My glider was mostly working, but had two issues:
1. It was "glitchy" or "jittery", as in, it would never stay still in one spot. Most of the time it worked but this would sometimes cause balls to not stop there at the glider when they were supposed to.
2. The glider mech itself felt loose/droopy. This would sometimes cause it to get stuck or for the ball to get stuck as it would lock into place and stop moving.
Sadly, the only way to tighten up the assembly is to completely take it apart (which would address #2)
My Distro said that since the diverter still basically worked, they couldnt get another from Stern.. fun.
How complicated could this be? I dinked around with servo's growing up in my RC cars and planes. So I figured I would give it a shot. This is the one I ended up ordering from Amazon. Not sure if I would suggest this one for others due to the issues I had (see below).
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First thing I had to do was locate where it plugs in underneath. I had to cut away the heat shrink tube to get to the plug, which is basically your standard servo plug you will find on basically any model.
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This is the original servo from the machine:
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Taking the glider assembly off itself was actually pretty straight forward. Remove the lower habbitrails, remove the 3 screws on the platform and slide it out (pulling the plugs out from the pops with it). I was able to install the new servo easily. I did move the armature off the old one to the new one (the new one had a different size on it and while it was close, i figured this would mess with the positioning of the glider).
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Installed the assembly back into the machine, I made sure to tighten things up this time to get rid of the slack/droop. plugged it in and bam.. it worked! but wait, it was moving backwards. In the glider test, moving left made the glider move right, etc. I had everything wired up right. Maybe I ordered the wrong servo? (seems odd tho..)
Did anyone else who did this run into this problem? curious to know.
I figured.. well, a servo is just a DC motor with a potentiometer. I assumed you could reverse the polarity to the motor and swap the leads on either side of the potentiometer and I would be back in business having it turn the correct way.
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Annoying to do, but it worked!
Both issues are now solved for me. With everything tightened up, there is no droop or slack and the new servo got rid of the weird glitchy/jerky behavior.