Hey guys, I am new to EMs.. Just picked up my first one a few days ago.. (Sky Jump) and am loving it. My plans are to restore entire machine eventually. Anyway, my wife and I have been having a real blast playing this EM. Made my first order with Pinball Resource; manual, schematics, bulbs etc.. to get me started.

Anyway, today I decided to check all the scoring mechs to make sure the game was scoring properly. The first thing I noticed was that when any target or drop target was trying to put 500 points on the board, sometimes the 100s reel would only give 400 or 300 or 600 etc.. i could literally watch the reel get hung up a bit. So I pulled the reel out and cleaned all the contacts, ( same issue ) with the reel out I could watch the reel actually hang up when trying to put 500 pts up. I noticed the solenoid looked like this in the picture. Do you think this may be a bad Noid and I should replace it? I also watched the score mech in the cabinet and it looks like those switches are actuating fine and giving me 5 clicks for 500 pts.

In addition I looked at all the other reels and the solenoids look normal to me.. So what do you guys think..? Thanks fort any help you can throw my way..

ps.. I can post a video if you want to see it in action hanging up..

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thanks for the responses.. yes I clicked the solenoid and it seems to be clicking fine manually. It does not hang up or show any issues when I click it with my finger. my next test will be to put a meter too it to see if it is getting the correct 2.0 ohms across the contacts, as fredsmythson said. I am tempted to just change it out anyway since this is the only one that looks like this and it seems to be the only one giving me trouble. I haven't received my schematics yet from PBR but when looking at the relay down in the cabinet that fires the score reel solenoid, it seems to be doing its job and not hanging up to the naked eye.

here is a video of the solenoid in action..

go to settings and slow the video down to about half speed and it really becomes very clear that sometimes it fires all 5 perfectly for 500 points and sometimes the noid hangs up and doesn't fire all the way down each time.

it never hangs up when the game resets or when just advancing one position. It only happens during the 500 point scoring. I ordered a new solenoid just for the hell of it since i dont like the way this one looks anyway. But you are correct that the plunger is not returning to its normal rested position and seems to stay up when advancing 5 times.

Hi, Ok I removed the coil in question. but my question is , I had a really hard time removing the nut at the top of the coil that is attached to the back plate. the issue is that as I would try to loosen the nut, the threaded shaft would turn as well, and there was really no room to try and hold the threaded part without mangling the thing. is there a way to remove this nut more easily without the threaded shaft spinning?

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thanks. I think I got the problem fixed. I replaced the coil, sleeve and plunger, however my problem still was there, so i started to do some more troubleshooting and i found that the hundreds point relay that drives the coil needed to be cleaned, because when i watched the plunger studder i could also see the relay doing the same thing. So I cleaned it all up and it seems to have fixed the issue. thanks.

ps, im glad I replaced that coil anyway. the old one looked pretty bad.. probably would have lasted a long time but hey.. no biggie.

these machines are built like tanks..

Thank you for all that great wisdom and info. I will definitely refer back to this when i need to do more more on the reels. Hopefully latter than sooner as I am just tackling a few other issues and learning along the way.