Tags

  • Published on

    Repair log: Guns N' Roses (Jersey Jack, 2021)

    Repair logs are quick summaries of workshop and on-site repairs. If your machine needs a service, 📬 Contact Us to discuss how we can help!

    

    Image description


    🔋 Had a few service calls relating to power issues on Jersey Jack games recently. The newest patient is Guns N' Roses (Jersey Jack). Primary symptom was no activity on power up. No lights, no sounds, nothing except for a very slight hum. Few things checked first including the main line fuse, power switch, and power cord. These were all good. Into the backbox we go! Here there was no activity whatsoever from the main computer. No fan spin. This is a pretty typical indicator of battery failure. Indeed, the battery was completely flat at 0.5 volts.


    Put a new one in, but still no joy when turning the game on. At this point you need to "jump start" the motherboard by connecting two terminal pins on the motherboard. This is a fiddly procedure but there are videos that guide you through the process on JJP's website in the support section. Once that was done, the game booted back up. It had lost its BIOS settings due to the battery going flat, so a keyboard was needed to set the time and confirm the BIOS settings before it could fully boot into the operating system and a game could actually start.


    Gave the playfield a clean and checked all of the coils and switches. Found a funny switch issue on the left ramp. The switch actuator wire was back-to-front, meaning it was never actually triggering the switch when a ball went up the ramp. It had been this way from the factory. Must have been a Friday afternoon job! A couple of other switches needed adjusting, too. The action button had come loose from its mount, too. 


    One complaint from the owner was that the flipper buttons kept falling out of the cabinet. This is a common problem when the plastic rim that keeps them in place wears down a little. A simple fix is to add a circlip (or similar device) to the end of the button so it can't be pushed through the hole. 


    Levelled the game, gave it a play test, and it was good to go. 👍


  • Published on

    Guns N' Roses

    Picture

    Many people consider Guns N' Roses (Data East, 1994) to be one of Data East's best pinball machines. One of the few rock music machines from the 1990s, it is a really cool game with some interesting design decisions incorporated into it. While a lot of people prefer the more modern music themed games such as AC/DC or Aerosmith or Metallica, I still prefer the older games, so Guns N' Roses scratches that rock theme itch perfectly.

    This will be a shorter blog post as this was not a full restoration by any stretch.  There was limited disassembly performed and pictures were only taken of the issues I was tasked with fixing. My customer had pulled the machine out of his warehouse for the first time in years and wanted it to brought back to working condition. No cosmetic fixes and no fancy stuff. I just needed to get it back up and playing. So, I won't bother with the standard descriptions of the machine's condition or nitpick the defects. However, I performed some interesting repairs on this machine which warranted writing some of them up. So, let's jump right into the repairs!