Help! Williams I.J. question

PeepingScott

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During play last night, machine pretty much stopped playing because the gate that drops the locked ball in the idol wouldn't drop. Game over technically. It would sequence to find the missing ball, but won't/can't drop the gate to release it.

Anyone run into this problem? Suggestions on fixing it? I'm still very new to this and am not liking the breakdowns!! It's going to give me a breakdown!!!

Thanks for any suggestions/repair ideas!
 
when you first turn machine on you should get some kind of error code,if not check opto board to ball chute. matt

opto? as in option? I'm very green in this department, so I'm not sure what it is you're telling me to do (insert laugh here).

I've only been at this a few months, and I can confess that I'm tired of "something always going wrong". It's almost non stop, I don't remember them having problems when I was dumping quarters in them back in the day!!! OH WAIT, they were NEW then!!!!

Thanks for any pointers or help, it is appreciated!! It won't let me play at all right now, and I'm Jonesin' for some Indiana Jones!!
 
opto? as in option? I'm very green in this department, so I'm not sure what it is you're telling me to do (insert laugh here).

I've only been at this a few months, and I can confess that I'm tired of "something always going wrong". It's almost non stop, I don't remember them having problems when I was dumping quarters in them back in the day!!! OH WAIT, they were NEW then!!!!

Thanks for any pointers or help, it is appreciated!! It won't let me play at all right now, and I'm Jonesin' for some Indiana Jones!!

Optical sensor. There should be two ends, one recieve and one transmit. They can get dirty and need to be cleaned, if you get lucky that's it. In theory, ball should break the beam and trigger an action just as if there was some kind of physical switch there.
 
When you turn on the game, it should sequence through the Idol and drop the lock gate three times to release all of the balls. If the gate is not dropping, then you will need to fix that. If the gate does drop but the ball isn't released, hold down the gate with a pencil to let the ball be released at power up. Then the game should play correctly. It seems that if the game does not think that there is a ball in the idol, it will not release it.
 
What I ended up doing was holding down the lock gate to get the balls out. It was playing strange on the first game after getting the balls out, throwing multi-balls for no reason, firing new balls during play when not warranted, but midway through the game it started playing normal and has been since.

Seems very odd to me...

So I guess whenever it malfunctions, I repeat the process, shut it down, start it and play again. Is this a computer issue?
 
I take it back...third game and the gate drop on the idol won't drop again...

Man this is frustrating...
 
I don't own an IJ, so I can't help specifically with the idol issue. But your ramdom mutliball issue would likely be a trough switch problem (the trough is the assembly that the ball are stored in before being kicked into the shooter lane and is where the drained ball go ICYDK). I don't know if IJ used microswitches or optos, but either way diagnosing them is fairly straightforward.

You test them in the switch edge test (you'll likely need your manual to find this and see which switch is which). Make sure the switches are "tripped" when balls are on them. Then you can remove the bottom ball with a magnet and make sure the other balls move down the trough and the top ball's switch is no longer "tripped". Do that until the trough is empty. If any of the balls hang in the spot where they normally rest, the trough is divoted and needs to be filed flat.
 
I had this on mine, and it ended up being the switch on the down ramp after the ball gate drop. That switch had gone bad. Replaced the switch, and the ball gate has worked fine ever since. Just a thought.
 
All the switches checked out AOK...
My pin tech came by tonight and he ended up tightening the Idol, and it's cured!!

For now!!!
 
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