I don't envy repair people

Deadly

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I have a lot of respect for you repair guys - wether it's monitors or system boards my hats off to you. I can only imagine the piss poor hack job/failed repair attempt victims you've had go through your hands. I'd like to hear horror stories.

I spent 2 hours trouble shooting a monitor board only to find out (after moving the wiring harness enough to realize) some jack ass replaced a zener diode with a capacitor which lovingly fried 7 other components. This is the 3rd board I've repaired that someone shot gunned in the wrong parts. :D
 
I only wish that I had saved some of the pictures. The Williams Repro harness was born out of frustration from all of the poor hacked up wiring harness' in Williams cabs.

Saw one Robotron Cabaret that had all of the connectors in place, but the wires were soldered to the boards. Yes it did have a switcher very badly hacked into place.

Saw a poor old Moon Patrol that had been converted into a multi with Clay's kit. Wiring was such a rat's nest, I would be scared to plug it in to the wall. Had a big ass 120mm fan blowing on the switching power supply to keep it cool.

Have a Stargate power supply in hand that has individual diodes tied together to replace both BR1 and BR2.

The list goes on and on. Most of these hacked up games have come from route ops.
 
I have a lot of respect for you repair guys - wether it's monitors or system boards my hats off to you. I can only imagine the piss poor hack job/failed repair attempt victims you've had go through your hands. I'd like to hear horror stories.

I spent 2 hours trouble shooting a monitor board only to find out (after moving the wiring harness enough to realize) some jack ass replaced a zener diode with a capacitor which lovingly fried 7 other components. This is the 3rd board I've repaired that someone shot gunned in the wrong parts. :D

Nothing like that on vides I've seen, but I've seen JAMMA-tized cabs with rats nest of wires - uncut, unstrapped, with original wiring in place.
I can share some truly pinball horror hacks, but this is not the right place. ;)
 
Just finished up someones elses mess with this Golf game. Went from Teed Off to Big Event. The original Teed Off harness I pulled out...not a damn conector left. Everything was zip tied, or MASKING TAPED together. Contacts on the leaf switches were held on by what looked like chewing gum......everything was just hanging by zip ties..boards too.

A 5 year old could have done better. Good thing I was changing harnesses. Yikes!
 
Hackjobs are what makes everything fun :)

If you didn't laugh about 'em you'd have to cry.
 
I only wish that I had saved some of the pictures. The Williams Repro harness was born out of frustration from all of the poor hacked up wiring harness' in Williams cabs.

Saw one Robotron Cabaret that had all of the connectors in place, but the wires were soldered to the boards. Yes it did have a switcher very badly hacked into place.

Saw a poor old Moon Patrol that had been converted into a multi with Clay's kit. Wiring was such a rat's nest, I would be scared to plug it in to the wall. Had a big ass 120mm fan blowing on the switching power supply to keep it cool.

Have a Stargate power supply in hand that has individual diodes tied together to replace both BR1 and BR2.

The list goes on and on. Most of these hacked up games have come from route ops.


Hmmm... think I know where that Moon Patrol is.... The fan was the guy's idea to keep the older ram cool... sheesh. Sadly enough after watching the guy swap ram on the board I now know why the wiring was the way it was.

We're actually going to pull that multi kit out of there soon and try the old moon patrol harness and see what we get.
 
I only wish that I had saved some of the pictures. The Williams Repro harness was born out of frustration from all of the poor hacked up wiring harness' in Williams cabs.

Saw one Robotron Cabaret that had all of the connectors in place, but the wires were soldered to the boards. Yes it did have a switcher very badly hacked into place.

Yes My Robotron Caberet was hacked to hell. They had a switcher hidden duck taped above coin door, Tape was prob atleast 5-10 years old. switcher fell off when I moved it. Harness plugs cut and soldered to rom, main board and PS. yanked it all out, put in a nice board set, an original rebuilt power supply and my new UR harness, for temp use. As soon as my friend from Seattle repairs my original harness. It will be all original and unhacked again. Looked like a bomb went off in it.

roboharn-1.jpg

roboharn6.jpg

roboharn5.jpg

roboharn1.jpg
 
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The bad part is when they take it all apart, then expect you to fix it while it's all in pieces. Then I have to put it back together so I can see what it's doing, then I can take apart what needs taking apart (and usually MUCH less than was taken apart before) so i can fix it.

Some of the crappy stuff:

1) 40-pin connectors cut off, and every single wire soldered directly to the board so I can't just pop it out.

2) Dead rats fried on the line filter in the bottom of the cab.

3) Blown fuses wrapped in aluminum foil and stuck back in, and then they wonder why the game no longer comes on.

4) Had an old pinball that had no power switch, and someone cut a big hole in the side and installed a light switch (like you have on your wall) to turn it on and off.

5) A pigtail fuse was blown on a monitor chassis. Someone just solder another fuse piggyback on top of it (instead of removing the old one first). Then that fuse blew, and another was soldered on top, etc until there were four blown fuses stacked and soldered on top of each other.

6) How about the 1937 nickel slot machine (all mechanical) that was brought in for repair, and they hand me a box full of springs and levers from when the "tried to fix it themselves" and now they want me to fix it (which I eventually did - but it wasn't fun).

7) I really like the one where they called me out to fix their game, telling me that it was working up until a couple weeks ago but then it stopped working. I get there and open it up, only to discover there is no monitor chassis or game PCB inside. Then they confess that they first called a "garage fix-it guy" like a lot of you guys are who have regular jobs, and they didn't like the guy or couldn't get ahold of him anymore, and didn't realize he'd taken the stuff out....
 
I spent 2 hours trouble shooting a monitor board only to find out (after moving the wiring harness enough to realize) some jack ass replaced a zener diode with a capacitor which lovingly fried 7 other components. This is the 3rd board I've repaired that someone shot gunned in the wrong parts. :D

I had resistors in place of diodes and the wrong caps in several places on my Tempest monitor when I repaired it. Cap kits alone cost about $60 (since after I capped it I had to go to Rat Shack and pay a premium for blown resistors due to the cluster f*** job done on it before). The irony is that I might have had to pay hundreds more for the game had the monitor been working :D

Sometimes idiocy pays off in the end.
 
Sometimes it turns out ok. I ran into a guy that had an Elvira and the Party Monsters all torn apart in four boxes. He was going to restore it, as it was in a building fire and had smoke and water damage. He tore it all apart, and decided it was too much work and he already had a working one. He said that I could have it, as long as I was going to keep it and not sell it. I now have a pretty nice EATPM, that only needs a Boogie Moster Assembly to be complete.

Another guy had a Monday Night Football and a Paragon that he needed repaired. He paid for all the parts that he needed, and I got a very nice Gorgar for my labor. The Gorgar had taken a lightning strike, and only ran me $75.00 to get it up and running smooth.
 
If nothing else, at least my students learned to wire things well. They included that single loop in my honor. To give me something to bitch about. They seemed to believe I enjoy doing that. ???
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/6/6.S28/imagegallery/finalproject/1.html

They all learned well. But some of them didn't learn soon enough. That's the same project!! (but a different design team)
http://web.mit.edu/bputnam/Public/6.072/nonsense.jpg

Guess which project worked? (that's my awesome nephew btw)
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/6/6.S28/imagegallery/finalproject/8.html

And guess who stayed up until 7am helping the other team debug? :(

Luckily, I haven't had to deal with a wiring crisis in an arcade vid yet. Death Race was hacked pretty good, but mostly intact. Certainly not a crisis.
 
Have a Stargate power supply in hand that has individual diodes tied together to replace both BR1 and BR2.

I just got one of those. Plus another one that has 2 5,000 uF caps + 2 4,000 uF caps tied together to replace the 18,000 uF cap.

ken
 
Just got done working on a Tempest. Someone had put sockets in, so swapping chips was easy. Unfortunately, when they pulled the original chips the pulled traces too. Pulled them so completely you couldn't tell they were even there. That took a bit of checking with a meter and schematic to figure out which lines were missing. But after several hours of verifying traces, and adding some wire runs, she's back up and running. Now to work on the one that's smoked. At least I can see which parts are definately bad, it's the ones you can't tell if they were smoked that's going to cause me grief.
 
I repaired a bally/stern lamp driver board last night that someone else had tried to fix... and shorted a couple of pins together when they replaced a socket. That took me a while to figure out...

I hate those kinds of problems. Without my test bench it would have been a REAL pain to track down.

I had a guy bring me a Paragon to repair where he had taken apart the ball trough and bent a bunch of the pieces.
 
I'm not defending some of the hack repairs, but think about it:

An operator has a "hot" game that is raking in the dough. But it's busted. He opens it up and finds that the edge connector is FUBAR. And no, he doesn't have a spare in stock, because it's a newer game or has a different style connector.

He can either wait 5-10 days (this is before the internet!) for an edge connector to be shipped to him or he can solder all 40 wires to the board and have it up and running in a few hours.

You KNOW he's going to solder that sucker and get it back out on the floor or on the route.

It's only the hobbyists and actual contract repair techs who will do it right.
 
I'm not defending some of the hack repairs, but think about it:

An operator has a "hot" game that is raking in the dough. But it's busted. He opens it up and finds that the edge connector is FUBAR. And no, he doesn't have a spare in stock, because it's a newer game or has a different style connector.

He can either wait 5-10 days (this is before the internet!) for an edge connector to be shipped to him or he can solder all 40 wires to the board and have it up and running in a few hours.

You KNOW he's going to solder that sucker and get it back out on the floor or on the route.

You almost got it right, but the operator isn't going to have a soldering iron with him because he only cares about the money he's making, and isn't going to waste time learning how to fix these things.

So - hell cut the wire from the connector, strip some insulation off, and wrap the wire around the leg of some component nearby.

Trust me, I've seen this numerous times - both by operators AND hobbyists....
 
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