Wayne Schmidt's Addams Family Game Malfunctions The ways my TAF broke and how I fixed the problems.

 
This is a log of all the problems my TAF (The Addams Family pinball game) had, when they occurred and how I fixed them. I'm posting it as a resource to anyone who may have had similar problems and is looking for solutions or anyone thinking of purchase a TAF and wants to know what may be expected of them maintenance-wise. Please note that based on a survey I made of other Addams Family pinball game owners, my machine has had many more problems than the average. This doesn't surprise me. After bouncing around Europe for over a decade before being shipped back to the states, I purchased it unshopped (unrestored) from a private individual. Such machines are more likely to experience problems than those undergoing professional restoration. Even then, unexpected problems are bound to occur. After all, no restorer or owner, no matter how knowledgeable or talented, has x-ray vision or can see the future to know which components are going to break ahead of time. I must also confess that several of the problems were caused by my not being careful when working on the machine.

Ball Hanging up on the Lowest Jet Bumper

Right from the start I noticed that a ball would regularly get stuck against the lowest jet bumper in the graveyard area right before draining in front of the Thing flipper. Taking a close look at the area I discovered a thick residue of wax or cleaner.

Removing this residue solved the problem.

 
Battery Reset Problem

This wasn't really a malfunction, but was certainly disturbing as one. One week after buying my TAF I decided to change the batteries to make sure fresh ones were in place. (Old batteries can leak.) As this was at the beginning of the year it seemed a good idea to initiate a battery change at the beginning of every new year to prevent this.

What I didn't know is that although the batteries appeared to be installed in parallel so that removing one should not cause a power disruption, it did. In spite of replacing them one at a time, when I turned the game on the power break from changing the batteries resulted in the game chips resetting to the original factory settings. Since this particular TAF had been manufactured for the German market this meant that the words on the dot matrix display were all in German. Although the manual explains how to correct this problem, because the menus were now all in German it was very difficult to work through them. How I corrected this was to remember enough of some German I'd studied 30 years ago to eventually wander to the correct command to change the language back to English. If I hadn't been able to do this, I'd have written down the menu options and used an on-line translator to figure out what they meant. Considering the weakness of my memory this might have been faster.

The next time I do this I plan on using jumper wires and an external battery holder to make sure the power isn't interrupted.

 
Broken Bookcase Optical Sensor

Two weeks after I bought the TAF, an amber dome-shaped object suddenly appeared on the playfield. After a good deal of looking around I discovered it had fallen out of the far left hand side of the underside of the bookcase cover. It was one of the four infra-red transmitters (LEDs) used in the optical sensors used to record bookcase hits.

Both wires coming out of the LED were broken off flush with the base, so reinstallation wasn't an option. Studying the Internet turned up the fact that Radio Shack carried part number 276-143, a replacement for it. I purchased one and installed it using the orientation of the others as a guide. It didn't work. It seems that the construction of the Radio Shack LED is different than the originals. Whereas they were arranged with the flag pointing to the left, the correct orientation for the Radio Shack LED had its flag pointing to the right.

Part of the confusion for this came from an error in the printing on the back of the LED case. It shows the cathode lead coming out of the side with a flat spot and a long lead. In the actual LED a short lead is coming out of the flat spot.

I tried using copper desoldering braid to remove the old solder from the circuit board holding the LEDs but while it removed the surface solder it didn't have enough drawing power to pull the solder out of the hole itself. To get that out I had to purchase a bulb-type solder sucker.

The picture above shows the new LED (although it's blue it's still an infra-red LED) in place.

It's easy to see if the LEDs are working using a digital camera. Get the LEDs operational and take a picture of them. If they are working they show up as a dim violet glow, as the photo below shows.

Even easier is to look directly at them in a completely dark room. There will be a faint reddish-brown glow from the center of the LEDs.

 
My Thing has Dropsy

One week later I noticed that the magnet in Thing's hand started releasing the ball a little early. It wasn't very often so I didn't worry about it. Then is started happening more often, particularly when I'd collected a THING award and Thing was supposed to return the ball to the playfield. Instead it fell down into Thing's box and got shunted into the swamp. Before long it was happening almost every time it picked up the ball. Then it started failing to even pick up the ball.

The pattern of this malfunction clearly suggested a wire had slowly been degrading and finally broke. Upon looking inside I discovered one of the two wires leading to the magnet had a sharp kink in it but the insulation was still intact. I straightened the wire and made sure when I reinstalled the cover over the Thing mechanism that I didn't kink it again. Thing's worked perfectly ever since. I'm assuming the wire is broken inside the wire and the point of the kink but that the insulation is holding the broken ends together tightly enough so that reliable contact is maintained even when the wire is being stretched.

If the magnet starts acting up again I'll start trouble shooting by stripping the insulation away from this point and resoldering the wires.

 
Balls Lock Up between Thing and the Swamp

Immediately after completing the previous fix, I noticed when Thing dropped a ball to transfer it to the swamp, it usually ended up getting stuck. Upon looking at the ball track I noticed I happened replaced Thing's protective box in exactly the same place it had been with the result that the out hole from the box didn't line up with the in hole to the track to the swamp. The result was that a blockage was created. I reset the protective cover and the problem went away.

 
Permanent Slam Tilt

One day after working on the coin door, when I turned the game on all I got was SLAM TILT displayed on the dot matrix display. After investigating I discovered that I'd managed to bump against the slam tilt sensor on the door hard enough to bend the leave switch so it was always "on."

Bending the leaf back into place fixed the problem.

 
Slingshot Switch Warning

One month of use I decided to clean up the playfield. After doing so, when I turned the machine on I got a test warning on the dot matrix display. Pressing "enter" told me that the left slingshot switch was malfunctioning. I removed the plastic cover and looked at it...

... but couldn't see anything obvious. So I put on my pair of close-up glasses and compared the upper and lower switches at 5X power. What I discovered is that the lower switch looked like this:

whereas the upper looked like this:

Evidently I pushed against the switch hard enough to bend one of the contacts so that it was always "on." Pushing a pencil down between the leads bent it back so now it works as good as new.

 
Ball Hangs up in the Swamp

This is one of the most common problems with TAF games. In my case it turned out that it would come to rest behind the swamp eject.

My solution was to add a piece of metal to block off this area. The problem was getting to it. The first step was to remove the playfield plastics covering the swamp. I assumed that all I had to do was remove the three nuts indicated below by the arrows.

Wrong. These nuts hold the swamp cover to two other pieces of plastic. You have to remove the nuts holding these down and the entire section comes off as one unit. Once I figured out that I was able to install an angle deflector using weatherproof carpet tape and aluminum tape. I've used both before in long term applications and have confidence in their ability to handle this job.

Since the installation I haven't had a ball hang up in the swamp a single time.

 
Giving Thing a Manicure

I've only seen two Addams Family pinball games in my life but they both had ugly black streaks running down Thing's middle finger. These are caused by the center rib of the red plastic box rubbing across the finger as Thing comes out. Why red plastic sliding over flesh-colored plastic should produce black streams is beyond me. (The friction is too low, pressure too light and speed too slow for any heating effects.) I fixed it by activating the Thing motor in the Test menu and stopping it when the hand was fully deployed, then scraping it off with the tip of an exacto knife. The black marks may look like grease but were hard and brittle. Once they were removed I used a water based felt marker to touch up the wrinkles that had lost some of their coloring. Here's how it came out:

Unfortunately, after a couple of hundred games I noticed the streaks were returning. It looks like this is something I'll have to clean up from time to time, unless I can come up with a way to line the box's rib with a flat piece of Teflon.

 
Missing "I"

Five weeks after getting my TAF the "I" in THING between the dot matrix display and the playfield quit working. I lifted out the lower cover module of the back panel and laid it down on the playfield.

The lamp turned on. I put the module back and it went off. This suggested a loose connecting wire. After studying the wiring to the lights in that area I determined which went to the bulb in question. It turned out to be the one on the far left.

Somehow the wire had worked loose from the push connector. I tried bending it so that it would remain in contact but the light kept going out so I ended up removing the wire (difficult to do because the push connectors have one-way wire grabs), cut the end off the wire to start with a fresh section and pushed the wire back in place. It's worked without fail ever since.

Dim "Shoot Again" Lens

The bulb lighting the "Shoot Again" lens appeared dim and off center. This wasn't a game stopper but it didn't look good. I lifted the playfield and discovered that the bulb holder for this lens was bent so that the bulb was way off to one side.

I pushed it back in place and the lens lights up much brighter and uniform now.

This wasn't quite as easy a fix as it sounds. The hole to the lens is partially blocked by the frame to a coil, making it difficult to place the bulb so that the maximum amount of light reached the lens.

 
Nonsymetric Tilt:

I began noticing that I could nudge the machine quite a bit farther to the right than I could to the left. Upon examining the tilt sensor:

I discovered that the plumb bob wasn't hanging in the center of the sensor ring. By bending the copper arm the bob hangs from I was able to get it properly centered.

 
Confused Sound Effects:

Six weeks after getting the machine the sound effects started getting confused. Sometimes when I turned on the machine it would work fine. Other times the music and voices were replaced with random sound effects like door slammings. Something about the erratic nature of the problem made me think is had to do with an IC not booting up correctly or a loose IC pin. The next time it happened I turned off the game, opened the backbox and firmly tapped every IC I could find. It worked. The problem never came back. In a way it's a shame it didn't because I was looking forward (sort of) to tapping fewer ICs each time until I isolated the one causing the problem.

 
Upper Right Flipper Bounces Out When Hit

Six and a half weeks after getting the game I noticed the upper right flipper would bounce outward a fraction of an inch and stay there if a ball hit it. Lifting the playfield I discovered the flipper return string had broken off at one end and was hanging loose, as indicated by the black arrow in the picture below.

Since it was just the end that had broken off I bent one loop into a new hook and resecured the end of the spring to the flipper arm.

Problem solved!

 
Lowest Jet Bumper Stopped Working

The same week that the flipper spring broke, I noticed that the lowest jet bumper in the graveyard stopped working. Lifting the playfield, I compared the switch to the other jet bumpers and it appeared to be okay. I used an Ohm meter to test for continuity and it seemed to work fine. Then I checked a different bumper and noticed a slight difference. Whereas the second bumper sent the Ohm meter's needle immediately over to "short," the failed bumper did so after a moment's hesitation. I reasoned that there was some contamination between the contacts that was just enough to slow the response of the bumper down so that it wouldn't fire.

I used a piece of 600-grit sand paper to very lightly clean the contacts. Now it Ohmed out as fast as the other bumpers and when the game was turned back on, operated as it should.

 
Black Monday

Remembering this day make me cringe for a long time. As soon as I fixed one problem something else broke. It's days like this that make me wonder why I ever bought a TAF... until I start playing again that is.

It all started on the anniversary of the second month I'd had the game. I fired it up for a quick game in the morning and got an "Upper Right Flipper EOS Switch" test warning. Investigating, I discovered that the copper contact button had fallen out of the End of Stroke (EOS) switch. Worst still, the leaf spring on which is was mounted was almost cracked in two, probably a fatigue failure. When activated, the EOS wasn't being closed. I searched the bottom of the cabinet for the contact button but couldn't find it.

The only solution was to order a replacement switch, which I did immediately. I wasn't happy about the prospect of not being able to play for two weeks while the part arrived so I looked around the garage for a way to patch it up. What resulted is ugly to the point of being evil... but at least for the short term it works.

I found an old bit of brazing rod and pounded the flux coating off it. Then I hammered it as thin as I could. All that cold working made it too hard to bend so I softened it by heating it over in a flame of the kitchen range and letting it cool slowly. After a sandpaper cleanup, I crimped it around the switch leaf to act as a new contact point. Unfortunately, while doing this the end of the leaf broke off. Because it's stainless steel wending and soldering where out. I headed back to the garage for more inspiration.

I dug through the junk drawer until I discovered a piece of galvanized steel sheet. Using tin snips, I cut a thin strip and used aluminum tape to connect it to the remaining length of leaf. After trimming the steel to length and bending it to make contact as it should I had the EOS switch repaired and working perfectly. Hear's what it looked like:

(I warned you it was an ugly fix.)

 
I no sooner got that problem fixed when I noticed that three general illumination lights in the lower right of the playfield were out. I replaced them and learned two things: First, these bayonet bulbs are hard to get back in and second, that they weren't the problem.

There was so little of the bulb to grab when pushed that two of them were impossible to reinstall. What I did was cover the end of an 11mm socket with a piece of rubber tape and used this as an extraction and insertion tool. Worked great.

Tracing the lighting problem turned out to be an arduous process. Using an AC volt meter I was able to figure out right away that the problem was that all three of these lights were interconnected in a single circuit and that this circuit wasn't getting any power. All of the wires and connections appeared to be sound. The primary leads were solid purple and white with purple stripes. I tried following them back but quickly lost them in the large wire bundles that go up into the backbox. The TAF manual was useless because it doesn't provide complete wire schematics. Hoping for a break I opened the back box and got it.

Down at the bottom of the lower, center circuit board was connector J121 and it had a purple wire and a white-with-purple stripe wire. Hoping that these where the same as the wires I needed, I noticed that there was also a white with brown stripes wire going into the connector. A similar bank of general illumination lights had just such a wire so I had good reason to think I was on the right track. The white and brown wire tested out at 6.3 volts: same as it had on the playfield. The white and purple wire was dead. Examining the connector, I noticed carbon scoring all over the area where the white and purple wire connected to it.

I pulled the plug out and tested the pin to the white and purple wire. It had power so this told me there was probably an overheat problem and the wire got burned. I wiggled it around in the connector to remake a metal-to-metal contact, replaced the connector and sure enough, when I turned the machine on the lights came on. If it hadn't worked my next step would have been to remove the wire, cut the end off and reinsert it after making sure the connector itself had good conductivity through the plug.

 
But Black Monday wasn't done with me yet.

 
I started to play a game and noticed right away that the "D" in GREED wasn't lighting up. I sighed and lifted the playfield to work on yet another problem. I traded the bulb with a neighbor that was working, a good tactic because if you also change the bulb holder as I did it tests several contacts at one time as well as the bulb. That didn't fix it so I replaced the bulbs and suddenly it started working again. Good news? I don't think so because what probably happened is that there is a lose connection that I nudged back into place. It's still broken and just waiting for a chance to go out. Knowing there's a weakness in the game makes it difficult to relax and enjoy it... sort of like living with a time bomb and not knowing when it's set to go off.

 
Okay, so I start to lower the playfield and as I'm doing so I nudge the lower left flipper frame and felt it move. At first I thought this was a bit of good luck because it explained why sometimes after working under the table the balls stopped bouncing off this flipper the same way. I tightened it up and thought another problem had been solved. Little did I know I'd created an even bigger one.

Each Addams Family pinball game, or any pinball game for that matter, is unique in how the balls bounce of the paddles. These bounces are determined by the complex relationship of the paddles' angles. After two months with the game playing a certain way, tightening the left flipper's frame completely changed the way the balls bounced off the paddle. The new bounce pattern was a nightmare so I began trying adjusting the frame to get it back to where it was. After three hours I gave up. If I got one bounce corrected, another was messed up. I couldn't figure out any way to get the machine playing the way it was.

After two days of adjustments I finally managed to get the balls bouncing the way they had originally. So ended the saga of Black Monday, a day that'll haunt me for a long time.

 
"D" in GREED Lights Doesn't Light

Less than a week after Black Monday the light under the "D" lens in GREED went off again. I switched bulbs with one next to it and the light still didn't come on. Jiggling each of the wires on the connector to this string of lights hit pay dirt when I reached the last one on the left. The light came back on. This malfunction is the same as the earlier one that knocked out the "I" in the THING award lights, which used the same type of wire connector. Perhaps this is a problem with all the push connectors of this type.

The problem with the "D" came back to haunt me two weeks after this fix above. The light went out and while jiggling the wire would make it come back on momentarily, it invariably went out again within a minute or two. The wire between the two knife contacts in the connector had worn away so that the blades not longer made reliable contact with it. The wire needed to be removed and pushed into the connector on a fresh area of the wire. To do this I had to pull the plug out to work on it. Bad idea. Three of the connector pins soldered to the circuit board the play seats on came out with the plug. I was able to solder them back in but the situation could have turned very ugly had the board been damaged.

Fortunately, the fix worked and the "D" has burned brightly ever since.

 
"Extra Ball" Light in the Mansion Went Out

The same day "G" in GREED went out the light under the "EXTRA BALL" lens in the mansion stopped lighting. Fortunately, it was only a burned out bulb.

 
Ball Locks Up in Shooter Eject

The seventh week for this Addams Family pinball game started with balls hanging up in the outlet that feeds the shooter.

A little scrubbing with a Magic Eraser cleaned up the dirt build up and the sticking stopped.

 
Mansion Room Light on the Electric Chair Stopped Turning On

Two days later the yellow light on the left side of the chair stopped lighting. I thought it might have burned out by it had simply shaken loose. Pressing it back all the way into its holder fixed the problem. (Don't we wish all problems were all this easy to fix?)

Ten games later it went out again. This time reinserting it didn't help. I pulled it and could see that the filament was broken. A new bulb fixed the problem.

 
Bulb Burned Out in the Lower Left Inlane Guide

This occurred three months after purchasing the machine. Fortunately, it was just a burned out bulb.

Ball Ejector Doesn't Push Balls Far Enough to Fall into the Shooter Lane

This problem developed early in the third month of owning this particular TAF. It was progressive in that over a period of one week it went from happening very rarely to almost a quarter of the time.

Inspecting the curved ejector finger...

...clearly showed that the end was worn. I figured the problem was simply that the wear associated with 15 years of use shortened the finger enough so that it doesn't push the balls far enough out into the shooter lane for them to fall. I used aluminum foil tape to secure a piece of steel wire over the end of the finger to make it a little longer.

This fix may look ugly but it worked.

 

Please check back regularly. I'll post every problem I have with my TAF and their solutions as soon as I can in the hopes it'll help out someone else with similar problems.

 
After 6 weeks of nothing going wrong, two bulbs in the mansion burned out. Changing them fixed the problem.

Electric Chair Ejector Fires Balls Out at Odd Angles

I noticed that the balls coming out of the electric chair ejector covered such a wide range of angles that sometimes they'd strike the bottom corner of the slingshot and other times the ball would sail up and completely over the top of the slingshot. The cause turned out to be that one of the welds near the top of the metal guide broke and that side of the ejector had drifted outward so balls were no longer being guided.

I solved this problem by cleaning up the area around the weld with a wire brush, clamping the side panel back in place and brazing it. The problem instantly went away.

 
Around the time I'd had the game four months the light under the Tunnel Hunt mansion room went out. I was a burned out bulb and easily fixed.

 
The very next day I noticed the light in the left slingshot as well as the three lights in the left inlane guide were out. From a previous problem I knew that this string of lights was powered by a brown and white-with-brown-spots wire from pins 11 and 5 on connector J121 in the backpanel. After several tests I determined that pin 5 had gone dead. Unfortunately, going any further requires removing the entire power circuit board and rigging a series of connector extenders so it can be run while out of the machine. This is too dangerous for me at this time so I cheated. I moved the brown and white wire from pin 5 to the unused pin 4, which has the same voltage applied to it as pin 5. This fixed, or at least bandaged, the problem.

Unfortunately, while all this was going on the slingshot and inlane guide lights on the right went out. There aren't anymore pins with power on them to use so until I figure out how to fix these problems the game will have to be a little dark in that area.

While working these problems it appeared that pins 1, 6, 7, 9, and 11 are grounded. Pins 2,3,4,5 and 10 are hot (or in 5's case supposed to be hot). Pin 8 is missing.

 
While opening the illumination panel behind the backglass, I noticed that one of the two strings of lights that light up the back panel was out. These may have been like this from the day I purchased the machine. I traced the power source to connector J120, immediately above J121.

The fact that J120 and J121 both have 11 pin locations, both have pin 8 clipped off, and both appear to provide 6.5-volt AC power for lighting suggests they may be powered by the same circuit on the back of the circuit board. One string of lights on the back panel light board (sometimes referred to as the insert) connects to pins 3 and 9. This string works. The other, connected to 4 and 10, doesn't. I jumpered the connectors at pins 9 and 10 together and both strings lit up. I suspect the problem was with pin 10.

In the last two problems I think what might have happened is that the trace, a thin connector that passes through the circuit board from the back to the front where the pins are soldered, broke from vibration. If and when I get the courage to pull the board I will be sure to check the continuity of these traces and fix them if there's a problem.

These trickier problems are extremely difficult to troubleshot without having a complete set of wiring schematics. I found such a set online and ordered it. Hopefully it will have more information that the meager diagrams supplied with the manual.

Seven months after purchasing this TAF the single, upper, round, orange target above the Swamp disappeared. Upon lifting the playfield I discovered that the L-shaped mounting bracket on the front of this target had broken in two. I ordered a replacement ($9 in 2007 plus $9 shipping) and replaced it. The new target worked, but it was quite a bit stiffer than the others. I'm a little concerned that it may be so stiff that when the Thing flipper misses high and the ball strikes this target it may not fire to send an aiming correction to the game. Only testing during play will tell.

 
Broken Bolts

Nothing went wrong for two months then around the ninth month the lower left flipper jammed in the "up" position. Lifting the playfield disclosed that one of the two bolts that secures the end block had sheared off allowing the block, and the shaft on it that guides the plunger, to cant off at a sharp angle.

The arrow points the bolt that broke.
Here it's already been replaced.

The end of the bolt left in the mounting bracket had to be removed before a replacement bolt could be screwed in. There was no way to get a grip on it to screw it out so I decided to use a dremel tool to cut a groove in it so I could use a screw driver to back it out. The vibration of the dremel tool rattled the bolt end enough so that it rotated freely... in the wrong direction: it screwed itself further in rather than out. The solution was to remove the four bracket screws from that end of the flipper assembly, lift the entire assembly, then use the dremel again to vibrate the bolt end all the way out of the bolt hole.

Inspecting the other flipper units I discovered the Thing flipper also had a sheared-off bolt. The replacement procedure went the same as above. This flipper hadn't jammed because the remaining bolt had been fitted with a lock washer. In the flipper above it hadn't and that allowed the end bracket to rotate.

 
NEW!!! Start Light doesn't light

I couldn't get the back of the Start switch to twist out so I couldn't replace the bulb to see if that was the problem. So, I pulled the leads to the bulb off, the ones on the sides of the back of the switch body, and applied 12VDC to them from a battery pack. The bulb lit so that wasn't the problem.

Next I tested the voltage across the bulb's connector. There wasn't any. So I traced the bulb's red-and-grey and yellow-and-grey wires back to jacks J-138 and J-133 on the backpanel. They had the correct voltage (varying 10-20 VDC to make the bulb flash while in attract mode) so I ran a jumper wire to replace the yellow-and-grey wire. The bulb still didn't light. I repeated this step for the red-and-grey wire and it did light. This wire goes through a connector close to the door. A jumped the wire from the backpanel to this connector and the light lit.

The red-and-grey wire connects to no other points between the backpanel and the connector close to the door so there must be a break in the wire somewhere between those two points. (I checked the jack connections and they were all good.)

The final fix was to solder in a replacement wire. Problem solved!

NEW!!! Airballs Galore!

Before I had my TAF restored, shooting balls up the left ramp never produced an airball: a ball that's thrown up into the air, usually slamming into the underside of the cover glass and ending up stuck some where so you have to open up the game to free it. After the Restoration from Hell, half of all balls shot up the left ramp were airballs. Not a good situation.

I discovered the problem was caused by the new ramp I had installed. The plastic lip at the entry point to the left ramp was thicker than the original ramp. This created a slight ridge in the middle of the overlaying metal entry ramp, which knocked the balls up in the air almost every time they hit it. (You could feel this ridge by running your finger over it.) The arrow below shows the too-thick plastic edge to the ramp.

The solution was to use a cone-shaped grinding bit in a Dremel tool to grind a little plastic off this edge. The result was 12 left ramp shots in a row without a single airball.

 
(Click on main site to browse 70 other topics ranging from exotic kaleidoscope designs to the strange world of lucid dreaming. There you will also find several other pages dealing with the Addams Family pinball game.)