Theatre of Magic
Bally, 1995I tried the obvious, first I replaced the bulb, and tried again, and again, and again. So I know it's not the bulb!
Next, I fiddled with the conntectors to the lighting board, and at the other end on the board in the head unit. Unplugged, plugged back in... nothing.
Oh, and its for TOM. Its the 2 lights in the playfield for 'Spirit Cards' and 'Midnight', the thing is, all the other lights on the same board work perfectly.
Help a noob? 
I'm not sure what you mean, there was a bulb in there that didn't light so I tried lots of other bulbs, known working bulbs. I haven't done anything to move the socket, it's attached to a board with other sockets on it, but THEY work.
My old Sega X Files didn't have boards under the playfield holding many of the sockets for playfield illumination... but TOM has lots.
And it seems that 1 or 2 on every board is out, it's definitely not just the bulb, I used my multimeter in the socket of a working light and received a decent reading, but when I use the multimeter in a socket of non-working light, I get it shows less than 10% of the working socket's reading.
It seems that pulling and pushing bulbs into some of those sockets on those boards might break something, but most of the connections still look decent. I was able to solder a single one to get it to work, because it was obviously dangling, but I still have 10 or so seemingly random bulbs on various lamp boards under the playfield just refusing to work. In addition, the 'special' lights on the outlanes and the 'Shoot Again' light behind the flippers all refuse to work too.
I'm at a loss, if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them.
The lights twist into a PCB. The light holders are plastic, and have metal contacts on them. Take a known working plastic socket with a working bulb and move it around. That way you can narrow down the problem. If a known working bulb holder and bulb fails in some parts of the PCB, then that at least gives us some information. The plastic holder has metal leads that contact the exposed traces on the PCB. You can check for wear on the PCB, but my guess is that the twist scockets themselves have worn or are tarnished.
Ohh! So you can just twist out those ones? I'll do that, and that will at least help me with the ones inset in the board. The others are mounted parallel to the board and I don't think they're removable.
I'll report back once I give it a shot, thanks for the tip!
Hope you have a nice soldering station. You're gonna need it in this hobby. Check for cracked soldering points on the pins, resolder if necessary.
I bought a $16 soldering gun today... is that good enough? I actually was able to fix 3 severed switches and a dangling light socket with it already.
Well, the twist out sockets only fixed 1 light, but that's 1 more lit than before!
Cracked soldering points on the pins huh? I'll take a look, but not exactly sure what that is supposed to look like...
I went cheap on the soldering iron at first too, strangely ToM was my first pin as well years ago. I highly recommend buying a nice one from somewhere like amazon. You'll know where the money went, those cheap ones just don't cut it. If it works for now though...
Just look closely for a hairline crack around the base of any of the pins. Or look for the solder to be grimey looking or dull. You'll want the solder to look shiny and new.
Dang... the pins on the lighting boards look really good. I checked closely and there are no cracks, plus they look like the shiniest things on the whole pin...
Is there something I can do with my multimeter to see if the proper power is coming through the wires? I tried to look in the manual but had trouble identifying which wire powers which lamp.
Quoted from robbiedoo:So, I discovered the individual light test, and this chart. I highlighted the dark bulbs... notice a pattern? There was a severed wire below the playfield. Others were bulbs... all lit up now!
Edit: 2 severed wires, actually!
Awesome science!
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