To contrast that, check out this awesomely tacky original promo video for Star Trek The Next Generation Pinball! Crazy retro funkolicious!

There are loads more pinball promo videos on YouTube, posted by Captain Pinball.

The new plastics look awesome. The difference they make is really noticeable. The older plastics have obviously heavily faded over time.

Click the pics for an animation of the old and then new plastics in place

In the top right pic you can see that I made a replacement for the tiny transparent bit of plastic which sits just under the delta quadrant ramp, using some left over polycarbonate, so at least it came in handy

At the time I took off my 8 driver and removed the transistor for the coil that turned to mush and tested it.. it was totally fuct (that’s “Function Use Completely Terminated” ).

TIP102 transistors are really rare. There’s a moderately equivalent part that you can get from Maplin, but it’s not as good, so I decided to rummage around the internet a bit more.

After nearly a week I finally found some on ebay going cheap and stuck in a bid.. a few days later a very very nice guy called Jeff replied to a message I’d posted on the yahoo ukpinball forum and said he’d send me some TIP122’s (pretty much the same thing) for free from his stash in the US. So now I’ve got about 10 of them and I only needed two! If anyone wants one let me know!

Looking at the shoddy soldering job in the pic above it’s not hard to see why this thing blew. The soldering is crap (no acronym this time! ) and the TIP102s were actually the dodgyish Maplin replacements! So I’m really glad I didn’t get them!

After a bit of cleaning up, I stuck in my shiny new TIP102s

Much much better! So.. this is where it gets interesting.. I stuck my new 8 driver in and being the cautious fellow that I am, powered on my pinball with the high voltage disconnected (coin door open) and the playfield up so I could monitor my divertors. As soon as I engaged the high voltage, one of my divertors locked on full power! Eep! So I immediately turned everything off and checked my soldering.. everything was spot on.. no gaps accidentally crossed with stray solder.. everything working correctly. Bizarre.. plugged everything back in .. same problem.

For some reason I decided to remove the ribbon cable from the 8 driver to see what that did.. it stopped the coil locking. Put it back on.. locks. Then I removed the ribbon cable completely and cleaned it a bit and reseated it on the CPU board and the 8 driver.. now everything works perfectly! I’ve never heard of the ribbon cable causing this problem before. Quite strange.. but it’s working now, so no complaints from me!

I bought a new bridge rectifier from pinball heaven a while back in case it was my BR3 causing this problem, but it doesn’t looks like it is. I think I’m going to change it anyway just to be on the safe side, but that’s some fun for another day

After a split second of mild heart attack I quickly reached under the killed the power then popped the hood to check out the damage.

The divertor which sends the balls to the left cannon (”Under Divertor Bottom”) somehow overheated and melted. You can see in the insert that the center is full of melted plastic from the tube which normally lets the metal rod slide through. Not good! Luckily it didn’t catch fire.

Interestingly, the 7A fuse which I recently changed blew. So… great that the fuse blew, because that probably stopped the solenoid igniting.. but is it just a freaky coincidence that that same 7A fuse blew before? I have two ideas:

1. This solenoid being faulty was the reason the 7A fuse blew in the first place.
2. One of my bridge rectifiers is knackered. (Probably BR3 for those in the know;-)).

This solenoid runs off 50volts DC, created from the AC supply using BR3.. which I now know for sure, because I just checked in the manual!

I have to go off track for just a sec and point out how totally awesome the STTNG manual is. You can find out EVERYTHING from this baby. For instance.. with this solenoid thing.. First I go to the solenoid-flasher table on page 3-5 and find the solenoid. From my picture I can see it’s got a White-Black wire and a Violet-Green wire. I can identify it just by that, but it also has the name in there. That table tells me it’s using pins J107-1 and J4-2. Then I turn to the solenoid wiring on page 3-8 and I can see exactly what components it goes through. One of which is the all important AC to DC converter, Mr BR3 the Bridge Rectifier!

So my theory;

1. If the solenoid is knackered then it would go wobbly and blow the fuse.. I change the fuse. The solenoid is still knackered so it melts a bit and blows the fuse again.
2. The Bridge Rectifier is knackered. So instead of giving the solenoid a nice 50v DC current, it pops it with a little unregulated AC. Instead of the solenoid generating a nice magnetic field to convert it’s energy into motion, it instead would just vibrate the metal rod inside it, generating heat via friction, or alternatively, it would just get really hot, like a regular household AC light bulb does, which is essentially just a wire with AC going through it.

Since both are just a feasible as the other, I think I’m going to err on the side of caution and replace the Bridge Rectifier just in case. The solenoid is getting changed anyway, since this one is a charred mass of plastic in the middle.

You can look forward to some interesting pictures of my power driver board getting ripped apart soon, for some fun soldering work!

Alternative titles for this post:

• Danger! Danger! High Voltage!
• Disco Inferno
• Merry-go-round break down
• Come on baby light my fire
• Burn baby burn
• Firestarter

At the time I was cutting up my exhaust to make a shuriken and I thought that I could use the exhaust metal to repair the under ramp. That was a crap idea, so on to Plan B!

Using the chrome exhaust metal was a crap idea for two reasons: 

1. Exhausts are bloody thick! Bending that T piece I made is nearly impossible.
2. Exhausts, although shiny on the outside are filthy on the inside… and I really didn’t fancy giving myself asthma, grinding out the inside to clean it.

So, plan B! Pop over to B&Q and what do I find? A lovely chunk of 0.6mm galvanised steel! Awesome stuff!

Random Trivia:

Galvanisation (crikey, I actually spelt that right first time!) is a chemical process that coats the steel in a layer of zinc. Zinc doesn’t break down like iron when it oxidises, which means it’s pretty much rust proof. Also of interesting note (and I just found this out by googling to check my spelling of galvanisation) is that the size of crystallites in galvanized coatings is known as spangle! How cool is that?!

Anyway! Back in the garage I surveyed the damage:

The end bit of the ramp has cracked off right next to a bolt that sticks out from the ramp. Above the broken bit is the under borg lock opto set. Their bridge is attached with two bolts coming out of the ramp. I decided to use these three bolts to hold my ramp repair/protector in place.

To find out what size I needed everything to be, I got some paper and cut it roughly to size, wrapped it around the broken bit of plastic and put it on the ramp. I pushed the bolt through the paper and marked all the key points on the paper like the position of the opto holes in the ramp. Next I removed the opto bridge and put another piece of paper over that and marked up where it intersected.

Then I made up proper sized paper parts from my notes and checked they all fitted. Once I’d confirmed that all I had to do was flatted them out on my nice sheet of galvanised steel and cut everything out

Bending the steel into shape wasn’t too hard. It’s 0.6mm thick, so it’s thin enough to bend without breaking your fingers, but plenty strong enough. I bolted the broken plastic on the steel T then pressing gently but firmly, bent the steel around it. For the opto section I marked where it should fold with a pen, and bent it on my workbench over a wooden block.

The result is a pretty kick arse customised ramp protector!

The bottom bit in the picture bolts to the opto bridge. The holes in the side are for the opto to shine through. As you can see in the picture, I also grinded down the heads of the screws, used to connect the two pieces. I made them as smooth and flat as possible, so not to damage anything, or bend the metal out of place.

When fitted the broken end piece is held firmly in place with the metal wrapped around it and doesn’t move at all

Here it is installed:

I’m rather proud of this, it’s a perfect fit