OP

Quoted from pinballinreno:

Time to look at the driver board.
After seeing the 8 amp fuse incorrectly placed.
Im very concerned about serious damage the the driver board.
Sure enough, both the ball release and the trough kicker MOSFETS (q27 and q29) have been badly hacked and worked on.
I think Im finally getting very close to the ball count problem.
The board is a mess.
I found a damaged trace on the outhole kicker MOSFET.
I added the jumper wire (with a little "wire wrap" wire) as the trace under it was cut 3/4 the way across and scored deeply. Possibly from the original repair guy trying to salvage his terrible work, or the next guy checking for problems, as I am doing.
There is no "easy" fix for the blown VIA's and overheating of the fiberglass.
Adding the jumper really stabilized the game issues when the game is totally warned up.
But it still didnt fix the ball count issues completely.
After seeing the over-fusing and damaged coils and the bad MOSFET board work, I suspect that the chips at U3 and U4 are heat damaged or compromised in some way.
You can only barely see from my photo, but the top metal edge of MOFET 27 is scarred from countless ground firing tests.
Also notable is that Q27 looks like it has been replaced a couple times (possibly searching for the problem my game has?), due to the way its been soldered on top of the existing pins of the prior "hack".
I have no complaint about this method, it has saved a ton of boards from being ruined by inexperienced board repair trechnicians.
The replacement? MOSFETS are identical the existing ones. Im confident that they are "pulls" from another board.
So, a bad hack job using sketchy unproven parts? Welcome to pin-repair, lol.
I have ordered and new driver board from Barakandl, it'll be here in a week.
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