The Addams Family Pinball

One of the two reported faults of the pinball machine, was that the LEDs in the Mothership weren’t working. Time to find out why.

Bearing in mind that the Mothership Assembly is suposed to be like this:

Mothership Assembly

I was surprised to find that the spring support under the mothership had been replaced with a rubber post cover:

The rubber post support instead of a spring

and that the metal tab of the mothership bracket, which the plunger from the coil should hit to vibrate the mothership had broken off, so that the actual mothership was used as the target for the plunger:

With the metal tab missing from the mothership metal plate, the plastic housing was used as the target of the coil plunger

resulting, of course, in a broken mothership plastic:

Broken plastic from the continued battering - that'll teach those Martians

Not only that, but the housing for the coil assembly had got really hot at some time, resulting in a warped housing:

Warped housing from a burned out coil at some stage perhaps?

Oh, and on taking the assembly appart, I discovered why the LEDs hadn’t been working: there weren’t any!

The mothership PCB showing the missing LEDs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 at 21h51 and is filed under AFM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.