I'll be joining the Fellowship in a few weeks and have been looking for mods to get. The Palantir Eye mod looks really cool but I'm not sure if Jay is going to be making them again. Anyone have a spare to sell or know if these will be made again?

I'm considering doing the coil upgrade and your experience is making me a bit wary. Hopefully you can get it fixed soon.

Wow those look fantastic! You going to sell them too or just a one off? Also it looks like they might work great in Hobbit.

I was playing today and cradling with the left flipper and got into a conversation with someone. After cradling for maybe a minute or two the flipper went dead.

Looks like fuse is blown and to the touch the coils felt extremely hot. I'm assuming that maybe the EOS switch wasn't engaging? First time I've had a blown coil on any machine so this will be a fun learning experience! I'm planning on switching the coil to a medium strength one anyways but definitely need to figure out the cause of the issue first.

This is on an LE too, which I guess has some minor differences in the coils (no diodes I think?)

Thanks for any tips.

And this is why Pinside is great! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction

Clear rubbers throughout looks nicer than I would have expected!

About a month ago my LOTR LE left flipper went dead while cradling. Researching this issue led me to find a common problem with the Q15 and Q16 flipper transistors. Instead of sending it off I've been learning how to do the repair myself - all part of the fun!

Unfortunately I've been really busy and the learning process has been a slow one. Since I don't feel confident enough to do the repair myself yet I decided to get a RottenDog to use for now and have as a backup.

The board arrived and it is a much different looking board than the one in my machine. The LOTR LE power driver board is nearly half the size of the RD board and the metal mounting plate on the back doesn't look like it would line up with the rotten dog board correctly.

Questions: Did I buy the wrong board? It literally says Lord of the Rings on the RD board itself but maybe the LE version is different?

If it's the correct board do I need to change the mounting plate somehow? I'll have to pull the old board out to be sure but it didn't look like the RD board would mount properly.

Thanks for any help or advice!

Here are some pics:

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Is yours a regular or an LE?

https://vimeo.com/34448364

This is footage of a LOTR at PAPA. They talk about all the things that make it harder. Take note that with the removed outlane posts they actually reduce the tilt sensitivity to allow the possibility of some nudge saves.

A few weeks ago I replaced Q15 and Q16 transistors on my LOTR LE driver board (it's different than the standard edition).

Game played fine, no problems. Turn it on today and it starts a game then freezes up. I open up the head and whoa tons of lights are off!

No 5V, 20V, or 50V
F5,F7,F8,F10,F11 all blown

What da funk happened?! BR blow up maybe? Where should I start looking for trouble?

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Regarding my problem above, I just noticed I never fully screwed the board back in. It was just hanging on the screws. I'm guessing that might be part of the problem and could have cause a short or missed ground connection or something... Yay for fuck ups

Replaced all the blown switches and F11 the 5V Logic Power still blows about 10 seconds after powering on. Sure hope I didn't somehow fry the CPU.

Try seeing if one of the plating/powder coating guys (like pinballplatingandmore.com) has one. It'd be super shiny too!

Regarding the coils, are the LE coils different than the standards? They feel pretty strong to me but it does get really hard to hit the ring.

Bump for SillyOldElf's decals, they are super high quality and look gorgeous. They also work just as well in The Hobbit as they do in LOTR!

+1 for the Arwen ramp! It works well and looks like it's a factory installed part.

When it comes to making the ramp shot you might need to tweak the spinner. When the spinner is at rest if it's not at the right angle the ball will be significantly slowed down. On mine I just added a super tiny amount of lube at the spinner joints to make it spin like hell. Balls fly up the ramp with ease now.

That's not the only possible culprit though. Your flippers might need adjusting if they are old or are dragging.

The ramp itself shouldn't need to be tweaked unless the flap is bent and causing balls to brick and slow down. It's possible the tip of the ramp is getting deformed but that's probably not the main cause of missed ramp shots.

I don't know about the Balrog mech, haven't had any experience tweaking with it yet.

If you're overshooting the ring then I'd suggest the easiest fix is just to raise your play field angle. The extra energy in the shots would get used up climbing the steeper slope.

Concur! I forgot that this is exactly what happened to me once. Thought for sure the ramp was screwed up, spent a ton of time tweaking things... Blown magnet fuse fixes it all!

The earth shook violently and Gandalf shouted towards his pinball league “you shall not have long ball times!”

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Re: PinSound Wool Mix

I thought I remember reading months ago that he was grabbing all the center channel DVD audio to use for better call outs. But now I keep seeing people say the call outs are the same original low quality.

So did the movie call outs not get used? Or is it just the game specific ones like “jackpot”?

I’m still on the fence if it’s gonna be worth the extra hassle and cost for LOTR. I do love PinSound though!

I've run into this a few times with PinSound. The fix each time was to get a better USB stick. I'm not sure why it seems to be the answer but I have almost no glitches anymore. Maybe once every dozen or so games there's a tiny glitch but I barely notice now.

For what it's worth the bigger 32 and 64 sized sticks seemed to have more problem. I'm using 8GB USB 3.0 sticks in all my PinSounds.

So I noticed last night my cabinet speaker wasn’t making any sound. After some testing it seems like the output from the CPU/Audio board is broken. It’s just a steady buzzing sound.

Common or simple fix? I’ve been planning to put PinSound in but didn’t want to deal with the board work... this might be forcing my hand.

Beautiful cards! Love the chrome and gloss effects!

Could also increase playfield angle and go into the settings and adjust the flipper power a little lower. Though that might make shots like the ring and sword ramp harder too.

Just for reference are you talking about this one: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/rerun-of-the-improved-arwen-plastic-protector-ramp

How smooth is the Merry shot for you guys?

Mine is super bricky and I can’t figure out why. It just seems like anything not 100% perfect bricks out before it even goes through the gate. It almost feels like a ball guide or rail is missing on the bottom right side of the sword ramp, but i think that’s just how this game is setup.

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Look at that! Yeah previous owner likes really hard games so they must have made those thicker.

You may have a blown transistor, I'm not sure if this is an LE only issue but read this post: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/tech-lotr-le-flipper-fuse-transistor-failed

Yes the original release was in 2003 and games were still shipping with incandescent. I'm not sure when STERN stopped and switched to LED but I think it was their first SPIKE system releases.

Coil dust is literally microscopic pieces of metal flying off the metal plungers on the flippers, kickers, and pop bumpers. It then gets rolled all over the place by the ball eventually creating trails.

Any other dirt, dust, or environmental gunk is generally from outside the game when the glass has been removed.

When you replace these mechs after years of use they can be completely blackened with the dust. The plungers end up totally malformed and everything has to get replaced as cleaning isn't enough to bring them mechs up to a high level of function again.

Waxing can help make cleaning easier as the coil dust has a harder time sticking to the surface since there's less static. It's still there but a quick wipe of a cloth will pick most of it up and leave a slick playfield behind.

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Yep, it's just the pieces of metal, the plungers mostly, smashing around tens of thousands of times and creating microscopic metallic dust.

Wax helps make it easier to clean tho.

Wipe your finger anywhere inside a cabinet that has seen 10,000 or 20,000 or more plays and it will be completely black.

Also LEDs do not make any difference in the amount of coil dust buildup. Although reading Neal's comment above makes sense as well.

The dust basically gets exploded out in all directions from the force of whatever is moving and smashing into things; and yes most of it goes down! However enough gets up and onto the playfield and then spread by the balls to cause us problems.

Keeping balls cleaned regularly is a pretty easy way to keep a pristine game pristine.

Got some eBay a few years back.

That's funny I didn't mean to link that picture to that quote, but the PinSide editor saves previous edits and stuff, forget it had been linked!

I was really bored with 30 minute games and thought I would give my league mates a laugh and a challenge. Thought it would just be a gimmick but have kept it for three years now! The game is set to an EM like angle to help a bit, and the tilt bob is very loose, so you can toss the cabinet a bit but still potentially tilt. You also get nine balls, one for each of the Fellowship. The code is also set to the absolute easiest settings.

A typical game if you are halfway decent will get you to the Destroy the Ring mode. No one has been able to destroy it yet but I've come within one shot multiple times now. Also the satisfaction of beating one of the multiball modes or ring scenes is immense, the first time myself or anyone destroys the ring is gonna be epic!

We call them "Hobbit Flippers" around here

Check Titan Pinball.

What PinSound mix do people think is the best? I remember Wool made one of the first ones but I see they've got a couple others on the PS site now.

I've got PS in other games but have been holding off on LOTR because I haven't seen the same rave reviews of the sound mixes like for example the Indiana Jones Endprodukt one gets.

It's not unheard of to have slow or poor support with these small boutique companies but that's pretty bad you can't even get an account setup. Have you tried directly e-mailing them about the issue or is that who said it takes time?? Bizarre.

Looks like the Sillyoldelf ones. I'd recommend the same thing, or even just lightly brush some behind the areas that are coming up instead of removing the whole thing. Removing might cause more problems/rips etc.

Believe it or not this is a really fun way to play:

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