Hot Tip Finally Working

After my soldering woes, I was getting close to throwing in the towel on the Hot Tip and start looking for a replacement board.

I pulled the board again, scraped some more, plugged the board back in, turned it on. And again - no solenoid action except one that was on continuously until the fuse blew.

I lifted the playfield and thought I might unsolder the solenoid that was having trouble to see if that helped, but when I looked underneath it looked to be in great shape and worked manually just fine. Besides, the only thing that changed was my soldering in the new DIP-Switch.

sigh...

Time to pull the board out and scrape some more, I must still have a short where I accidentally over-soldered the connections.

This time I noticed one of the chips was halfway out of the chip holder, one side was up high and the other down low. I pushed it in, scrapped some more and put it all back together.

Low and behold it worked!

Now that I think about it, it may have been the chip all along and I may not have needed to do the scraping at all.

But, now everything seems to work. In test mode, all of the lights, bumpers, switches, etc. all fire just fine. The game plays, scores count, everything is good except...


Now the flippers won't work.


...sigh...

I checked the fuses again, and traced the wires I could see, but whey would any of that have been messed with. All I did was unplug the circuit board a bunch of times. I was really getting nervous that I had somehow totally broke the table and was getting ready to post a "help me" message to the pinball forum when I had a thought tug at me. I seem to recall something similar happening on the table. I could not pin it down and I spent all evening trying to remember. Then just as I was heading to bed, I remembered!

There was an extra wire on the connection between the head and the body. Although I never touched it, it was worth checking.

Low and behold (again) it was disconnected!

I reconnected the wire and the flippers started working. It appears the table is back to functioning again. But it was past bedtime so I didn't have much time to try out the DIP-switch and see if it worked correctly.

Today I dug back through my posts and found the relevant one.  It details exactly the same problem I had. I don't know why the wire was disconnected, it doesn't plug into the boards I was removing, I must have just hooked it somehow during one of the processes. But hey, at least it is up and running!