Tuesday 2 February 2010

Star trek on it's knees

I had an interesting episode with my Star trek the other week.

I was playing a game, when suddenly it started to behave a bit strange. It was popping the balls out during a regular gameplay, it lost the track of number of balls in play an was being all weird in general. A couple of minutes later a coworker came into room and started complaining about something burning. By that time I was already done with my (weird) game and i noticed that the machine was unable to put the balls into proper places. I also smelled something funny so i turned the machine off quickly. I took the backglass down and to my surprise, it was full of smoke!

After panicking a bit I pulled myself together and dug into the problem. It turned out that one of the diverter coils underneath the playfield simply melted.





What followed in the next couple of days was a classic procedure of:
  • traveling home
  • picking up the needed tools
  • finding the replacement coil
  • forgetting to pick up some fuses (F103 got burned when the coil failed)
  • looking for a place to buy the proper fuses in Ljubljana
  • etc....
Anyway, today I was ready to test the thing and it was also over in a second. The moment I turned on the machine the new coil fired and the next second the F103 fuse failed again.
I am now in the process of investigating, what could be wrong. Pinrepair has a whole paragraph dedicated to this exact problem with the Star trek exclusively, thus I have more than enough info on my hand. At a first glance it seems that some problems with the wiring took down some transistor on the auxiliary driver board, but I haven't found the time to check one or the other yet. I will report on the progress.

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