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Tommy - watch an idiot bite off more than he can chew!


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I have new rubbers arriving hopefully Monday so will be able to get a whole heap of plastics in place. 
I will also be able to put the ramps in and get a good idea of the finished product. BUT, my rivet punch and spring steel for new ramp flaps are deep in the delivery jungle, so final final result will be held up till then. Getting close though!

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Aye, a wire comes off and you are upset?. We only ever had one Tommy and lets just say it wasn't my favourite reliability wise and it was brand new so I certainly wouldn't be to concerned.

Bigger to come by design such as the stupid auto launch plunger mech arm. I think our one lasted about a month before it sheared off as it should considering they only put one connecting arm to a part that obviously twists every time it hits a ball resulting in all the balls dropping inside the cabinet.

This become an annoying problem because before shearing off, the arm would bend back enough to allow the ball to roll behind the ball switch but still infront of the arm. Result, the arm would fire and snap the micro actuator arm off the micro switch so now no way of the machine detecting when to kick. After running with no switch you end up with more than one ball in the shooter lane making it bend more till it failed.

I repaired a few of those on site before coming up with a long term solution that involved using Williams parts. Turtles and Hook I think suffered this same collection of problems.

Some ideas are just poor and this idea is one of those I thought. Good thing is I don't remember Tommy having to many other "design" problems.

Not many machines didn't have "design" problems.

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5 minutes ago, Autosteve said:

Aye, a wire comes off and you are upset?. We only ever had one Tommy and lets just say it wasn't my favourite reliability wise and it was brand new so I certainly wouldn't be to concerned.

Bigger to come by design such as the stupid auto launch plunger mech arm. 

Yeah, not so bad. It was more about the hilarious timing.. right after I got the very last ramp on, haha. Whole ramp had to come out again right after it went in. Just the way it goes. 
 

I’m going to try a Stern launcher on it at some point. The OG really is not the best. 

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To me the design got changed from original as in it started out as a normal slingshot kicker that aren't really known to fail but them someone worked out the switch arm got in the way so they offset the arm to one side. Offsetting it allowed the arm to twist. I just looked at what they were trying to do and looked at how Williams did it on machines like Getaway that didn't really fail. Problem through memory is Williams have a shooter guage that has metal at the front edge where as Data East did not. That had to be altered so the ball couldn't go beside the plunger.

It may not give you the problems I got as regularly on account that tommy when it was new was making us around $400 a week plus 10% free so around 440 games X 3 balls per game is around 1300 operations per week.

I guess I was blessed seeing what goes wrong so quickly on machines but I was also cursed when a new machine wasn't earning it's expected revenue resulting in an arse kicking so to say.

I think through memory this mech design was factory modded later as the factory finally recognised they had an issue. Look for the kicker that has two arms up to the part that contacts the ball. It was better but the arm that goes back to the plunger still twists allowing the mech to touch the playfield and not return to the rest position reliably.

You avoid all these probems simply using basically a knocker coil bracket but that isn't exactly standard factory I guess.

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