Whenever making repairs or adding mods I try to stick to my own self imposed rule: repairs should look like there never was a problem and mods should look like they could be factory.

I know that when doing repairs they will sometimes be obvious because say new connectors will be different than the others and so on, but that doesn’t mean the repairs can’t be clean. The image below illustrates my point.

It’s the same with mods. Instead of properly connecting wires, I see people using alligator clips to power them. Clips are OK for testing purposes but not as a permanent solution. All it takes is for one clip to fall off and touch something it shouldn’t to make a whole mess of problems.

Whenever adding the Alltek lamp driver boards for LEDs you need to run a power wire to it from the switched lamp circuit to eliminate the LED flickering. I usually see a wire draped across from the insert panel to the board and just hanging freely. I suppose in most cases this is fine and I’m sure most people won’t care.

My OCD prevents me from doing that. I don’t use the wire supplied with the board since it’s not long enough. I start from the point where I’ll pull power and tie the wire into the existing harness using new wire ties and feed it into the connector through the other side to where it will eventually terminate at the new lamp driver board.

I can think of maybe one occasion where the connector was full and I had to add an additional connector, but most games won’t have this issue as there’s usually a few unused spaces.

One benefit to this is that in the rare occasion the insert panel needs to be removed from the head no additional wires will be to be dealt with.

That’s is for this Frank’s Quick Tip, hopefully it will inspire you to take a little extra time when making repairs or adding mods. Not only will your work look better, it will be less prone to problems and will be ultimately more reliable.

Till next time, Frank