It’s been something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time – hosting a pinball tournament! The trick to running a tournament is to have reliable games. While at the Open Studios back in November we had people in and playing the games, when you’re going to run a tournament, everything needs to be working properly on all of the games.
Today was a day where I buried myself in the studio to deal with several not-so-obvious, but important problems on several of the games.
I spent over an hour working on Mata Hari today – it was having issues with the score displays. The displays were showing “junk” instead of numbers, so I started with the J2 connector plug on the MPU board. All of these connections tell the five different displays what numbers to show. After working, on the connectors, all but one of the displays were behaving – the player 4 display seemed to still be having issues. I found another Bally display in my parts collection and it worked perfectly. The former Player 4 display will need to be rebuilt.
After working on Mata Hari, I spent some time on Jungle King. Jungle King needs a flipper rebuild to make the flippers work better, but they’ll work as-is for the time being. The issues I wanted to deal with were a target that wasn’t working, and the hundreds score reel which was not advancing properly.
I dealt with the score reel first. The problem was most apparent when the player scored 500 points. The unit is supposed to advance one step each time the coil inside is pulsed – so when a 500 point target is hit, a relay pulls in inside the game which activates the score motor and pulses the hundreds relay five times – and hundreds relay pulses the score reel coil. The five pulses were happening as they should, but sometimes the reel would only advance four times, and other times it would advance six. There is an EOS switch on the score reel which controls the hundreds relay – it helps to hold the relay in until the score reel coil has fully pulled in (when the coil releases, the reel advances). On the score reel, the EOS switch was broken. This is not always a problem, as you can try to make other adjustments in the game to compensate for the broken switch, but I had a spare, so in it went!
Lastly, I spent some time on Eight Ball. I had to replace a stand-up target on the playfield and replace some light bulbs which were burnt out. Eight Ball was out of commission for about a month as I was using its boards to test out another game. The target that wasn’t working turned out to be a contact not “making” in the alternating relay.
I’m currently working on another game – a Williams Pat Hand – and I’m hoping to have that game running well in the next few weeks.
Atlantic Pinball 