire extinguisher in the game room under one of my machines just in case.
From what I was told this type of extinguisher doesn’t leave a lot of residue /contaminate whatever you use it on like other types of extinguishers.
If anyone reading this doesn’t have a extinguisher in the garage ,under the kitchen sink and another in their bedroom closet I highly recommend picking a few up. Also good to put a small one in your car /truck.
C8A57AE2-701F-4AA0-BAC6-2D5025F12FF1 (resized).jpegebay.com link: 3AG Omni Block 12 position 1 4 QC Terminal for 1 1 4 x 1 4 Littelfuse 354812GY
enough fuse holders to fuse the bridge rectifiers of 6 games for $10.00 shipped.
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