In this 2-part series I go over installing a shaker motor in a Stern Jurassic Park pinball machine. I also run into a few weird glitches with the hardware sent me. That’s the world of pinball… nothing ever goes 100% smoothly does it?
As soon as I thought I had the game operational, I waxed the playfield and got ready to put it back together only to find out one of the flippers was out. This was a rather tricky issue that took a little bit to figure out — not your typical flipper problem, so I thought I’d do a video of it and go through the process of diagnosing why a flipper might not work (on a Bally-35 early solid state game).
I’ve had this game sitting around for awhile and finally got around to looking at it. I shot a few videos awhile back and forgot to publish them, so here’s a useful short video on how to access the DMD in Slugfest. It’s nowhere near as easy as you’d expect as it is in a regular pinball machine.
I was going through some old videos that had been uploaded to YouTube that for some reason were not made public and found this one. It’s a short video on how to go through the diagnostics on these 80s era Bally pinball machines and track down switch matrix issues. I don’t go into how the matrix works in this particular video, but I do demonstrate how a stuck switch can cause odd behavior. In this case, the tilt triggers when a certain target is hit.
The other day I was working on a game and traced the problem back to a blown bridge rectifier, so I thought it might be nice to produce a short little video on how to test/check bridge rectifiers in pinball machines, as well as a little info on what they do.
Diagnosing problems with the mist multi-ball assembly on a Bally/WMS Bram Stoker’s Dracula pinball machine. In this case, we were not getting power to the motor, which is supplied from the 20vdc circuit on the power driver board (which also powers the flash lamps). In this series of videos I show how to test the mist motor, and where you check for power and back-trace it to the driver board, then identify which components are related to this problem and how to fix it.
If you have a broken plunger/linkage, you can repair it and replace the broken part for a lot cheaper. Sometimes you can’t find complete linkages but you can get the individual parts or the linkages. Here’s how you can build them, or repair them. It’s been awhile since I did this so I had to refresh my memory of how I did it.