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The simplest explanation is usually the right one (or embarrassing mistakes you've made in pinball)

kevlar

kevlar

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Joined
Apr 11, 2013
Messages
6,577
Location
Newport, South Wales
Alias
Kevin Donovan
A few months ago my Shadow started resetting randomly in game. After reading so much about dodgy 5v often causing resets I removed the driver board and replaced the relevant bridge rectifier and capacitor. Well I did a crap job of it and now had no 5v so my good mate Dave did it properly for me :). This seemed to have cured the problem although the machine hasn't had a lot of use since. Well last night it started doing it again and I noticed that it did it when I nudged. Infact I could make it reset on demand by giving the machine a good nudge even when in attract mode. Luckily my brain must have been having a good day because I pretty quickly thought to check the power cable, you guessed it, it was pretty much hanging out of the socket on the back of the machine. I'm pretty sure this was the cause all along.

What silly mistakes have you made that cost you money and or time as you were lead up the garden path?
 
I once had a similar problem with Jokerz. I suspected voltage spikes, but after running the solenoid test for a while without a reset occuring, I checked the mains side and found the Neutral connection loose in the plug.

With your Shadow, has it got the metal cover plate fitted to hold the lead in place?
 
Spent about an hour trying to work out why a slingshot on LW3 wasn't working, poked and prodded the connector on the driver board, there was voltage at the coil, but it wasn't firing, after experimenting and moving the connector one pin over (to check that another solenoid on that pin fired) I finally tracked it down to one of those pesky Z connectors right next to the coil.

Unplugged it and plugged it back in again and all was good.

I think that's just one of many garden path faults with LW3, it breaks in some way shape or form everytime I play it, keeps me on my toes!
 
A few years back I had a real problem with balls staying locked on the sword on LOTR. After spending ages looking at the mechanism I finally checked the balls and found they had magnetised so were sticking together whenever the lock mechanism went down.
 
Oh and had real problems on my AC/DC cannon after replacing the motor. scratched my head a while and then discovered I'd reattached one of the connectors but had got it 1 pin off. Reseated it and all worked perfectly
 
Ha,
I have a recent one of these.
Couldn't figure out why 1 or 2 lamps in the whirlpool of my whitewater were coming on at the wrong times.
Changed loads of diodes and everything.
Turns out the leds were ghosting badly. Only realised last night by accident!
 
Just for the record. Bridge rectifiers are rarely the cause for resets. When they fail they generally go short circuit causing fuse blows.
 
I brought Spirit back from the dead, but it took me almost 6 months to figure out why it wouldn't boot... I was looking at some before and after photos and noticed that the 40 pin connector for the reset board was fitted upside down... :eek: Fitted it the right way and Spirit fired up first time. :rolleyes:
 
My first pin was a sf2 which was 10 years ago !
It tuck me about a month to take the lock bar off ,so in the end I gave up trying, then I found a site called pinball heaven, so I bought a manual,
As soon as it arrived,looked at it and......DOH !! That's how you get the bloody thing off !!:clap:
 
I was having intermittent problems with an Earthshaker when I had it around a year ago. The left inlane and captive ball switches were sometimes not registering. It seemed to happen more when I had recently closed the coin door.

Eventually traced it to the slam Tilt switch touching the lock down lever with the coin door closed, doh!
 
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