Tim's SKYLAB thread

[DRANO]

Tim,
Find the bonus unit.. take it apart, clean it, put it back in.... I'll bet most or all of this behavior clears up.
The bonus unit is a stepper with a wheel full fo contacts. They probably need to be polished and re-greased.
Anyone who owns or repairs EMs needs to get comfortable with this process.
It looks a lot more complicated than it is.

Clay covers all you kneed to know here: http://www.pinrepair.com/em/index2.htm#steps

As for the liberal/conservative adjustment, it was in the head cabinet. I'm pretty sure the jones plug was set to conservative, but I could be wrong.

 

[tim.sanderson]

Anyone who owns or repairs EMs needs to get comfortable with this process.
It looks a lot more complicated than it is.

Yup. I had a couple of issues with the score reels yesterday, too. The '10 - 90 reel's coil was very often getting stuck on. It was getting quite hot, quite fast. I pulled them all out and gave the switches a good cleaning. It's seemed to solve the sticking problem, as well as the backwards scoring thing I had going on.

The game was already set to CONSERVATIVE.

When I switched it to LIBERAL, one difference is that special is lit when you light S-P-A-C-E-L, instead of requiring you to light all of S-P-A-C-E-L-A-B.
Also, SPECIAL awards thee credits in LIBERAL, but only one in CONSERVATIVE.

I'll dig into the bonus problem a little later in the day.

 

[tim.sanderson]

I figured out why I wasn't getting a 10K bonus when collecting the special... I wasn't supposed to.
There's a Jones plug in the head that lets you change between three different variations of two different ways to play.

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I had it set on the top option:
Spacelab Special awarded a credit. (silly for free play/home use)
Rocket Special awarded an add-a-ball. (RS is when you get all 5 captured balls on the same side)

When I plug into the #3 slot, I get awarded 10K for both of the specials.

I'll likely plug into #2 for a while. If that makes for too long of a game, I'll switch to #3.

The reason for the novelty setting was to try and keep this machine from being seen as a gambling device. Add-a-balls and free credits were seen by the law to be spoils of gambling.

I'll have to make up a rule card that reflects each of the settings. Right now the only one I have is for the NOVELTY setup. That's probably what confused me. It wasn't until I read the differences between the SKYLAB and SPACELAB machines that I realized it was probably just a setting to get the 10K bonus.

Not only that, I seem to be getting more accurate bonus scoring, although that may just be because I cleaned most of the switches in the cabinet.

 

[luch]

time to sell

 

[DRANO]

Add-a-balls were the workaround for the gambling laws. Free games/credits were seen as payouts. Adding a ball simply extends play.
The novelty settings are usually for home/free play or ideal for tournament play.

Good catch Tim!