Stern Lectronamo Pinball Repair

Introduction

This is one of my games that I got in a recent purchase. I didn’t have the chance to test the game onsite, but knew it didn’t work. A quick look at the game showed that it was complete and in decent shape.

Head of the Game

When I finally had a chance to look at this game, it’s body was buried behind a couple other games. I was able to pull the head of the game out and start looking at the boards inside. One of the first things I noticed was the original battery was still on the MPU. There was extensive battery corrosion, and at that time I ordered a replacement one. I went ahead and removed the Solenoid/Driver Board (SDB), Lamp Driver Board, and SB-100 Sound Board for further repairs.

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SDB

I went through the SDB and added new caps along with adding a couple of jumpers on the backside of the board. I also tested all transistors and replaced a couple of resistors and diodes.

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Lamp Driver Board

I tested all the transistors on the board, and all were good. To my surprise, battery corrosion had leaked on to this board and had three green transistors. I went ahead and cleaned up the battery corrosion and replaced three transistors.

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Sound Board (SB-100)

I went ahead and re-soldered the headers pins and installed new caps on the board.

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Displays

I pulled all the displays and checked the 100K resistors along withe re-soldering the header pins. With all of the boards gone through, I went ahead and dug out the body of the game for its initial test.

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First Power On

The cabinet had a broken “neck” and needed fixed before installing the head onto the cabinet. After hooking up all the connectors, I started a game. The game booted up on the first try, displays working (mostly), and attract lights were flashing. However, I could not start a game. Game had credits on the machine but the start button was not working. I verified this in the switch test. One other problem that I noticed was the coils were not firing correctly. The right sling shot and outhole would fire for different coil test.

The game started and all coils fired correctly after re-pinning the J2 and J3 connectors. J4 connector was also replaced. All three connectors had extensive corrosion on them.

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Displays (Again)

Most of the displays had some sort of problem. Either a missing segment, a missing digit, or flickering. I brought the displays back out of the machine and ended up replacing some resistors, transistors and decode chips. I don’t know if it helped or not, but I did end up re-pinning J4 on the MPU board.

Conclusion

This was a fun game to work on and needed quite a bit to get it up and running again. The backglass did have some damage on it. Some of the blue on the edges was starting to peel, and I lightly sealed the backglass. Lectronamo was Stern’s first game to produce digital sounds. The game has some neat shots on it including drop targets, which are always a positive in my book.

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