Bally Solved Bon Voyage (Bally, 1974) won't start

[xsvtoys]

Bally Bon Voyage won't start (SOLVED - broken wire on coin switch)

Hello everyone I am new to the forums and also just got my first machine which is a Bally Bon Voyage EM. I got it for fun and also I wanted to use this one as a learning platform to see if I could figure out how these things work. Well now I am getting lessons quicker than I wanted.

When I first got it, all functions appeared to be normal. What was I doing when things went south? Something pretty innocent, I think...I was just changing some of the jumpers to see how they worked. The last one I changed was from 5 ball to 3 ball. When I restarted it, I found it in the current condition.

Here is what happens:

- Turn on power switch - all is quiet as expected.
- Hit left flipper switch - all lights come on as expected. The Lock Coil energizes and appears to stay energized. The Game Over light is lit. Nothing else happens.
- That's it, I can't get it to do anything else at all by pressing the start button or inserting quarters.

What I have done so far:

- Put in a new power cord. The old one was a horrific mess with 3 different electrical-tape patch jobs, and it sparked when I accidentally stepped on it. I put in a new one, everything is the same, I didn't expect this to change anything, it just needed to be done.

- Checked all the fuses and also the fuse holder with a meter using tone. All good.

- Checked the transformer voltages, it is wired for hi tap and shows 58.3 VAC and 6.3 VAC for the lights, I believe this is all normal.

- Manually moved the score motor - I read that it can get stuck sometimes. This did not help.

- Tried a free play mod on the credit switch. This did not help.

- Check all of the tilts. All appear to operate as expected. There definitely is no tilt in the wrong position. If I short either the plumb bob tilt or the roller ball tilt, the tilt lamp comes on as expected. The tilt light stays lit when I restart. I can get the tilt light to go off by hitting the Reset coil. There are 3 slam tilts, one on the door, one on the bottom of the cabinet, and one on the bottom of the playfield. They all work as expected. When one is closed, it trips the Delay coil, which turns on a lamp connected to it for a few seconds, then turns off. I think this is how all of that is supposed to work.

- There are 2 quarter coin slots. One had a solenoid on it that looked pretty fried, including one of the wires. I read that this isn't needed anyway, so I disconnected it, taped off the wires, and removed it entirely. This did not help.

- Inspected everything to see if anything looks amiss. I didn't notice anything.

I have a schematic on the way which will give me something to work from, and I am working on better understanding of how the startup sequence works. If anyone has any hints or things for me to try I would appreciate it, I am not sure what to do next. I don't know if its something major or simple. It seems it might have something to do with the coin door since it is all so dead, although I don't know why that should go bad because I didn't really mess with anything in there.

 

[pinballdaveh]

it looks like you got all your problems solved on pinside.congrats on finding the bad coin switch.

 

[xsvtoys]

Yes, thank you for checking. I started out here after I read a lot of your posts helping people. But something strange happened when I made a new account and made this first post. The post wasn't showing up. It was on the front page, but that only lead to a dead link. I reported it and waited for a few days, but it didn't seem to want to show up, so I tried over at pinside, and eventually found the problem. (Broken wire on a coin switch!).

 

[JonPurpleHaze]

Sorry about the delay about your first post showing up late xsvtoys, we used to have a problem with spammers making new accounts and posting spam (and still do sometimes).

New Users first post are placed into a moderation queue only if the post contains certain keywords or hyperlinks (you should have been notified about the moderation queue after posting) and your post shouldn't have been placed into moderation, but I think I found out why it was placed into moderation.

The keywords mostly relate to Viagara, Cialis, sex, pharmaceutical, ringtones, etc. but one word is credit, I think this sentence did it:

- Tried a free play mod on the credit switch. This did not help.

:verysad:

I've removed credit from the keywords listing.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

speaking about that-- my GF is frequently complaining about my "credit switch."

any advice for me, fellers?

 

[pinballdaveh]

sure on what kind of machine are you having the problem.