Saturday, May 31, 2014

Introducing... Surf Champ!

It was the perfect scenario:  I was done working on Out Of Sight and itching for something new.  I got in touch with a man who had a Surf Champ that needed fixing, but he was a bit far out of town.  He proposed a trade:  His not-so-working Surf Champ for my massaged + shopped Out Of Sight.  He gets a fully working game, and I get a great project.


Looks like a pretty sweet game, and its definitely one of the more popular 70s Gottliebs.
That juicy center spinner looks wonderful, but all of the action is on the drops and rollovers.  At 10 points a spin, that spinner is just luring you to the pop which can send it SDTM.  Wait until it's lit...

I did a quick clean with Novus 2 and it's already looking better.  This game has great colours, but a bunch of dirt visible if you zoom above.
I will tabulate an order of LEDs of course.  All basic stuff.  What's wrong though?

The prior owner outlined 2 major sources of frustration:
1) the game was sometimes not resetting the drop targets
2) a score reel would advance to zero after 9990.

After playing a round of games, I came up with a more extensive list of issues:
- Left flipper is wonky and flutters
- Right flipper is weak
- top rollover lights never advance
- player 2 score reel does not increment the ten thousands when rolling over the thousands
- 4th rollover light switch is unresponsive
- game gets stuck at certain times, not resetting anything, and serving an additional ball.  Then later randomly advances
- slings need much alignment
- there is one cracked plastic

These are all things I can look in to!  I will have to take a break for about 2 weeks, but I am looking forward to getting in to these issues.
I will also do all of the regular maintenance:   cleaning the steppers, cleaning contacts, waxing, getting LEDs, etc.
I can't wait to play this game at full force!

Speaking of which, I did notice the manual suggesting a 3.5 degree incline.  Nuts to that, 6.5 all the way!!!

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