Introduction
Recently, a customer brought in a 1979 Bally Star Trek to upgrade to LEDs and fix a few other problems. One flipper had quite a bit of play in it and some of the lights would not light up (pop bumpers along with some feature lights).
I mentioned to him that Bally games from this time period need an extra resistor added to the lamp sockets for LEDs. The LEDs will flicker without this resistor in place. It would be a pain to do this individually on every light socket, so people have made an adapter with the resistor already installed. The owner bought an adapter kit, and he bought it along with the game to my shop.
Powering on the Game
The feature lights were not working upon the first startup. F1 fuse on the rectifier board had blown. I placed a circuit breaker in the spot for F1 and had no problems (for a bit). The owner said there wasn’t any history with that fuse blowing, so I continued on.
After installing the LED adapter board (and switching out the light bulbs for LEDs), I noticed a few lights were flickering and not working. Replaced four transistors on the lamp board and the lights were working correctly.
I also noticed the pop bumpers were not lighting. This was caused by the lamps not soldered to the power wires. It looked like the leads were cut too short and didn’t reach the wires. I added jumpers to all of the pop bumpers and the lights came back on.
The next problem was the flipper with quite a bit of play to it. The set screws chewed up the shaft on the flipper bat. I replace both flippers and fixed the problem.
I then went on and adjusted a few switches and played some games on it. After playing for a bit, F1 fuse blew again. Upon expecting the rectifier board and connectors more, I decided to repin the connectors and order a new rectifier board for the machine. This should make the game quite a bit more reliable. After this fix, the game worked as it should with all lights working. The last steps were cleaning the playfield, new rubbers (where needed), vacuuming out the machine, and waxing the playfield.
Played a few more games and returned it to the owner.
