James’ Blog

Lights I never knew I had

Posted on August 24th, 2006 by James.
Categories: Pinball.

Today I decided to check all of my bulbs. I knew I had one blown bulb on the enterprise shileds, but I didn’t want to order one bulb then find later I had a load more blown. So I decided to prop the playfield up and check all of them using the test menu.

I soon realised that I had a whole load of bulb that weren’t lit when I selected to light up everything, so I went through each lighting section of tests until I found that “Playfield 2” was doing nothing.

The display helpfully told me I needed to check the White-Violet and Violet cables, so I looked them up in the manual and found their connector on the power board. They were fine, but I found that one of the 5Amp fuses was blown. I replaced the fuse and it all lit up again… however! Right above that connector check out what I found!

Some well dodgy wiring that I hadn’t noticed before. See how the top 7 cables are in two bunches with a load of cables going to White-Orange and a load into the White-Yellow (hard to tell the colours from the pic, but trust me! ;-)). I checked on the wiring diagram in the manual and it says that there should only be four cables wired to this connector!! Some muppet has wired them all up! Goodness knows why?! Also, they’re wired them the wrong way round!

There should be two power feeds connected. White-Orange and Orange make one set, and White-Yellow and Yellow make the other set… only they’ve wired White-Orange to Yellow and White-Yellow to Orange! .. and not only that, they’ve wired White-Orange to 3 other supposidly unused pins and White-Yellow to a load of others too! Now the manual says “Not connected”.. but that’s only for ST:TNG. In another game using the same power board they could be wired and that means that some muppet could have wired up two power outputs to the same wire! No wonder my 5Amp fuse blew!

The dodgy cables were wrapped in masking tape, so I unwrapped them and de-soldered the connections and cleaned the cables up. I trimmed any exposed core wire from the “extra” pins and wrapped them seperatly in proper insulation tape so they can’t touch each other, then wrapped them together as one for easier handling. Then I soldered the proper cables together and wrapped them in insulation tape too.

Much much nicer! I changed the fuse and powered on. I’ve got a whole new set of lights I never knew I had!! It’s tons brighter on the playfield now 🙂

Check out these two shots. In the one on the left you can’t really see the playfield illumination much as the lights are on in the garage. The second shot I took a bit later when it was dark and I turned the light off, so all the light is coming from the pinball machine. Doesn’t it look cool! 🙂

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