Well holy crap. I went through and cleaned up all the score reels. 24 of them
I can't tell you how glad I am that is finished.
Knocked off most of the rest of the list too since I last posted.
Yaaaaay!
Of course as you do stuff like this you discover any other problems that exist. True to form, I found that the pin mechanisms have this little plastic gear thing and two of them have broken teeth. I don't know if I can dream up a hack to fix it by Christmas. If not, I'll just go with what I've got and it will be fun enough to play I guess. It still has a lighted pin indicator on the lower backglass, so even if it doesn't show the real pins below, the display will show what's going on.
I also found an electrical glitch. When it's on the third player the "ones" relay sends the correct pulse to player 3's "ones" score reel but also sends a weak pulse to player 1's "ones" score reel as well. Sometimes it increments player 1 and sometimes not. The opposite does not happen. In fact,
everything else seems to be gold. Got to be some kind of mild short in there somewhere. Probably one of the screws I couldn't find settled in over some solder joints or something
. I'm not good at reading these old schematics for EM machines. It's confusing to even follow continuity and the labels are kind of cryptic for me. Funny thing is I can read SS schematics much better. Hmmmm. Anyway, if I can't fix that we'll just try to play two players or just deal with screwy scoring for player 1. It will still be fun even if it isn't 100%
By the way, according to the tracking, the bulbs I ordered are somewhere in town so I'll probably receive them later today. Having all good bulbs will be very nice.
Yaaaaay again.
