Thursday, September 23, 2010

Sinbad repair

Will post some more info about repairs so other people can learn about them (as pinballninja.com advises).
Repaired a Sinbad. Gottlieb System 1, I had never worked on this type of game before.
Prepared myself by reading the pinrepair.com guide for this type of game, and checking my spare parts boxes to see what I had laying around for this type of games (coils, a driver board, ..).

The pinball machine was in quite good condition. It had only been on location for about 3 years and then always in home use. Needed a good cleaning, new rubbers, some lamps.

It played very slow, that was mainly because the playfield wasn't raised enough.
I raised the back legs, adjusted the gaps of the popbumper switches, and the game came alive.
One of the right flippers was too weak, eos needed to be cleaned and adjusted.

One problem was that the chimes did not work when you scored points. The game was very boring without this instant feedback when you're playing well. Most of the charm of playing these old games is the constant ringing of a bell or chimes when you score points.
Only at startup of a new game the chimes did make a little sound.. So the fuses and coils were good. It had to be something on the cpu, couldn't be anything else..
Took out the manual, sure, there's a dipswitch to select if you want chimes when you score points or not (dipswitch 20 if I remember correct). Weird enough it was already set to 'on'.
Set the dipswitch to the 'off' position. Still no chimes. Turned it back in the 'on' position. Bingo ! There it was, working chimes during gameplay.
Seems the dipswitch didn't make good contact anymore, moving it had solved the problem again..

Another problem was there were no playfield lights. Had measured all fuses, they seemed ok. Read the part about the playfield-relays (Q and R if I remember well). Operated them by hand, still the lamps didn't turn on. Measured voltages, didn't have any. No broken wires so it had to be something with the fuses.
After a while I removed the fuse from the fuseholder, measured it again.. and it was broken afterall !
Replaced it with a new fuse and the playfield lights came on nicely :-)
Now I know why you should always remove one end of a fuse out of the holder and not test them still in position.. there's 20 minutes of my life wasted :-(

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