Tales of cursed pins

[Durzel]

I bought some clear ramp plastics for my TZ recently, and set about fitting them last night.

Easy job, even for a electronically incompetent person such as myself, just unscrew the existing ones, take off the standoffs and attach them to the new plastics, install.

While I was at it I thought I'd re-route the power cable for my TV mod so that it went through the hole at the bottom near the ramp. This was a bit trickier, getting the cable threaded through the hole so you can actually reach it - without removing the Fight the Power metal ramp - was a painfully long process.

After I had done all of this I dropped the playfield back down, switched the game back on, and the lower gumball flasher came on and stayed on. Ugh. Tried turning the pin off and removing power completely, but every time I turned it on the flasher would come on half way through the testing bit.

Having no idea where to start, and knowing that I hadn't unplugged anything, I opened up the backbox and tapped all of the ribbon cables (I vaguely remember seeing a post somewhere where someone said that the flashers are controlled by a board connected by a ribbon cable). Turned it back on, flasher was no longer coming on - yay!

Played a game just to make sure everything was working, and halfway through the game the clock stopped working. Sure enough, at the end of the game I had a credit dot and running a test said "Clock is broken". Went into the Clock Test, and it worked fine and the error went away on its own.

Since then the game has been working fine, with no errors at all.

Anyone got any tales of pins behaving badly for no obvious reason at all?

 

[replicas]

That's totally normal behaviour for a Twilight Zone.

 

[Sgt GrizZ]

Anyone got any tales of pins behaving badly for no obvious reason at all?

Every single pin I've owned ....... they are all b*stards .... they usually wait until you have a few friends coming over or a league meet or until you have busted your balls dragging them to a show

Today's offender is Tommy

For Sale ...... a bunch of temperamental b*stard pins

 

[Sam C]

One sticks in my head as a total b*stard, my F14. Played lovely but the beacon topper was always intermittent.

I found this was because the original motor had frayed wires leading into it and the inner gears were well worn out, no way to repair it had to be replaced.

The new motor was half the size of the old one and as such it just didn't have the strength anymore to rotate the beacons, the original belts were too taught and causing it to stutter and struggle.

I went through I forget how many number of belts before eventually finding one I thought was what I needed.

Of course it jammed and got stuck when a friend was over and burned out the new motor as it tried to rotate and just got jammed instead.

In the end I gave up and asked the ledge to fix it, new motor and belts.

He sorted it a day before it was picked up and the new owner has owned the game for over 2 years with 0 issues on the beacon topper.

Pain the a*se!