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Help with unfixable Fish Tales flipper problem needed please

VeeMonroe

VeeMonroe

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The latest step in the saga of our unfixable Fish Tales flipper onto (links to previous posts here):

Both flipper buttons not working on Fish Tales

All the fuses are good and the flippers flip when we energise the coils with the coil test function. The flipper buttons appear not to be working. When we run the flipper test, switches F1-F4 remain open whether or not the buttons are pressed. Both flippers stopped working at the exact same...
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In Progress - Fish Tales - long-term project

We purchased a Fish Tales in July this year. We were newbies to pinball and didn’t know anything about how to purchase vintage machines. As such, we bought a ‘discount’ machine at retail from Williams Amusements, which we were told was lower in price than most retail pins because it lacked its...
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The manual says that 12V power should be daisy-chained from connector J116 on the power driver board to the coin door controller board, then to the left flipper opto, then to the right flipper opto, with grey/yellow wiring. Jon (husband) has checked all the connections downstream of the coin drawer and they are good. The grey/yellow wire from the coin drawer towards the backbox has been messed around with - the wire goes from grey/yellow to orange (with what looks like a soldered connection wrapped in insulating tape) and then back to grey/yellow (with what was an uncovered solder joint but I have replaced with screw-top connection block). This doesn't seem to be the problem though - there is a low-resistance connection from the screws of the connector block to the flipper boards. The grey/yellow then goes into the right-hand big plastic conduit carrying all the wires from the cabinet to the backbox.

In the backbox, J116 connects to one Molex splitter (which we installed to take 12V power for a colour DMD LCD screen) and then to some kind of sealed splitter that we didn't install. Both parts of the split appear to go into the left-hand plastic conduit carrying wires from the underside of the play field to the backbox - i.e. not the wire from the coin drawer. Further investigations reveal that there are two 12V power connections on the underside of the play field, both used to control the reel (one is the motor control board, the other is the opto switch board). When I unplug J116, the reel does indeed stop working.

The other 12V yellow/grey cables on the power driver board are J117, which the manual says connects to the (the old one - not my colour one) DMD controller board - this appears to be correct because when Jon pulled it the DMD stopped working, and J118 which the manual says connects to the two reel control boards, but which does not appear to connect to anything - when he pulled it he didn't notice anything new breaking. He hasn't managed to trace the wire coming out of J118 because of the huge bundles of wires in the way.

All headers on the power driver board appear to be good.

Does anyone have any advice on what might be going on - both what might have happened when the machine was rewired (we have most of our Williams boards replaced with Rottendog boards - the power driver board is still Williams, the two reel control boards and the "old" DMD controller board are all Rottendog) - and where the fault could be?
 
I had a splitter connection which had the cables in the IDCs not pressed in deep enough, no power therefore. Take that splitter out; connect direct and measure if you have power at the coin door. If that’s the issue, get an IDC tool and press the cables in proper. Think mine was a colour DMD one actually ;-).
Otherwise: So there is no 12V at the flipper optos/coin door interconnect? You could jump that with a new cable from the backbox to get it working. It is also easy enough to pull the corrugated covering off to follow the cable. Reading your description someone replaced yellow/black partly? Pop me a DM with where you are in London, if it is in the West I can pop by after the 17th to have a look.
 
Do you have continuity between j116 pin 2 and the left flipper opto board pin 6.

I.e. Turn machine off. Set dmm to continuity test beep. One lead to j116 pin 2 where the grey yellow wire connects at the idc and the other on pin 6 left flipper cabinet switch opto board where the grey yellow wire connects.

If you get a beep then all the potentially dodgy non original connectors you have described are OK. If no beep it is most likely that you have an issue in one of the non original connectios to the 12v line that you describe.

Paul
 
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J118 pin 2 should be supplying the 12v to the emi board for the reel motor and pin 2 of the reel motor opto switch board.

j117 pin 2 should be supplying the 12v to the dmd controller.

Looks like you have all the above and the flippers running off j116 pin 2 and I would want to put that all back to how it was originally.

I suspect there is no 12v at j118 pin 2 and previous owner operator hacked by taking supply for reel motor from j116 pin2

I have found that the golden rule of diagnosing issues is to suspect and check and correct the previous hacks first.
 
Thanks for all this @Asiapinball and @drhex.

We'll check j118 pin 2 and do a continuity check. Jon also had the idea of running a line straight from the opto board to the backbox with the aim of temporarily skirting around the problem but, obviously, we'd prefer to sort out the hacks rather than create more of them!
 
So many problems in pinball machines are actually caused by owners putting mods in/ bodging repairs.

First port of call is anything non-factory/ repaired/ soldered on the relevant circuit
 
Flipper problems solved!

Thank you @Asiapinball and @drhex for your invaluable advice and assistance 😍

It was a molex plug that needed re-wiring, but due to the multiple hacks and stuff running off the wrong plugs, it was harder to diagnose than we’d hoped.
 
CHRIS B PINBALLS said:
I honestly doubt it will be a broken wire a few things to check make sure you have a good earth on the multimeter by checking another voltage somewhere
Don’t think it’s gospel that it’s j116 it could be any of the 4 connectors for the 12v won’t be the thick wire one as that is the display
Maybe worth swapping them round
Pay great attention to where the wire is pushed in to the connector that is my bet
Also could be a cold solder joint on the back of the board
Another pointer one of the bank of 3 pins is to the cab flipper button s and coin door
The other is for a playfield optos
And one for the display make sure you don’t plug them on 1 pin out if you swap them about the
Click to expand...
Did I not tell you this back in January
 
CHRIS B PINBALLS said:
Did I not tell you this back in January
Click to expand...

We were going to ignore this to avoid a pointless argument.

We followed all the advice we were given, carefully, and we tried this advice in January. We swapped around the connectors - it didn’t make any difference because the problem was within the wire, which remained connected to the flippers. Likewise, we checked whether the wire was loose where it was connected to the pin on all four connectors. We also tested the voltages/resistances on the connectors and had a look at what they should be connected to in the manual.

We eventually found the problem by wire testing extensively with a multi-meter, and re-wiring. It took a while to work out what to re-wire because all the wires were wired up wrongly from a previous bodge (not ours), so we were testing the wrong places the first time around

Thank you, @CHRIS B PINBALLS for the advice - we did follow it back in January and it was greatly appreciated :)

It is possible we misread your advice and you meant ‘rewire all the connectors’ rather than literally ‘swap the connectors’ from one 12V pin to another, without rewiring anything, at which point we’re sorry for misunderstanding your advice - it would have been solved in January had we understood what you meant :) I’d say we were pretty naive, starting out, on just how wildly someone could have hacked the wiring while the pinball could remain working.

We are and remain, as always, extremely grateful to everyone who’s taken the time to guide us through learning how to fix the many faults we’ve found on our Fish Tales 🥰
 
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