Demolition man

Next project is a Demolition man. It has two intermittent problems, the cryoclaw does sometimes not move and the flippers loose power after a while, making it impossible to get the ball up the ramps. It should also be cleaned, polished and rerubbered. I have already visited this game onsite and had a look at the cryoclaw problem. I found a badly repaired connector for the claw motor which I replaced. But since the problem was quite intermittent I wasn’t sure if I had found the cause or not when I leaved. I have now played the game a lot at the workshop and the claw is working properly so the connector was probably the cause. The loss of flipper power was a bit more troublesome. I was quite sure it was an electrical problem so I took out the fliptronic board and checked the soldering at the connectors and power transistors. They all looked OK but to make sure I reflow all of them. Then I connected the oscilloscope and DVM to one of the flipper coils to monitor what happens when the flipper lose the power and the flipper lost power but I couldn’t measure any differences compared to when the flipper had normal power. The conclusion was that it is a mechanical problem and when disassembling the flipper mechanisms I found the cause. take a look at this picture, can you see the fault or faults? It's not the spring, even if it isn't the right type.

Take a close look at the plunger, there are no coil sleeve sticking out through the coil bracket and, it might be hard to see at the picture, there are oil at the plunger. I’ve said it before but its worth to repeat, do not lubricate anything in a pinball unless the manual specify that it should be lubricated. If something doesn’t work as smooth as it should, take it apart, clean the parts, replace broken things and put it back together again. Oil might make things work fine but just for a short while, the oil will collect dust and grime and will end up more like a glue and It is a lot of job to clean it off.

I do not think the oil was the main cause for the loss of power, the main cause was that the coilsleeves was inserted the wrong way round. The flange was against the coil bracket causing the plunger to scratch against the bracket instead of sliding smoothly through the sleeve.

 

Both flipper assemblies had to be completely disassembled and cleaned before reassemling it with a new fresh flipper rebuild kit.

 

 

I also made new coil wrapers, the paper I had was a litle bit dark but it looks beter than the old oil soaked blue one.

 

I have played the game quite a lot after the rebuild and haven’t seen any sign of power loss. I haven’t disassembled the upper flipper yet but I can see oil residue at the plunger and also at other plungers in the game. There are a lot of cleaning to do…

 

I have also started cleaning inserts and lamps, some of them was quite dirty.