OP

Quoted from PantherCityPins:

So today was an exciting day and a little frustrating day but overall I think significant progress was made. Here is the recap:
The pinball tech in our area came over to the house today and spent three hours with Whirlwind. Here is the good and the bad:
The Good:
1. After much work he got it to boot. With the stock game ROMs in the machine it would not go into diagnostic mode at all. He checked multiple areas and felt the ROMs may be bad. We swapped out the ROMs with my Pinbot ROMs and got the board into diagnostic mode. It threw out two codes, 4 and 5 flashes. That meant U38 and U41 had issues. He swapped out both chips and we got the board to boot. After replacing the Whirlwind ROMs in the board it booted into attract mode. So, it does not look like I need a new MPU which is great news.
2. The lights and such seem to work as do the coils.
3. Music works.
The bad:
1. Sound does not work. Tech thinks it is a bad RAM chip on the sound area of the board. He tried reflowing the solder but still no sound. I will need to get a socket and solder that in there. I have a RAM chip from a prior machine that got NVRAM that he said I could plug into the socket and see if that fixes the sound.
2. Multiple switches don't work. Some are on the same wire string, some are elsewhere. Need to trace all that stuff out and see if there are broken wires or bad solder joints somewhere.
3. The AC relay on the Aux power driver board seems to be bad. I will have to order another relay and replace it.
4. The fan spins but rattles like all hell. Will have to sort out what is up with that.
5. I missed some of the incandescents on the machine so will have to make another order with Comet. No biggie.
6. I played a few test games, the left flipper seems weak. It has a new coil sleeve in it so I'm not sure what the problem is there.
Overall I was a little disappointed we weren't able to get it fully up and running today but significant progress was made.
A few questions:
Should I replace the relay on the MPU at the same time as the other relay? It seems to be working, just not sure if it is worth it to do so.
The left flipper seems weak, I was under the impression that coils don't get "weak" they either work or they don't. That coil already has a new sleeve in it, should I replace the coil?
Thanks!

OP

Quoted from PantherCityPins:

Yeah I was thinking of ordering the flipper rebuild kit. I'll check the voltage at the coil this weekend.
Overall I'm still very happy with the progress, I was surprised that there were so many components on the board that were bad. The PO told me the game was booting when he got it and it stopped booting after he "cleaned" it. I don't know what you do to a machine while cleaning it that causes 3 separate components to go bad on a board... Unless he saw some magic smoke and didn't tell me, maybe that's why it was so cheap lol.
At any rate, as you said I have plenty of room in the budget here, even with the current parts and paying Evan I'm still < $1500 in the machine.