Daniels Woodland Shooting Gallery gun issues

Deverezieaux

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Donor 5 years: 2013, 2020-2022, 2025
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Let me start out by saying I have zero experience with shooting galleries, and I think I've already diagnosed the problem, but I thought I'd share so someone here could educate me more on these as they'd like me to help with their shooting gallery more in the future.

While working on some skeeballs at a local pumpkin patch they asked if I could give them any guidance on the intermittent gun issues with their shooting gallery. I've included some pics just for fun (god I love shooting galleries), not for help diagnosing. They have an 8 gun shooting gallery and 3 of the 8 weren't registering hits. I tried to intuit what might be the issue based on my basic knowledge of IR sensors and swapping guns to see if the problem persists. When swapping a non-working gun to a working position the gun still did not register hits. The guns would make sounds however. I should note all of the target sensors registered hits from good guns so it wasn't that we were just shooting bad targets. This lead me to believe either the IR senders in the guns were bad, or at least dirty, though they didn't appear to be. The gallery is in a barn area and is extremely dusty and dirty, so I suggested perhaps cleaning the IR emitters in the gun barrels before sending them in for service. They said last time they sent them in for service they came back still non functional, so they were hesitant to just send them back again.

Anyway, seems like a simple problem, but perhaps there's more to it. Would be interested to learn more about these.
 

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You would have to take a working gun apart along with a non-working one and compare. If it is making sounds, the trigger is working. It might have two "leaf switches" in the gun or some sort of relay in the target stand. Or the emitter may be faulty. The camera on your phone can see IR. You can check it with the remote off of your TV or other remote-control device to get comfortable checking for it.

If a non-working gun does not work in a working gun stand, does the working gun work where the defective gun did not?
 
Thanks for the reply @rod90, wasn't sure I'd get a reply as I'm not sure how common knowledge of shooting galleries is!

Yes, when swapping a working gun to a non-working position it did function properly. The guns connect to a control board via a 6-pin connector so I also took the time to check that the pins weren't bent, dirty or corroded. All things considered the interior electronics were clean and in good shape. It's clear the guns just receive a lot of abuse. They'd had one cracked in half previously as some kid just smashed it on the control panel.

They are going to send the guns back in for service in the hopes they'll be fixed this time, they have some time as they don't open until September. I'll be back in c couple of weeks to do some maintenance on their skeeball and basketball games after they move them, hopefully by that time the guns are back and functional. If not I'll do some more poking and in the meantime hope to learn a bit more about shooting galleries in general.

Thanks again!
 
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