Pinball repair

[TheBelgian]

I recently moved to Bangkok and brought an Addams Family pinball machine with me. 6 weeks on a hot container ship didn't do it any good and I'm looking for a pinball repair service, but that seems to be rather difficult to find here in Bangkok. Any ideas where to look?

[mike324]

You probably won't find anyone that knows how to repair a pinball machine, but you may find people that can repair parts if you know whats wrong with it.

Do you know what is the problem? Don't forget the voltage here is different compare to the US, hope you didn't fry the board.

[TheBelgian]

There are 3 major issues at the moment:

1. I don't have enough time to try to fix it myself.

2. The playfield glass is broken. Is regular 3/16 inch glass strong enough or does a pinball require special tempered glass?

3. There's a weird thing with the sounds, a dummy like me would assume there's something wrong with the sound board. Some of the sounds are missing (also when running a sound test), some are correct, some sounds have been linked to the wrong action.

I've actually been looking for a technician for months and I've found one. He came to have a look, opened the machine, didn't even run the on-board system diagnostics, fiddled with some wires, then left and sent a quote for 18k THB. He said replacing the main CPU board would fix the problem. For the spare parts he was quoting 3k for replacing all the rubbers and lightbulbs (obviously going to do that by myself), 3.5k for the playfield glass (less than 600 THB from the local glass shop if normal glass is strong enough), 6k for the main board, 1.5k for replacing the transformer which is working perfectly. I'm not really convinced he knows what he's doing, never met a repair guy who knew what was wrong just by looking at the machine without running any tests. I also don't appreciate his ridiculous quote, just because I'm farang.

[thaiowl]

I have had "The Shadow" pinball for 20 years and have never had any major problems. I buy my spares from Pinball Heaven in the UK (where I bought the machine from). https://www.pinball.co.uk/

The backlights have stopped working due to a short, but all features etc work fine. Let me know if you find a decent repair man. I would like to get my machine working perfectly.

[Peterw42]

On 3/24/2016 at 11:15 AM, TheBelgian said:

There are 3 major issues at the moment:

1. I don't have enough time to try to fix it myself.

2. The playfield glass is broken. Is regular 3/16 inch glass strong enough or does a pinball require special tempered glass?

3. There's a weird thing with the sounds, a dummy like me would assume there's something wrong with the sound board. Some of the sounds are missing (also when running a sound test), some are correct, some sounds have been linked to the wrong action.

I've actually been looking for a technician for months and I've found one. He came to have a look, opened the machine, didn't even run the on-board system diagnostics, fiddled with some wires, then left and sent a quote for 18k THB. He said replacing the main CPU board would fix the problem. For the spare parts he was quoting 3k for replacing all the rubbers and lightbulbs (obviously going to do that by myself), 3.5k for the playfield glass (less than 600 THB from the local glass shop if normal glass is strong enough), 6k for the main board, 1.5k for replacing the transformer which is working perfectly. I'm not really convinced he knows what he's doing, never met a repair guy who knew what was wrong just by looking at the machine without running any tests. I also don't appreciate his ridiculous quote, just because I'm farang.

Quoting for the transformer seems odd, unless he is changing it for local voltage 220 v, what country/voltage did it come from ? I would imagine the glass would be some sort of safety glass is case someone pounds on it and hand goes through or the actual ball bounces up and hits the glass etc, you should be able to tell by how the old glass broke.