Hi All, I finished my Target Alpha a couple of months ago & thought to share some pics & the story. The machine had been floating around the Wimmera district for quite a while bouncing from one owner to another without any progress being made to fix her. I had just finished adding & fixing a Bally Black Rose when I saw Target Alpha was again back on the market. I didn't have an EM in my collection & I was trained on them some 30 years ago when I did some road service for Golden west. Anyway long story short I made an offer for the Target Alpha and had another project on my hands. When I got the machine home it was dead, no backglass, had a lot of cabinet damage, it was really knocked around & had many hacks done by other people not knowing what they were doing.
I spent the first few days stripping down the machine repairing wood work, and going over the playfield & backbox. I needed parts ordered from the US & here in OZ, the parts need were a Ball kicker bracket, two plastic drop targets, 2 Pop Bumper caps, complete rubber set, a relay coil, a ball kicker coil and the back glass. Now as luck would have it Pop bumper Pete had a new repo back glass & he was only two hours away but it took a full month till all the parts arrived. In the mean time I spent that month cleaning & undoing the hacks & slowly Target Alpha started coming back to life. The first hack was the G.I was blowing the fuse, I tracked that down to a dead short that someone soldered a wire to ground, No idea why they needed to do this as once the wire was removed the G.I all worked. The next hack was the spring & cam position was a mess and in the wrong position with the coin unit & the wiper arm on the player unit was wrong too. So a lot of time was lost here as trail and error to find the correct positions.
The next issue was the score reels, Yep the hackers had been here too, They oiled & greased the reels. I spent the next week completely disassembling all 20 reels cleaning & resetting the contact gaps. The last fault was the reset cycle was not completing the last step where it subtracts the to player 1, ball 1 sequence so the game could begin. This had me confused for quite a while and really hard to solve. It wasn't till I was cleaning the contacts on the motor unit that I discovered the switch wasn't closed but it sure looked like it was. Target Alpha now worked & with perfect timing the parts from the US had arrived, so the next week I put in the parts & cleaned, waxed & replaced all the globes.
Time to move Target Alpha into the house. :)
