I finally found some time to take a look at the Mars God of War I pulled out of a hurricane katrina-damaged house in New Orleans last year. The batteries on the MPU board had hosed the connectors as well as the main board and I am set to replace it with Pascal Janin’s PI80x4 board. In preparation for that, I have to re-pin some of the damaged connectors… as this video shows, things are never as easy as they seem…..
In some cases, playfield lights, like bonus and other lights that may be out are the result of poor contact on the bonus stepper unit. In this video I show why replacing a light bulb may not fix a light-out problem and where to look to remedy the situation, on a Gottlieb electro-mechanical pinball game “King Kool.”
This is another one of those video series where I thought to myself, “If I were smart I would edit this.” But then I thought, I can’t be the ultimate pinball repair guru and I’m not really trying. If I have some kind of “angle” it’s that I’m doing a FPS (First-Person-Shooter) perspective to the hobby, collecting and restoring. And often times when you’re in an FPS, you poke your head down the wrong hall and get fragged. This is kind of how this video series starts off but it takes part 3 to realize the plot twist…
Ok I’ll get off confusing metaphors and back to pinball repair..
The problem I had was when I got this Bally Mystic, one of the targets was broken. I had ordered replacement targets. I opted for the same style as the side targets even though on many Bally Mystics, for some reason, the front targets are bullseyes and the side targets have explosion graphics on them. Go figure? Anyway, after replacing the targets I discovered that two of them would often get stuck in the “up” position and would often not retract when hit. I knew the springs on some of the targets were old and had “lost their zest” (that’s an official technical term by the way). So I thought I’d make a video on replacing the springs, showing an alternate source for some of the components as well as a trick to make an old spring kinda new. Along the way I discovered the real reason why the drop targets weren’t resetting…