I used to have an old Scout. I'm glad it didn't have electrical problems because the IHOP color code was kinda strange...

18gauge wires green, 16ga brown, 14 blue and so on. There sure was a lot of green wire in that little rig.

There were supposed to be printed numbers to identify individual wires but I only saw a couple that hadn't been washed or snipped off.

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Tick... Tick ... Tick... <Bomb counting down>

Ok, now you need to cut the yellow/green wire.

WHAT EVER YOU DO DON'T CUT THE GREEN/YELLOW WIRE!!!!

Snip
<Boom>

Stacked PIAs soldered together. Actually works fine.

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I once used a bottle cap to repair the ramp leading from the battlefield on a shadow. It was used as a shim to support it as the support screw holes had cracked off. Worked fine.

Hacks are only bad if they don't work. They aren't always pretty but as long as they are safe and effective I don't think they deserve our scorn. Sometimes people have to get creative.

New use for coil stops....who would have thunk!

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Just spotted this on ebay:

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LOL that is one way to repair the sol drivers.

I want that so bad.

ebay.com link: Untested Pinball Board Williams F 14 SYSTEM 11A CPU D 11392

How many hours of dicking around would it take to build that thing, rather than just buying a new board?

Thar's some bonus with that board.... free fuzz on the batteries.
faz

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Woof. At least he color coded the wires.

Since the ball deflector plate is obviously missing they decided to replace it with balled up paper. Not one, but two pieces.

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Damn! Came to the thread just to post this one Pretty amazing hacks... Bunch of jumpers on the solder side too. The bonus ancient leaky batteries are just icing on the cake.

I like the blue PIA socket, nice touch. I think I have a sys11 at home that has this beat this though. I gotta take a picture of it for here. I think almost every IC was socketed, and it looks like someone used a clothes iron for soldering in spots. Probably 2 lbs of solder on the board. Oh, and some ICs were soldered into sockets. Yep...

The plan was to slowly put like 30 mins here and there into it until it was at a point where it may actually boot, but then I found lifted traces under sockets.

One of my Galaxies had this in it. Actually both my Galaxies and my Meteor looks like this.

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Looks good to me! Just replace F4.

This looks pretty good compared to a system 6 driver board I once had. The board had a 2" square burned out of it and they "HOGWIRED" the transformers together then made a block of silicone to keep them in place. The damn thing worked to.

Naw, no need to buy a fuse. I'll just solder a jumper wire on the F4. They have a tendency to blow all the time.

And for like no good reason either. Skip the soldering, just throw a nail in there and call it a day.

Saw a screw jammed into an EM's fuse holder and the previous owner wondered why one of the score reels caught fire. Haha.

Wait, did they replace a GI connector with a freakin' JAMMA connector??

Bravo sir, Dr Fixpin tips his hat to that one

Just posting some useful info:

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LOL!!!

faz

not sure if this saved time or not. It didn't work when I got the Game. Out of a Taxi Machine. LOL!

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Wow talk about a Rube Goldberg. The 3 feed through looked salvageable enough to remount the transistor, so why?..... Then what the heck is that thing they are using as a heat-sink? And then they are using thermal paste when air would have done fine.

Hey, that must be why the old one smoked, it needed a heatsink and thermal compound.

lol

LOL ok that made me spit coffee..

I should do that right away and attach heatsinks and thermal compound to all the transistors in all my games.!! Wait, maybe retro a PC water cool system and run some HE-Pex though each head!!! OH OH Wait,,,,

Interesting.
Looks to me like they used the dead transistor as a heat sink for the new transistor. You can make out the tab, the die mounting area and the middle leg of the transistor.

Good catch Ed, it looks like a transistor after you hit it with a hammer to knock the plastic off. Thats good, I have plenty of bad transistors I can use as heatsinks in my next project.

Not the worst hack I've ever seen. My f14 tomcat I restored has a hacked MPU. It's works great so I just left it alone.

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This is Perkin's color code, even worse than IHOP color code.

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WTH??? What is that actually doing?

im guessing an active component in the reset section failed and that is how they decided to fix it.

With a piece of duct tape?!?! Man... that stuff fixes EVERYTHING!!!
Or is the blue jumper what is being protected??
faz

Went to an auction the other day. Games from the estate of a furniture lover. Not just one or two but a whole row of pins with the cabinets stripped and varnished. This guy even replaced all of the metal legs with wood bingo machine legs.

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Did get me a Miss-O for $60. The plastics and schematic were inside.

This is pretty cool looking. Cool looking game too, neat layout. Nice $60 grab.

Some of my personal favorites.
I have MANY more.

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I'm dying to know what it looks like underneath the ducktape on that WW. My guess on the flipper button is that it either has no Pal nut, or they are protecting the cabinet from flipper button wear lol. Poor man cabinet protectors!!

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Here is that toasty sys 11 I've talked about with the PIA soldered into a socket. Now that I look at it, it doesn't look as bad as some of the other hacks here, its just really stupid. And I swear this board weighs like 1 lbs more from all the solder. R81

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Ouch that poor MPU....

To the credit of the hacker, the thing was destroyed by alkaline damage, so it was never going to work anyway. Not like they destroyed something potentially salvageable. Good board to practice on for them I guess. It was inside a sys11 game I picked up a couple years ago (along with another roached sys11 board I actually got working and a display driver that worked), so I don't know the back story.

I dunno why I even kept it thinking I'd be able to save it. Now it sits on the shelf for laughs.

Not as bad as some of the hacks in here, but here are a few recent ones.

1st is the power supply board from my LW3, Never noticed this till I removed the board to figure out why my 12V was only 10.4

2nd from a Congo I just finished up, the pins in the picture were the ones on the board, they must have melted the connector before, and they wedged a new partial connector on, it was an 8 pin connector, the first 5 were the original connector, the last three were that toasted mess you see, I had to pry the connector off the board it was on so tight.

3rd was from the monkey under the plastic center of the playfield.

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Nice rectifier. Is it even soldered in? Looks like the leads are wrapped with mini barbed wire.

Yep, there is some solder in there, and a lot of open space as well..

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This was on a parts board. It's not the first time I've seen this hack, and probably won't be the last.

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