I never knew that the flipper enable signal on an early Bally SS comes straight from the MPU board...chased that around for hours thinking the issue was with Q15 and associated components on the SDB...

The drive for Q15 comes from the MPU...good to know!

Those are what mine are. Great plains shows them as .084 Mate-n-lok. Guess I should have specified.

That it sucks swapping flipper assemblies in the machine. Desoldering the old wires sucks. Unscrewing everything that needs unscrewing sucks. Screwing new assemblies back in sucks more. Soldering the wires back also sucks. I wish I had a rotisserie.

I learned to calm down in general.

Being newer to the hobby I recently spent weeks learning a lot about my down new machine to discover multiple attempts at reseating cables is all it took.

Humbling yet fruitful.

There are positions that that's not enough. A small piece of foam weather stripping in the right place can do wonderful things.

I learned that 90% of my fixes go like this:

Figure out the problem. Order a new part. Wait a week or so for it to come in (all the while a machine is down). Find free time to make the fix. Discover that my "fix" did nothing to change anything. Reassess the problem. Realize I was wrong, and that it only needs a small tweak somewhere. After hours (really weeks) of work, fix the problem in about 2 minutes with stuff I already had on hand. End up with more spare parts. Then I try to pretend my pride in fixing something overshadows the dumbness in which I went about it.

Repeat ad infinitum.

.84 and .93 connectors should be stored in different compartments.

I have learned to read a schematic for my first EM, '76 Royal Flush.
An incorrect scoring issue on white joker.
Would you believe? it was a possibly factory error....almost 40 years!
2 wires on wrong tabs. ("G" Relay)
Thanks to Pinsider "DirtFlipper"
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That the person who designed the sys 11 interconnect board was a crazy man (some crazy long connectors on that thing).

That some previous owner of my Taxi was a silly f*&k and had hard wired GI inputs to front AND back of board (when they could have actually just jumpered 2 pins at the back, if they really couldn't get their hands on a new molex connector).

That Vid rocks and his guides rock (technically, I already knew this).

Replaced the GI input connector and reflowed pins for any relative connectors and I now have full GI on my Taxi instead of the lame handful of Gi I used to have.

When replacing coils with pre-attached diodes, don't assume that they are installed in the same direction as the one you removed. Thankfully, all I blew up was the diode and a fuse. Thanks Vid for walking a newbie through diagnosing and recommendations for repair.

Don't set you pop bumper switches to close, the desire to have really good action and very narrow tolerance will cause you great frustration when the coil locks on and fries your board components. Spent my afternoon repairing my board and giving a little more switch clearance. Those gaps are really important to have right. Ohm meter continuity test was good during shop out fine tuning, but I knew they were REAL close. Live and Learn.
JP

I was able to fix a sound problem on a Stern MPU-200 game by swapping out a 5101 chip because unbeknownst to me there are 'fast' 5101E-1 and 5101P-1 chips and 'slow' 5101L-1 and 5101-3 chips. MPU-200 games need the fast variety to function properly.

From my VERY EARLY days (over 25 years ago), "Polarity counts!"

There are many more problems with a game than the owner knows about.

EMs are the work of the devil

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sometimes you just can't figure out what is wrong and you have to send it in to someone with years of experience .

Suck it up and replace both sides of the damned connector.

Trying to get all the pins through the holes when swapping out a 16-digit display glass makes me say lots of bad words.

Try replacing a glass in a DMD. 32+128 pins.

And using a jeweler's glass...

GI shorts can be a bitch to try and find. And have a bucketfull of fuses handy.

Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...
Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF...

oh... and don't forget .... Remove the balls from the trough BEFORE you lift the PF!
faz

I learned that when setting an EOS gap on a flipper, you should ALWAYS double check the gap via and actual button press.

What I mean it that manually moving the flipper bat to full extension is often further than the actual flipper button press. This distance in travel seems to be larger on Sterns than on WMS and Bally and I assume it due to the tolerances in flipper linkage.

In short, ALWAYS check gap with real life button press the actuate the flipper. DONT trust manual movement of bat to set a gap.

Also, be sure to have plenty of TIP, Mosfet, Drivers, of different/ typical number on hand.

If a coil seems weak, check the coil number before investing an hour trying to find a mechanical / physical fault somewhere.

That a WPC89 MPU won't boot if you have one flipper coil wired wrong. Anyone need a spare Rottendog?

How much do you want for it?

Better idea... get a set of these.
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I learned Gottlieb Decagon units blow chunks through coffee straws, they sure do, why not?

I learned a while ago its a reflex action to catch things you drop.......including hot soldering irons.

Yep, have a few of those ordered and on the way.

Just because a chip is old, doesn't mean its bad. I'm rehabbing a Bally light board and there were a lot of stuck on controlled lamps that ran through U-4. I don't normally have those on hand because they rarely go bad. So I looked for maybe a problem I could fix. I've chased down bad solder joints in lots of places but this was new to me.

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It's definitely worth while doing a full assembly swap when doing maintenance on flippers, rather than trying to rebuild. Now I can use a rebuild kit on the old assemblies. It's like keeping winter tires on a spare set of rims.

That it will take longer and double the cost of what I thought I needed.

LTG : )™

I did that once when an x-acto knife rolled off the table , ouch!!! All the way in yep, slammed my knees together

Learned this today.
Had a small screwdriver in my hand while testing the continuity of a fuse I had removed.
If you put one lead of the meter on one end of the fuse, and the screwdriver on the other end of the fuse, it will test bad every time.
When I finally realized what I was doing it took about 5 min. Just to stop laughing at myself.

You need to test continuity with 120V.... it would have tested ok... at least YOUR continuity would have tested ok

faz

So true, or spend a few hours repinning

A small amount of lubricant on a spinner axle makes a huge difference in its operation! Also, when removing the back glass and placing it onto a work bench adjacent to the machine, make sure there is not a spoon sitting in a bowl of chili on said work bench. The backglass hooked the spoon catapulting the chili all over the playfield glass and lockdown bar.

Better than shorting out a game WITH your screwdriver...

That it can be as simple as a fuse as long as you start simple and check the easy stuff first.

Pinball repair sucks sometimes

That bending the through kicker metal is the right fix for the ball coming out with too much force.

If you want spinners to score really "hot" all you need is a little force, patience, and needle nose pliers...

It's not just the tip of the iron that's hot, never seems to sink in.

I have a gremlin in my workshop that keeps hiding my tools each and every time I put them down.

Damn, I just had that hex driver; where'd it go this time?!