Hi everyone,
I'm posting this for the greater good because the seemingly small task of repinning the transformer connections on a Bally Fathom turned out to be much more involved than I thought it would be and those who come after me might find this useful.
OK, we start with the Molex connector which is set up for US 115V. If you look at the schematics you'll see that we have:
2-8
3-6
7-10
In the number 1 position is the yellow wire at the top right and the numbers read from right to left (like Arabic, I believe)
The yellow and blue wires stay the same. To change it to suit our 240V we need to move the orange ones as follows:
4-8
7-11
You'll notice that's one less wire, which was handy seeing as a broke one pin trying to get it out with the pin extractor I bought for the job. The pin extractor I purchased looks like this:
Yes, I know that this is supposed to be for female pins but the male one didn't fit either, they were both too small to go over the pin. I'm guessing that these pin extractors are for WPC era games (can anyone let us know?) So, anyways, I had used up my only spare wire and had to get it right next go.
So I went down to the local tip shop and bought everything with an aerial on it I could find: old radios, cordless phones, TV-antennae, etc. Then I took all the aerials off, cut the bottom end off and slid them all apart. This gave me a selection of tubes of varying diameters. I tried them out on the pins and the one which fitted over them best was from a cordless phone (Uniden N32 A97/0172).
Unfortunately it's outside diameter was too big and it wouldn't fit in the Molex connector housing. So I sanded it down a little and tried again. This time it worked and the pin popped out. Here's a picture of how the tube fits over the pin, pushing the two tabs in on the side and releasing the pin from the housing:
And here's the wire out of the housing:
The last one was difficult to get out, I think because the tube had flared out a little at one end causing it to become less effective. So I squeezed it gently with a pair of pliers and tried it again, it worked.
I then placed two wires back in the housing as per the specification from the schematics:
I triple-checked it but if someone could look at their Fathom and confirm it is correct, that would be great.
Now, to do Black Knight. Unfortunately the connector is different again, it's the female pin that needs to come out so I'll have to find a different-sized tube. If anyone has done this on a Black Knight please let me know what you used.
Cheers, Anthony
