Stern Ted Nugent Pinball Machine With SERIOUS Problems! - Shorted Display Repair...

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool pinball repair video for you today. What have we here? This kind of looks like a Stern Nugent pinball machine. We're going to be working on this today. We had a customer bring us several different pinball machines and today we're going to fix this Nugent. So let me get it out of here, set it up on its legs, and then we'll see what it's doing. Right on. Okay, so we got them set up. I always thought this was a cool back glass. Kind of screams 1970. Art courtesy of Wii Magazine. I don't see a date. Must have been 77, 78. I would guess 78. You know what? It's not that important. And like I said, the play field is pretty good. Or did I show you that yet? I don't know if these, I can't remember if these Sterns just stay in better shape or if it just hasn't been played that much. Now it does have a little bit of wear right there. And the gentleman has asked if we could fix that for him. Let's see if we can touch that up just slightly, just a little bit. Uh, cool. Okay, so let's take the back glass out and let's see what condition the boards are in on this thing. So the customer said that the problem with it is there's no sound. However, that's the problem that the eight ball champ had. So I wonder if we got some of them confused when we were writing them down. Displays look good. It's got a new rectifier board. That's good. Original solenoid driver board. Cap might be replaced. Um, original style lamp driver board. It's got a new MPU and it looks like the sound board has been recapped. So, um, it looks like they have been messing with the sound. So maybe they run into some kind of problem with that. All right. So that all looks pretty good. We'll see what she needs. Let me take the glass off so we can look under the play field and make sure nothing's under there. Okay. They have hacked in a coil kind of. Yeah, that ain't gonna work. It's not in there straight. Uh, so we got to mess with that. Everything else looks pretty original. I don't see any crazy hacks. Right. And then this old school speaker. Remember, this was one of the very first Stern games with sound. So pretty cool. I like it. All right. So we'll plug it up and see what happens. Okay. We're plugged up. Let's see what she's got. She's got general illumination lights. A little bit of a display problem on that last display. See how the numbers, oh, you can't see it that good because of the way it's flickering. That is a digit missing. The third digit is missing. That could be a problem with the, um, we've got a couple of problems going. That could be a problem where it's just got nobody set the high score yet. And we just need to go in and reset the high scores to get that correct. And that third one, the fourth one has issues going on. Something's going on with that. And the third one actually has a short in it. I'll show you what a short looks like in one of these old plasma displays. I don't know if you'll be able to see it, but, oh yeah, you can see that. So that's inside the display. There's nothing you can do about that. All right. So let's try to start it and see if it gives us any tunes, any good tunes, man. I don't see any attract lights either. I think they're all dead as well. Let's see if we can give it any credits here. It didn't want to start for us. These are really sealed up. They wanted to make sure we couldn't cheat. I might have to actually put a quarter in it. Oh, wait a minute. I know the secret. You can grab it from the back and twist a little bit. That ain't doing nothing. Oh, okay. It must've done something. All right. Kick the ball out. Yeah. We've got no computer controlled lamps. The coils are working. There's no lamps, you know, any of these, and there's no sound. And wow, that one's also got a short end. Got some ugly displays. We'll see what we can do. Holy crap. Are they all over-volted? Is that what's going on? Look, they're all glowing in the same spot. Now those do usually have a, they do usually have a little dot where the power comes in, but it seems like these are even crazier than usual. Okay. So I'm checking all the pins. They've repinned all the connectors, which is good. This one here though, if you look at that second pin, it almost looks like it might be in there backwards. That blue one. I'm going to pull it out and see what's going on. Yeah, it was actually slid in backwards. So I'll turn that around. That ought to help our situation. Let me see if I can figure out what that pin did. That'd be interesting to know at least. All right. So pin two of that connector goes to pin five of all the displays. You see the blue, which is the digit enable for the tens digit, the second digit. And that one was on, wasn't it? So it must've been touching just good enough in there that it wasn't a problem. So that's not one of our issues. Okay. Let me check the voltage going to the displays first. It could be that the voltage is like 250 when it's supposed to be 190 and it's causing a short. The solenoid driver board regulates that voltage down. If you leave it running too long, if the regulator goes bad, it just makes it as high as possible, which is usually about 250 volts. And then it could fry displays if you leave it like that too long, which might be what's going on here. But maybe if it's really high, we can get it adjusted down, get the regulator working right, and it'll save the displays. I've seen them before where they were doing that. And then if you got the voltage down, it stopped doing that. So we might get lucky. So you got to be careful when you do this. It really is like 200 volts. So you don't want to mess with it too much. So here's our five volt. It's at 5.22. So the reason that's a little high is because this solenoid driver board, I've got an X on the voltage thing, but that's all right. There's like a little circuit built into it that actually raises the voltage up because they were trying to get over the line voltage problem. Back in the day, the voltage was a little lower and they were trying to account for resistance that it would get in the wires over to the MPU. So a lot of these clock in at like 5.2 or something. And this board will run like that. Okay. So here's our high voltage, 249 volts. So here's the problem with the high voltage being like that. You can't tell. You can't tell that it's high. Yeah, we can tell right now because we know that we saw the issues of it, but it's very common for that to go high and then at first it doesn't burn anything up. And the displays don't even really look that much brighter. So basically this transistor is a transformer. It's taking AC voltage and turning it into other AC voltages. And then it sends it up here to this rectifier board where the voltages are turned into DC voltages. There are some diodes over there on the left where they are on a regular one. I don't know if it's like that on this one that turn it into DC. And then it sends it up here like 250 volts. Okay. So it comes through here and it goes into this section and this rectifies it down. There is a pot right there to turn it down. So you can turn it down to whatever voltage you want. In the paperwork, it says that it's supposed to be 190, but most people kind of set theirs a little low whenever you do it. So go and make it like 180 because it makes the displays last longer. So we need to work on this board anyway. We kind of knew that because this filter capacitor hasn't been replaced. So I think what I'll do is I'll go ahead and pull that out and that'll be the first thing that we do. So you can see this resistor here is burned up. That's very common too. That's usually if that's burned up, something is shorted in here and screwed up your high voltage. And I'll just do the obligatory mention here that if you put LED displays in it, you don't have to even use this. You don't even need the high voltage area. So eventually all of the plasmas are going to be worn out or destroyed or screwed up. It won't be while I'm still here. So I'm just saying after another hundred years, after I finally pass away, everything will probably be LEDs. There's not much of a downside to them at all. I don't like the LED lights, but the LED displays look almost identical to the original and they have all the benefits of the LED bulbs do. So they don't need the high voltage. They last longer supposedly. We don't really know yet though, but they last quite a while and you can make them with readily available parts. So the LED displays are a good upgrade, but we're going to see if we can extend the life of these plasmas just a little bit longer. So I'm going to take this guard off and then we'll test these three transistors. This one, this one, and this one. And then a lot of times we replace the potentiometer in it, but that's actually a pretty good potentiometer. If it's the little tiny ones that Bally used, they're junk, clutter junk, throw them away. But this type is usually pretty good. And sometimes there's a diode screwed up too. So let me start testing things and we'll see what the problem is. Okay, so the resistor was bad and all three of the transistors were bad. So the transistors are 2N3440s. Look at that. And I got some. Look at this. Look how beautiful. Look at the long leads. All right. And then the other one, big papa here, is a 2N3584. I hope I've got that one. So let me see what I can find. Okay, so I replaced the three and the 22K resistor. I put a higher wattage one in there. The original was half a watt. I put a two on it. All the other resistors were fine and the two diodes up there were fine. So I replaced those three and I was able to adjust it down to 180. Like I said, it's supposed to be 190, but you can run it at 180. That would still need some work. Fixed it. So they had not shorted. They were just shorting from high voltage. Once we got the high voltage off of it, we were good. Let me put it in display mode if I can on this one. So here's the display test. It's got a few problems. So this display has two digits missing. This display has three digits missing and one of them's fried. This display has one digit missing. This display has one digit missing and this display has one digit missing. So we need to figure out why all of them have that third digit, or I guess maybe you'd call that the fourth digit, the thousandth digit. We need to figure out why that's missing on every one of them. That's the first thing. But I'm very happy that we got rid of that short. That really saved those displays. You saw what was going on. They were about to burn, slap the crap up. So I looked at the connection on the CPU. Remember the CPU is new. I looked at the connection on the CPU and it's pin four on that same connector we were just messing with. And pin four is in there fine. I pulled the pin out to look at it. It's a good crimp. I put it back in and we have the same problem. So I disconnected all of the displays except the first one, which on this particular game is the credit one. So the credit display shows how many credits you have and what ball you're on. And they're wired different on each game. On that one, you can kind of tell by just the way the harness goes. And so the reason I did that was because if you have one bad display that is shorted, or I'm talking about these, if these transistors are shorted, not the glass. If you have like a transistor shorted, or this IC chip is shorted, you can get a problem that pops up on all the other displays because of the way that the game strobes the signal in. So it can just, it can screw up the other displays. So I thought, well, maybe this first one has a transistor that's shorted or something, and that is killing the signal. So the thought being, as soon as the wiring connects to here, and it, since that pin, it's pin seven on this and pin four on the MPU. Since that goes to each display, maybe since it's screwed up on one, it's shorting all of them out and it's making all of them lose that thousandth digit. So I disconnected all of them, except this first one is still doing it. So I've just checked on this first one. And if you have problems where one of the numbers are missing, one of the digits is missing, it's usually these resistors, R1, R3, R5, R7, R9, and R11, the odd numbered low resistors. They're supposed to be 100K. And these three are fine, but those two are actually burned out. So the thousandth digit and the ten thousandth digit, the resistor is burned up. It could be that the original board did something that fried all those resistors. I don't know, but it doesn't even look fried, but it is, it's open. So I'm going to replace it with new 100,000, uh, 100,000 ohm. No, I'm sorry. Yeah. 100, 100K ohm resistors. Um, and then we'll put it back in and see if that gets this one, right. And then we'll just work through the rest of them. Um, that one, the third player one has a weird thing where the half of the digits missing or something, and we'll figure that out when we get to it. But, um, so I'm going to just try replacing those two resistors, see if that gets those two digits back. And while I'm at it, I'm going to reflow the solder on these pins. If they haven't been done, this particular one actually has, somebody has already done it. Um, uh, as we go through them, we'll check that out. The transistors, usually you don't have problems with those. Sometimes you do, if you've got a segment missing or something, but usually it's these freaking resistors, if the resistors and the solder connections on these pins are usually your problem. Okay. So I put that one back in and the one digit came back, but the thousands was still missing. I took this one out and looked at it and, uh, the resistors were fine. So I figured, well, it still has to be that signal. So, uh, I took that wire out that I was talking about. It looked fine. I cut it, crimped the new pin on it and that fixed it. So that brought back that digit. So four of the displays are now fine. So that would mean this one had two resistors burn out. These three were fine. And this one's a complete mess. So it looks like the, the, um, the tens digit is missing. It's probably a resistor. The one hundredth digit is tripping. Might be a short on the board, like a solder splash or a bad transistor. Um, and then the, uh, hundred thousandth digit is missing. So that's probably a resistor as well. So let's pull that one out and check it out. So it had just about all of the resistors were toasted on the thing. So I replaced the six, all six of them on this one. And, um, it's working, but there's an extra little something going on. So if you put it in test, notice how it moves around. It's the bottom, then the top, bottom, the right. So it's not locked on or it wouldn't be able to, uh, it wouldn't be able to move around and it wouldn't be able to turn on. So that's an interesting one. I think that might be one of the two transistors that drives the digit. So I'll So it's this hundreds one. So it's this one right here. There are two transistors for each of these digits. And then there is one transistor for each segment. But if it was a segment problem, you would get that, like how that bottom lines on, you would get that on each digit. Um, and it wouldn't move. So the way it's down at the bottom, then it's in the middle, then it's at the top, then it's down at the bottom. Um, you saw how that was doubled up in some places. And then whenever it's supposed to be blank at the beginning of the game, when it's in the track, there's a little line there where that one segments on. Um, if that was the segment chip or the segment transistors, um, you would have that little line on every one of them. So it's real close. So it's something that's, that is only happening on this one digit. And there's only a few things that are connected to just that digit. It's these two transistors. So it's this one and I guess we need to figure out what the other one is. So here's one, here's two, here's three, here's four. So it's this transistor. So see, I'm trying to point out the three legs in the triangle. We'll do it from this end. Say one, two, three. So that's a transistor. This is a resistor. One, two, three. That's a transistor. This is a resistor. One, two, three. That's a transistor. So it's this transistor. And then it's the, uh, whatever connects to that. So I guess we need to find that on the other side. And I thought I could find the third one. Am I doing it right? It's the hundreds display. I'm wrong. It's this one. Yeah. One's tens, hundreds. So it's the fourth one. So one, two, three, four. So it's this transistor. This one, this one, and this one. And then this is the output where it actually connects to the tube, the plate, the glass. And then this is it tying it to some voltage or something. So whichever one this connects to, whichever one of these transistors it connects to, that's the one. So it might be this one. Yeah. See that connection there and how it goes under these and then to this resistor and then bam, this one. So Q3 and Q9. I'm just going to swap Q3 for instance, and then I'll try it again. And if that doesn't fix it, I'll swap this Q9. And if I don't, if that doesn't fix it, I'll swap Q3 and see if that fixes it. Just out of curiosity, if that, if that can be a thing. If that doesn't fix it, we're just going to have to leave it. It's not that big of a deal. And if you notice, they've got this in the fourth player. That's an old trick that people did. If you've got a bunch of displays and some of them aren't worth a crap, you put the crappiest one in the fourth player because hardly anybody ever plays four player games. Now I know some of you just said, well, I do. I play four player games all the time. You are the only person in the world besides those other three people that play four player. Nobody else does. So let me see if that's that. And it's like I said, it's probably been a problem for a long time. And I already checked those and they checked fine, but it could be that under load, they do something. So it was the one right up against the glass. Q9 fixed it. And it's just like the other ones now. So there you go. And again, the reasoning that I had behind that was because it only affected one digit. So it had to be something to do with the digit, not the segment, even though it looked like it was a segment problem because the wrong segment was on. It's kind of confusing, but once you mess with them a little bit, you kind of figure it out. So I don't know about you folks, but that kind of looks like five really good looking plasma display. So that's the displays. What I'm doing to get into the test is just pressing the button inside the coin door. So let's go from there to the next one, which is the solenoid test and just see that left kicker look like there's no way in the world that's going to work. But let's just see what all is working and what isn't. None of them are working. Okay, the earlier ones must be the sound. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. We probably blew a fuse. Yeah, serious solenoid problems. Something just tried to move on 17. Okay, so obviously we have major solenoid problems. The sound is all ran by the solenoid voltage and the solenoid signals. So that's probably those first six. Running it while that coil was screwed up, probably just blew the fuse, which is why we were having them work and then it stopped. All right, so under the play field, there is a sign that says, caution, use only a one amp slow blow fuse. So this is not a slow blow fuse. Let's see what it says here. Well, if I can get it. These are why my videos are so popular. One amp, 250 volts. What are we looking at? Says it's UL rated folks. All right, that is not a slow blow. I have seen them with those little dots on the filament in there. This is what you want. That's a slow blow. Big old thick looking thing. So this is a bus, fuse busman. That says MDL. That's a good slow blow. And they're not all MDL, but I like MDL. It also, it makes it more likely for you to see at a glance that it's blown. Now you can't always do that, but if one of these blows, usually you can tell. Of course you can tell this one is too, because the end of it ended up black, but you need to test them with a meter. So I'm going to put this back in and then try it again. Now it could be that it just would have blown anyway, but I think what's going on is they had one that can't take much, it can't take the heat. So the difference between a normal blow or a fast blow and a slow blow is the slow blow is slow to blow. There you go. So whenever, whenever, so this is a one amp. So the voltage is coming along and it's at half an amp. Works just fine, right? If the voltage were to go up to one amp, bam, the fuse would blow and it would kill the voltage. That's my layman's explanation. Now, here's the problem though. Sometimes the voltage goes up to one amp, but just for a second. So it'll calm down, right? So if this one's in there, this is a fast blow. If this one's in there, when it goes, whoa, it goes, oh hell no. Close it down, shut it down, explode. And it commits hairy carry. This one, it's more reason. So this one goes, wait a minute, what's going on here? Should I stab myself? No, it'll probably be all right. And then the voltage goes back down and it's fine. So this one takes about two seconds to blow. This one blows immediately. So if it says put a slow blow in it, that's why it's saying, look, if you put a regular one, it's going to blow the fuse every once in a while. But if you put a slow blow in it, it'll only blow whenever there's a serious short. If there's a serious short, what's going to happen is so that a short would be both sides of the voltage are tied together somewhere, maybe at this coil way up here. And so as the voltage goes up to it, it shorts. And then since it's short, it goes, oh hell, I know a shortcut, guys. We don't have to go slow. We can go fast. And it just starts drawing all kinds of amperage through the lines and going nuts. And once it lifts up over one amp, it blows the fuse. So on a fast blow, it'll do that immediately. On a slow blow, on like a coil, if you turn on the game, it'll go clunk and then it'll blow the fuse. So you can actually test with slow blow. So if you put it in, it'll go clunk and you turn the pinball machine off real quick and you won't even blow the fuse. You can tell which coil is locked on. I wouldn't recommend that's the best way to do that, but sometimes it's the best way to do that. All right, so I'm going to put this back in. With that said, we should have still heard the knocker working because it's in the bottom of the cabinet and this is the playfield fuse. The knocker is not fused by this. So it may have blown the one on the power supply too. So we've got to look at that Here's a closer look at that left kicker. It's actually not connected. The wire has broke off of the tube. So it looks like crap, but someone has disconnected it or disconnected itself. So that's not blowing fuses. I also went through and I checked all of these coils. So the way you check them is you just take a multimeter and put it on resistance check and you just check from pin to pin on the post to post on the coil. If you get a really low reading, which would be less than about one, that coil is probably shorted. I can't tell you the exact readings because it's different on every coil. Like a big one like this might be three. So three ohms might be the measure across there. A flipper coil is very strong. You've got other issues going on with flipper coils though, where like if this switch is closed, these two pins are shorted. See the two orange wires? They're connected together with the switch. So if you measure from there to there, your resistance is going to be zero. But a coil sometimes can be like two ohms, even 1.8 ohms, something like that. Doesn't necessarily mean it's shorted. If there's a short, the resistance is going to be like 0.2 or something like that. So I checked all these. None of these are shorted, including this one. It's not even shorted. It's just got the wire broke off of it and needs replaced. So I don't see any coils that are giving us problems. Here is the down in here and it's not shorted. And I also checked the one on the coin door. There is a lockout coil on the coin door. Whoa, look at that. It jumped out and tried to hit me. None of these coils are shorted. So let's look at the power supply in the back box. Remember, it's got that new rectifier board and see what the fuse looks like on it. Okay. So I checked that fuse. It's fine. And it is the correct one because it's a brand new board. There's actually a list up here that shows them. Notice how F4 there, it says coils, 5 amp. But if you look at over here, F6, it says 3 amp slow blow. So they're telling you that this one needs to be a slow blow, but that one doesn't. So you might wonder, well, why doesn't that one need to be a slow blow? But the one under the play field does. I don't know, folks. I'm not an engineer. Did I just see a light flicker up here? We've got the problem where none of the play field lights work. You know, though, some of the back box ones do. So it's probably just a connector problem. Okay. So let's see if we can blow that fuse again. What do you think about that? Oh yeah. There's one light that works on the play field and none of the other ones do. Crazy. There's our displays. All right. Let's see if the fuse blows again. These are all sound, I think. 14, 16, 19 were the ones that didn't work. All right. Let's look in the manual and see what All right. So the first six are not listed. They may be used for the sound or maybe they just don't do anything on this. So we got the left thumper, the right thumper, the center thumper, the out hole. It kicked the ball out, actually. The right slingshot, the saucer, and the three bank drop target on the right. So 14, we didn't get. The three bank drop target on the left. Hmm. That's interesting. 16 is nothing. And 19 is the coin lockout. Yeah, something ain't right. Because the left slingshot isn't even connected. So I must have those wrong. Maybe it's 15, 16, 19. And the flippers is the flipper relay. That was the click you heard in the back box. That's the flippers being turned on and off. So we're going to go with left slingshot and the coin door lockout. Coin door lockout could have came on. We just didn't hear it because it didn't do anything. So this is the coin door lockout. This is like the most abused coil in the whole game. When it comes in, it pulls this plate back. So we probably didn't hear it because it may even have the wire cut somewhere. But the whole purpose of that is when they're brand new and they work perfect, this little bar here slides out and in the way of the coin mechs. So what happens is the coin mech, if a coin rolls through, it will be rejected because of where this bar is. And they do that so that if the game's off, it can't take your money. So it's actually a very benevolent thing that the operators and the engineers do. If the game is on, this coil pulls in and it moves this little bar. And that just moving it just slightly is enough to make the coin mechs work where the coin will fly by it. But if you notice when I just pulled it, it kind of stuck there. So I probably just didn't hear it earlier. So that one's probably fine. A lot of people disconnect those anyway and just take that bar out so that you don't have the problems of things getting jammed up. And we know about the left slingshot. So let me see if I get another coil for that left slingshot. All right. So there is our replacement, an AE261500. He started with, say, J261500. That has to do with the mount of the way the diode is mounted and where the posts are mounted and things like that, and the sleeve that's included with it. But what you want to match is the numbers. 26 is the gauge, 1500 revolutions around the core. So it's pretty much an exact match. All right. So let's lay it down and see if that has fixed that problem. Yeah, I like that. Notice I checked my drop target by having one of them down. That's right. It's working just like we thought. So here we go, folks. Is this going to get it? Yeah, that's what we like to see. Can't scratch. It's the stranglehold. It's the weekend warriors. Pretty cool. All right. So all of our lamps aren't working, and the most important thing is the sound's not working. How can you have a Ted Nugent pinball machine without the sound working? Now, if you've never seen this game, I got to let you down easy. It has sound. I think it might play the beginning of Cat Scratch Fever if I remember. But it's just tones. It's like little chimes because it was early, folks. This was like 79 or something. This was before Stern had came up with any way to do anything else. So it is just their most plain soundboard, the SB100 soundboard. I've got everything unplugged right now just in case that was what was blowing the fuse. So you know what? We'll work on that next time. So I hope you enjoyed it. We got the displays fixed. They're looking great. We got the one coil that wasn't working fixed. It's working great. And next time we will knock out that soundboard and these lamps. So we'll see you then. I hope you enjoyed it.