Disassembly of the playfield

I have now rebuilt the flippers and cleaned the flipper bats before putting them back. There was quite a lot of wear in the old linkage and one coil sleeve was broken, so it was really needed. I played a few games to verify the function and they worked fine.

I have also started the disassembly and done some cleaning of the parts taken out. They are not as brand new after cleaning but they look much better and it’s important to get rid of the dirt and grime else it’s soon brought back to the playfield again.

This is the current state of the playfield. It looks quite naked but there are still parts there that have to be taken out to reach all areas for cleaning and changing rubbers. There are also quite a lot of lamps hidden under ramps and other parts. I will change all that are hard to reach to make sure not to have to take everything apart again soon.

And then there was light

Just a short note to say that the G.I. connectors at the driver board have been changed and G.I. is now working as it should. While taking out the driver board I found another connector that needed attention, J106 was soldered directly to the male connector. I gave it a new set of connectors to be able to take the board out without soldering.

 

 I also found a problem with the speaker cables. At some point in time they have been cut off. Probably to get the display panel out of the game, without the effort of disentangle the speaker cable all the way up to the connector. It was reconnected and insulated with tape, but tape ages and now one of the cables was uninsulated and could have been shorted in to anything at the driver board, probably causing major problems. I reinsulated the cables with shrink tubing.

Missing G.I.

I was planning to start the disassembly of the playfield today to prepare it for cleaning and change of rubbers. But before I started I found another problem, the lower half of the playfield is missing the G.I. I hadn’t noticed this before and I do not think the owner had either. I had a look at the fault and the cause is a fried connector at the power driver board. Both the male and female connectors have to be changed. Also the connector above seems to have been a bit hot, so I will change that one as well to make sure it does not cause any problems. Unfortunately I’m out of 11 pin females for the moment so I have to order a couple before I can fix it.

 

This was the first time I opened up the backbox and I found a surprise in it, check the upper left fuse, F108, at the picture below. Somebody didn't have a spare fuse and instead shorted it by a wire. Never ever do anything like this, the fuses are there for a reason and should always be replaced with a fuse of the proper amperage.

The Sanctum brick wall

The Sanctum brick wall is now sorted. I took it apart and cleaned and polished the parts and replaced the coil sleeve and the broken spring. The lifting mechanism does now fall back down by its own weight, as it should. The reason for the sluggish movement of the lifting mechanism seems to have been caused by someone fiddling with it and causing the plunger to not line up properly with the coil.  

 

 

The Switch that should indicate that the target is down was misaligned. As it was bent it would have been triggered by the lifting mechanism dropping down after lifting the target instead of being triggered by a dropped target. This didn’t happen since the lifting mech didn’t fall back down as it should. But once that problem was fixed also the Switch had to be realigned to be triggered by the target only.

 

I have played the game for about 30-40 minutes and the ball lock magnet and brick wall are now working as it should.