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I messed up my Wells Gardner monitor
Question from James: Hello.
I have a Wells Gardner 19K4906 in a Satan’s Hollow cocktail I’m restoring.
While the cabinet is beat up, the game itself plays fine. And the video while somewhat faded was good (no distortion, shaking etc.)
Wanting to improve things as much as possible I took the chassis out to replace the caps. Once all the caps were replaced I connected it back, powered it on, checked for smoke and all was good. (Some of the caps didn’t match what the documentation said, but I replaced everything with the same values as what was on the board).
However once the screen powered on the image would scroll fast from left to right, hit the right edge and go back to the left and scroll to the right – over and over. I powered it off, did some Googling, and figured I might have to play with the Horizontal Hold.
So I powered it on again but this time the screen would show random blocks of colour, then go all wavy with bright white light, then display just a single line of white along the middle, then go back to the original scrolling issue. In addition a high pitched static-y screeching was coming from the chassis. To me it sounds like it’s coming from the flyback.
So while I thought I was being all proactive and replacing the caps I’ve essentially ruined a perfectly working game.
I’m not sure what to do now. I intend on checking all my soldering again to see if there are maybe in cold solder joints, but beyond that I don’t know what else to do. I know I can get a replacement flyback, but I don’t know if the one’s I’ve seen are compatible with this tube. I could also just get a new tube but that’s a lot of money.
One final note. A lot of the newer tubes I’ve seen come with their own power cord that just plugs into a receptacle on the main supply. But mine connected with a two socket molex connector. However while the connector to the tube had an orientation (one circle, one square), the connector from the power supply has two round circles.
I wasn’t entirely sure which way it was originally connected, and after it messed up I tried reversing it but it didn’t make a difference.
Any suggestions/advice appreciated.
Thx,
James
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: James,
When you get the thin white line across your screen that’s usually an indication of either a bad HOT (Horizontal Output Transistor) and/or a bad flyback. Keep in mind that these parts might not necessarily be bad. They might just have some cold solder joints that broke while you were handling your chassis. We definitely recommend refreshing the solder around these two parts. If you feel like you need a new flyback, our friend Chad at arcadecup.com sells flybacks that will be compatible with your chassis and your tube. You should not need to buy a new tube. You might also think about buying a new HOT if you’re buying a new flyback as these parts are somewhat related and tend to fail around the same time.
Since you were having a trouble time getting the image to stop scrolling, there might be some sync problems going on as well. Check to make sure you’ve got a good connection coming from your board to your chassis. You might also touch up the solder on the pins that connect the board to the chassis. While you’re doing your touch up soldering, you might check transistor Q301 and capacitor C315 as these parts also deal with sync. Hope that helps.
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