ice cold beer issue

cleverlyj

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i just got an ice cold beer, and it will not play . -

when you turn it on, it makes the turn on glug glug glug noise, then the left motor keeps trying to pull the bar down, and will not stop.

if you try to coin it up, here's what it will do - it will not make any other noise, however it will show 0 points, the 100 point counter, and however many credits are left. it will also light up the #1 hole, but the right side bar will not move.

the motor on the left bar keeps running and will not stop till the machine is unplugged, whether it is coined up or not.

i checked the cherry switches for the limit switches and tried swapping them out with a known working one, no luck. the board had a tag on it saying there was a bad q09, q16, and q17. i replaced q16 and q17, (couldn't find a tip125 at rat shack), and when i turned it on, the limit switch did slow the right bar down when pushed on, but then it smoked q17, and now it's back to doing the same thing.

what should i be looking at as far as fixing this? i know i need to replace q9 and rereplace q17, but what else should i be doing? already checked all socketed chips and cleaned the edge connector. i checked the test point voltages and tp1-3 and 3-4 were correct. tp 5-6 showed 10.5v or so instead of 6v, and tp7-8 showed 39v instead of 32v.

also, there are three or four connectors in the bottom of the cabinet (molex connectors) that are plugged. they are labeled g, l, m, and n. i can't find any places for these to go so i'm assuming they are for an optional ticket dispenser, is that right?

i am not good at testing transistors, so if anyone could in layman's terms tell me how to test those tip120-tip125 style connectors i would appreciate it.

also, the traces for these are somewhat destroyed and missing by whoever did previous work, as it was horribly soldered, but i cleaned up what i could and ran a couple of jumper wires and everything has continuity now.

can someone point me in the next direction, please? i'd much rather fix this than have to find another board...
 
You got an ICB! If you need a working board to test with let me know.

sorry, can't help with your real problem.
 
You got an ICB! If you need a working board to test with let me know.

sorry, can't help with your real problem.

i may need one, however at this point i'm fairly confident i've got board issues in the first place. once i get the board ruled out i may take you up on this!
 
allright, so i have a slightly positive but weird update on this.

it turns out the actual problem is that the left motor won't move up and the right motor won't move either way.

the issue with the left side motor going down all the way is that the right motor bottom limit switched wasn't closed. as soon as i close it, the left motor stops. ?!?!

so, if i do that, and then open the ball door, the game will start and function minus the bars moving (except for the left side that goes down.) if i move the joysticks up and down they do make the up and down joystick noise, and if the bar is moved to the very top, the joysticks will not make the up sound, and if the bar is moved to the very bottom, it will not make the down sound.

so, this totally throws me a curveball. seems like i have a potential different issue now. anyone have any suggestions?
 
When you start a game the first thing it does is finds the ball. Sounds like the motor that wont move at all might be bad. First you need to adjust the limit switch on the side that is working so it stops that motor when the bar reaches the bottom. At that point the other side should move in the opposite direction to force the ball in a hole if the ball was on the bar. Once the ball falls in it should go to the bottom and hit another switch telling the game the ball is ready for play.
Most likely you have a bad motor but it could be a board problem too. A quick check would be to swap the wires from one motor to the other.
Let me know what you find then I will look at the schematics and point you in the right direction from there.
 
allright, so i switched the motor wires to the other side. same thing. although, with red on red and black on black on the motor wires, i only had the up direction on the right side, which would not stop going up unless both down limit switches were closed. i did not have control of left up or left down, or right down.
 
Check the leaf switches on the joysticks with a meter to rule those out. Always check the simple stuff (and most likely) first. Post back what you find and I will break out the schematics and take a quick look. I dont recall what drives the motors. It uses a pair of transistors to reverse the voltage if I remember right.
 
just did, and they metered fine, although i already suspected they were good as the up/down game sound (not the motor sound but the musical sound) will play when the game is in play mode and a stick is moved in either direction.
 
here's where i'm at now, after replacing q9 (tip125) and q17(tip120). i did also replace the 74ls02@u36 and try swapping the 2 68a21's @u26 and u27, but that didn't do anything.

to start a game, as before, i have to close the right bottom limit switch manually (as the left bar will go down and close the left one) and open the ball door. once that is accomplished, it will start a game, and if i move the bar manually up off the limit switches, i do have control over the down direction of the left bar.

however, the left up, and right up and down directions still don't work. it's like the motors aren't receiving the signal to move in those directions. the reason i say that is that it still makes the game musical sound in whatever position it should when the sticks are moved up or down, on either side.

let's say, for example, i push the right stick up. it will make the musical tone from the speaker until i let it go. then, if i hold the right up limit switch closed and push the right stick up, it will not make the sound.

and it does that for left up, right up, and right down. so that's where i'm at.
 
new update -

update - i now have 3 of the four directions working. replacing the tip125@q8 gave me the up on both left and right sides.

now i just need to figure out what other ones i need to replace to get the down on the right side working.

a new tip125 on q8 doesn't exactly make sense as to why the right side is working now, as it seems to only control the left motor per the schematic. so i'm suspecting that replacing one or more of the other resistors (q10-11, q18-19) should give me the down control back on the right side. any ideas on which i should look at?
 
this is officially fixed! i will post pics of the repairs for future help soon, but it turned out all the other tip125's and tip120's were cooked.

so, i pulled all the transistors off the board, cleaned off as much solder as i could, ran new solder for the 12v rails, and built a new transistor board.

what i did was buy a bunch of 22ga. wire, all 8 transistors, and a piece of breadboard from rat shack. then i just soldered everything together on the breadboard and ran jumpers to each location of where the pins went.
 
DSC04253.jpg


so here's a pic of the repair work. on the board end it doesn't really look pretty, as where all the red wires go, to the transistors q8-11 and q16-229, the majority of the traces were gone, and it is thoroughly blackened. as far as mounting the satellite board, i cut a small piece of 2x4x2", and mounted it to that next to the main board in the back of the cab. so far, after playing a few games and running it for a while, it runs good.
 
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