Ari [APz] Sovijärvi

It's slightly chilly, but I have a lap warmer.

#cats #catsofmastodon

A player reported Striker Xtreme not getting balls out of the upkicker next to the goalie. Looks like half of the upkicker is missing. #pinball #pinrepair

Last on the board was Viking. A player had reported its spinner being dead. I glanced at it when we were last open, but it was too crowded to take the glass off.

As I spun the spinner manually, I immediately made a note of how it's wire behaved. The spinner itself has a cam-like part at the end, that makes a wire go up and down as it spins. The wire goes below the playfield and actuates a leaf or micro switch. This being a very early 80s game uses a leaf switch. Since the wire was just hanging in there loosely, it was almost guaranteed something below the playfield had failed.

I had already mentally prepared to replace a snapped switch leaf, but fortunately the wire had just come loose somehow and this turned out to be pretty trivial repair.

But in the end I got to wipe the hall of fail board clean again!

#repair #pinball #pinrepair

Hacks. They happen to be best of us.

Last week I wrote about Elvira's multiball lock post solenoid's curious failure mode. The metal bracket that holds the coil and rest of the mechanism had suffered a case of metal fatigue. This is very unusual, as this is first of all a very weak coil that is fired very rarely. Apparently there was something questionable about the metal used in this thing.

This is such a rare part that it needs to be ordered from the US, which means the double birdie of high tax and high postage fees for something as simple as this. Oh and it takes weeks to arrive too. If I had a laser cutter and CNC bending machine at hand, I'd do it myself.

Not wanting to have Elvira down for this long, I investigated an alternative solution. This was such a simple thing I easily modelled one with #FreeCAD to be 3D printed out of ASA. It works fine, with a 8mm bolt head as a coil stop.

I'm going to leave this part in even after I get a new part as I'm curious hold long it'll stay intact! #3dprinting