Wire Identification
Games affected: all
The older the game, the more likely it is that the wire colors have all grimed up to a solid greyish/black. You can try:
- cleaning off the wires with an evaporative cleaner like grain alcohol, carburetor cleaner, or denatured alcohol.
- fray the end of the cloth insulator a little and sometimes see what the fibre color is.
- if the wire is connected to something, just look in the manual/schem to see what it could possibly be.
Sometime, though, you just need to figure out what wire it must be by verifying where the other end of it connects. Bally makes this a little more fun by routing the wires in huge bundles, so assuming you don't want to cut the bundle wrappings so you can physically trace the wire, you are left with using an ohmeter or continuity tester to find both ends of a wire.
Naturally, this isn't quite that simple, or this write-up wouldn't be here. So we'll look at the problems by using Dan's Big Time as an example. His machine had the replay register clipped out. He replaced it with one from a parts machine, but he can't really tell what the dangling wire colors are.
safari |
| replay register |
|---|
Looking at the above picture of a wired unit, we can count five different wires going to the switch blades, but one of them is a double wire, so he may have six wires disconnected. There are also a couple wires going down to the coil in the bottom left corner.
We will figure out which wire is which by using a continuity tester, the manual and
the schematic.
