I'm sorry to hear that but you are probably making the right call as this particular machine is likely overpriced.

$2900 for a color DMD and a playfield swap is a lot of money, and seems a little high to me but may be about right ... the parts are $1300 thats a known amount, the labor is going to vary, but IMO its roughly double what it should be. for $1600 you are paying someone that knows exactly what they are doing $100/hr as this should be no more than a 2 day job; if they are unfamiliar with the machine, it may take them 4 days to do it so $50/hr.

In reality though, if you dropped of a machine with me and provided all the parts, I would charge you $1000 for the job since it would take up my whole weekend and I would have to work 12 days in a row ...

Color DMD $400
https://shop.colordmd.com/colordmd-replacement-display-for-star-trek-the-next-generation-pinball-machine/

New Playfield $1,200
https://mircoplayfields.com/en/p/star-trek-tng-mirco-playfield

At least from these sources.

So they’d be doing the playfield swap with $900 towards labor for a job that they assumed to be 1 man week with normal hours (no overtime) to a level they would be comfortable warranting for 90 days.

And their support actually would include sending a local(ish) repair person to my house if we couldn’t handle it over the phone. I asked. If I was open to throwing $500 more towards labor they would have considered it. But that was a hard sell for me since I was feeling it was overpriced for the current condition.

I have no hard feelings about it. It was the right call for me to pass.

So who here wants to sell me theirs?

This was a good call. $9500 for a used game, even one as good as STTNG - is just nuts. You can spend 2 months learning most of the basics you need to know, and save yourself $5,000. Buy a brand new game (try Oktoberfest!) for $7k and you won't have issues for a long long time. STTNG is packed, no question about that - but more recent JJP and AP games are just as feature-packed. No, they aren't Star Trek. But still.

For $9500 I'd be temped to sell you mine and would provide free lifetime support.

I think you just went the wrong route. From my experience, 9.5/10 collectors are beyond honest, and most are more than willing to help you after purchase if you need some specific help. I've only been semi-burned once, and I should have known better. Businesses are the worst to buy from as they must make a profit.

You have the benefit of having reviews and opinions on pinside sellers, so find a game in good condition from a reputable seller and buy it. It's really that easy. Buying local is pretty close to the same. Ask around. Get to know the collectors around you. Again, pinball people are almost all awesome and really enjoy the transaction process. Who else wants to listen to you in the flesh talk about your passion for a game with crazy sewers and opto controls? If you think it will just be 20 minutes to pick up a game, think again! Good times.

Where do you live? Maybe there’d be some local pinhead willing to help. STTNG is a really great game, but you made the right choice. For that price you could have a NIB machine, and a high end one at that. Still though, my STTNG gets way more play than my WOZ. More than my TZ, although it’s always my first love. STTNG is one of the top games I’ve ever owned.

This is the second STTNG I’ve owned. The first one I painstakingly refurbished for my brother in-law and gave it to him as a present (when pinball was still affordable). He kept it for years, but then got mixed up with drugs. As best I know, he sold it and a Roadshow that I let him borrow. Never saw the machines again or him and my sister. I’m not bitter, as his machine gave me the opportunity to learn how awesome a machine it is. Still to this day it’s my wife’s favorite.

Don’t do heroin. Stick to the lesser evils, ha ha. Funny, kinda.

Whoah. That’s quite a burn. Mad respect that you can manage to not be bitter about it.

I’m in NC. I see one in the market place in SC. I might ask about it and maybe do a road trip.

I have zero local friends in the hobby and have only lived here for a couple of months so I’m not in or familiar with any of the groups or anything like that.

Been to a few local barcades, but not when the owners are around.

But I should do a new topic for that rather than hijack this thread anymore.

Well this thread is a bit of an open forum, unless someone complains, ha ha. If you were closer I’d offer up help, but I’m in KY. Still though, this group is always willing to help when we can. I’ve done so much work to my STTNG, I think I have all of the bugs worked out. Maybe.

Family. They were just that, so I let it go. Hard to watch people so close to you degrade. They were making well over $250k a year, business owners, one was a lawyer. The higher they rise, the harder they fall. Sad stuff. Heroin is no joke. Makes me scared for my own kids...

Check Facebook for a local sellers group. There are general groups on there that are good too. Spend less time stressing about quality and more time finding quality people. I've also learned to avoid nit picking pins. A little wear is always there... I've only turned down a couple buys. Most I just play a couple games, look it over and take it home. I always find a few minor issues, but I don't care.

$9500 is less than what HEP wanted for his base STTNG plus restoration services that he's working on right now. Now that might be worth it

Forgive my ignorance.

HEP?

GLM has great products, though they were having fulfillment issues earlier this year so I'd check to make sure whatever you want is in stock first.

And yes, HEP is the top-end of pin restoration in my opinion. If I had the money, I'd have at least one!

Here's a STTNG he did: http://christopherhutchins.com/gallery/album435

Holy crap. That would literally buy you the most perfect machine in existence. And he wanted LESS.

HEP is #1 in restoration services for sure ... but I still feel mine is done better

Did some sound board work tonight. I replaced the two large caps (C20 and C21), and because it was already out of the machine, I also replace C32 and C41.

Now for the fun part. I have an external sub hooked up to my machine but found the bass to still be a bit lacking. So, I removed R39 from the board and made a small rig to let me adjust the bass. I put a 4.7K resistor inline with a 10K potentiometer, in a small wire harness, covering all exposed stuff with heat shrink tubing. Even if the pot gets set to 0 ohms, there’s at least 4.7K inline in the circuit. Admittedly I’ll never set the pot to 0 ohms, but I do have more bass control now. Yeah, it’s a bit of a hack. But I never intend to sell this machine, so I don’t care. Things rattle in the room now when I play the machine. I’m loving it!

And everyone was right about the Hakko 808. I got my parts for it today and used it. OMG I didn’t know what I was missing. The smaller caps and resistor literally fell out of the board. The snap caps were a different story, of course...

9AEC3880-46C3-4AF5-BC8F-5B8315346B0B (resized).jpeg

Is there any pics posted of your finished machine @pin_guy? I know there are many you have shared during your tear down and rebuild. Would love some Ideas/Inspiration from your machine

there are several posted throughout this forum...you can search out posts by me ... if there is anything specific you are looking for let me know.

Those boards were great, I have a set in my Judge Dredd, but sadly I am pretty sure they’re out of business.

Has anyone 100% solved the random multi ball problem?

Mine spits out an extra ball on the playfield every 50 games or so. I got to thinking, maybe it’s because a ball rolled backward in the ball trough, past an opto, the reversed course and flagged the opto again.

Just wondering if the above is possible, or maybe there’s still something elusive wrong with my machine.

Remove all the balls, put your game in switch edge test and wiggle the opto boards wiring to see if one drops out.

I did solve my rando ball problem. As pin-guy suggested.
Mine turned out to be the IDC connector's "teeth" no longer gripping the power wires going to the LED board. I replaced it with a proper crimped on version and no more problems.

Pinless … I ordered some 4Mbit eeproms from a China "pull" vendor … just so I had some on hand.
I'm assuming you're good... or you got a prom from PinGuy. If not; let me know.

I was able to locate one, thanks! It still didn’t resolve my “5 tones after the bong” issue though.

After I finally get all of the issues resolved with this pin the only part left untouched may be the coin door.

My new cabinet should be here in a couple weeks. Trying to figure out what I should do with the original cabinet that needs some repair work.

Over the past few days I’ve been rebuilding the 16 opto board, replaced all headers and removed / replaced the solder on the large resistors.

Today I put the board back in, reconnected everything and powered up the machine. All seemed good until I closed the coin door. The machine rebooted. I wasn’t the slam tilt switch, as it doesn’t work. Then I noticed that F105 was blown - no high power to the solenoids. So, I replaced F105 and it blows the instant I close the coin door.

I looked around the opto board to see if I shorted something and there’s nothing obvious. The driver board tie-back is still in place.

I’m venting as much as anything. The rebooting thing is odd. It seems like it has to be a dead short?

Check for pinched wires or something.

Without having any idea of your soldering skills, I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume its perfect.

I'm wavering a little here as it doesn't matter if your slam tilt switches (SW21) work or not for a matrix issue effecting row 1 to cause a slam tilt when closing the coin door (SW22). The giveaway here is if diagonal lines appear across the display and the work perfomed on your board could cause this if you have a solder bridge between row 1 and 2. Should be easy to rule out.

This is irrelevant as F105 is for your high power solenoids:

pasted_image (resized).png

If you disconnect J130 and still blow a fuse, you know you have a coil shorted to ground and its going to be Sol 1-8 ... should be easy to find.

Thanks for the help. I’m confident in my soldering skills. I’ve been fixing machines for over 20 years, and it took a good few of them to learn. I ruined a handful of boards in the beginning and since then have figured out how to do things correctly. Unfortunately, whoever had the game before me did their share of damage. There were a few questionable repairs on the opto board, but I toned them out and everything seems ok. I actually had the board in the machine yesterday with the new headers and everything was working fine. But I saw how bad the solder joints were on the resistors and it was bothering me so I pulled the board again today to clean it up.

The reset was definitely a hard reset. There were no diagonal lines on the dmd nor the annoying buzz sound. It seems like it has to be unrelated to F105, but it’s an odd coincidence. And I recently replaced the bridge, caps, 5V regulator (with an EZSBC) and the 5V headers. Needless to say I’m on a mission to stabilize the game.

I’ll check for a short tonight. I’m down the (1) 3 amp sb fuse. Seems like they are hard to source locally. On that note, even the ones I have seem shorter than the originals and fit looser than I want. What is the right size fuse and who carries them?

Hopefully I can find the short after the kids go to bed. They suck up most of my free time, leaving little for pinball anymore.

2D51E758-7106-4253-9472-E53433B573DE (resized).jpeg

AD9CFAA9-28B8-4044-B129-3E34C6DE2351 (resized).jpeg

And yeah, I see that the 8 driver board is unrelated to this. I should do my research before posting.

The oddities continue. I pulled J130 and stole the fuse from F101 since it’s not used, made sure it was 3asb and fired up the machine. The fuse didn’t blow. So I plugged in J130 and it still didn’t blow. And everything works. Lovely, I may have an intermittent issue.

When I bought the game it did odd stuff, resetting mid game, scrambled dmd, etc. I still haven’t pulled the CPU as I’m waiting on nvram to arrive on a slow boat from China. Once it gets here I’ll pull that board, replace the critical headers and fix any questionable solder joints.

Next will be to replace a bazillion connectors.

The machine truly is a labor of love. One can only hope I’ll get 5 or 10 good years of stability from mine once done. All optos replaced, mechanically rebuilt, driver board rebuilt, sound board caps replaced and a bass adjuster mod added. But it is a STTNG, so who knows. But mine plays like one mean machine. I’m loving it!

Worth noting - the other 3 amp sb fuses I had were the cheap ones, a single wire with a blob of metal in the middle. Maybe they are just inferior?

My 16-opto board had the tiniest of shorts that took many tries to sort out. I didn’t do the work myself but pinball_ric or Sprout would have more insight on what was shorted and how they fixed it.

I have quite a few cheap pulls that work fine, bought extra at the time and would have happily sent you one but I'm not sure I have spare sockets.

Thanks, I really appreciate the offer! I bought 10 cheap ones from China, I assume they’ll be pulls. They should be here hopefully in the next few days. I ordered them a few weeks ago. I bought 10 sockets too, so I’m set up to do 10 games if all of the pulls work. But thanks for the gracious offer.

I redid half of the opto board connectors tonight. I guess 18 pins is enough for an evening. I’ll try and knock out the other two connectors tomorrow. I think I’ll leave the .156” connector alone since Williams opted to put 2 wires in a few of the pins. I hate it when they do that, seems like there’s no easy solution for repinning. I usually crimp one wire, solder the other two to it and heat shrink the connection. It’s a PITA...

For what it’s worth, I repinned the .156 connector by doubling up the wires into a single pin. Fixed the remaining issues I was having with the 16-opto board and I did not have to repin the smaller connectors.

Any place I can get as good quality as (or better than) original rule cards for the apron?

My STNG doesn’t have either of the apron cards.

Thanks, I may give that a try. It'll bother me that it's the only connector related to the board that hasn't been replaced.

It ended up being the Rosin Flux I was using. Not supposed to be conductive but it was generating super high resistance shorts. They were underneath the sockets too which made things so much worse.

I followed what was posted here:
http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=General#Headers.2C_Housings.2C_and_Crimping

It certainly wasn't as difficult as that article made it sound, at least with that gauge of wire.

Good to know. Of course, that’s where a lot of the questionable old rework is on my board. How do you remove the old rosin? Fresh stuff comes up easily with alcohol and a toothbrush. That old stuff is stubborn!

This or something like it: https://www.amazon.com/Chemtronics-Flux-Off-Concentrate-Remover-Aerosol/dp/B01N2KD6I9/ref=asc_df_B01N2KD6I9/

Finding the right fuses can really be a PITA if you aren't exactly sure what the series and size codes are for the fuses you are looking for.

I get my fuses, and all other components from Mouser Electronics, here is all the information you will ever need for these type fuses.

Littlefuse 313 series 3AG (Slo-Blo) DATASHEET:
https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/240/Littelfuse_Fuse_313_315_Datasheet.pdf-476752.pdf

Typical MFG Part number 03130XX.MXP where XX = Fuse Size

pasted_image (resized).png

FILTERED LIST:
https://www.mouser.com/Littelfuse/Circuit-Protection/Fuses/Cartridge-Fuses/313-Series/_/N-ba8h0?P=1z0zlhtZ1yzxjme

3A SB
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Littelfuse/0313003MXP?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtxU2g%2F1juGqbdCHRI5TALu%2F70j6uKxUC8%3D

4A SB
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Littelfuse/0313004MXP?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtxU2g%2F1juGqbdCHRI5TALuOxIDQlW4W74%3D

5A SB
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Littelfuse/0313005MXP?qs=sGAEpiMZZMtxU2g%2F1juGqbdCHRI5TALufIyDUYhRStY%3D

8A SB
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Littelfuse/0313008MXP?qs=%2Fha2pyFaduiOO1WeA1Bln2Dhd7rTzPh6KkiqnuXUDraekTwQq6ty1w%3D%3D

I ended up passing off that task to someone more capable than I currently am. I did end up buying some "flux remover" pens for the future though. Both the flux and the pens are from MG Chemicals.

I found Scrubbing Bubbles works very well:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/sttng-owners-club/page/14#post-3309859
Caution this is acidic so you can't let it sit on the board too long and have to rinse the board well.

But this makes the job easier:
https://www.ultrasonicsdirect.com/ultrasonic-cleaner-sh300-10l.html
Unless you are cleaning a lot of boards, wiring harnesses, etc... its just not cost effective to buy one

The safest cheap option (for your board) is to clean with a pure alcohol >99% ... you have to ignore the State of California warnings that tell you to dilute this by adding 30% water to make it less flammable which defeats the entire purpose of buying a pure alcohol ... Why would you not just buy 70% instead ... WTH is wrong with people in California?

This is the very best alcohol you can purchase for cleaning circuit boards.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005DNQX3C/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00

I have an ultrasonic cleaner but am reluctant to put boards in it, especially one that’s already had questionable repairs. What cleaning solution do you use in one with boards?

Branson makes an ultrasonic cleaner specifically for cleaning circuit boards.

Best Price is from All-Spec ... This is where I purchase the majority of my board work supplies.
Gallon $35.52 (minimum purchase $50)
https://www.all-spec.com/Catalog/Chemicals-Cleaning-Supplies/Ultrasonic-Cleaners-Accessories/Ultrasonic-Cleaner-Solutions/100-955-914-6768

You can also get it from Amazon

Gallon $88
https://www.amazon.com/Branson-Electronics-Solution-Ultrasonic-Cleaners/dp/B00BWESDKW#customerReviews

Quart $40
https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Solution-Quart-Ultrasonic-Cleaners/dp/B072XTT2NJ/#customerReviews

The main concerns with any ultrasonic cleaner used with electronics is to making sure you get all the water out of any switches on the board, and to have a cleaner with a sweep function if the board contains any type of crystal oscillator circuits (i.e. WPC CPU bords)

Pin_Guy you are a wealth of knowledge. Thanks!

How long do you put a board in for? And what's the best way removing all the water - like the flipper relay switch on a WPC Power Driver board?