Hello!

Apollo 13 was my first pin and I got it almost a year ago. Since then, I have acquired 12 more pins and learned a ton about pinball repair and have fixed MANY issues on my other games, but this game is the most advanced game I have and am not up to speed the newer tech.

For most of the year it's been fine, but I've had a couple of issues, which I thought I resolved, but now after reattaching a loose wire to the launch lane wire switch, I'm still getting the trough coil firing 3-4 times and then the launch coil firing once. I was seeing this earlier even after ball one launches and playing a game.

I get inside and look at the opto boards and see that the inner-opto board has a much brighter opto lamp than the outer-board. Are they supposed to be equal brightness? The board was tight in place and I shifted it a little (since there are rubber grommets) and it seemed to calm the ghost firing. Upon further inspection, I thought I saw a cracked solder joint on the opto and def saw flux residue on the header joints. So, I pull the dimmer opto board out and reflow the solder and popped it back in the game and I thought everything was fine after playing a couple games without any ghost coils. I came upstairs to do a few things and left the game in attract mode and all of a sudden, the game was going nuts with the same ghost firing of the same coils. It went on for about 20 seconds, but seems to have stopped and hasn't done it at all while I am typing this.

Do I have a bad opto board? The opto lamp on this board has some putty-like substance at the base of the lamp, whereas the other board does not have that and is nice and clean. Something tells me the lamps are supposed to be equal brightness. I didn't check, but I considered that maybe there is a bad diode on the trough coil that pops the ball up to the launch lane. Would that cause this type of issue?

A couple of things to not:

-I was in the utility menu and could not get any coils or flash lamps to fire during the appropriate test, but everything works fine in-game. The game had LEDs installed prior to me purchasing the game and I notice several molex connectors no longer attached to anything here and there in the cabinet. I have no idea what they go to, but the game play has been fine until these recent ghost coil firings. No idea why the diagnostics aren't working though.

-In the menu, I was trying to lower the high score by holding down the - button to lower the score (to an obtainable level) and the game stopped and did a factory reset. Then it started rebooting itself out of the blue and not quite booting all the way. I thought maybe now would be a good time to check the batteries with the power on, so I shut it off and powered on and changed the batteries. They were an off brand and I replaced them with Energizers and once I started the game, everything appeared to be fine, even though I had to go back in to the utilities and setup free play, etc. Would old batteries cause anything remotely similar to these symptoms?

After this, I was having the ghost coil firing which led me to track down the broken wire on the launch lane switch.

So, at this point, I have traced the problem to the opto board. Is that the likely culprit? If so, can I repair it myself or do I need to track down a replacement?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Ryan