With the SMC2 working on wallbox and with two known good blue box translators life was looking up. I dragged a nice DEC110 wallbox out of its hiding place that I had picked up online. I’ve worked on these since the Williford days and ran two locations with my own wallboxes. I know these wallboxes and like anything else there’s a certain way I go about reconditioning them. I took the black box out. It will get gone through just like all the rest with dis-assembly, inspection repair and testing. The combination power supply and selection board comes out. There’s a dozen capacitors that get replaced on it. Two SCR’s that get pulled and tested. I took the DES out also known as the pushbuttons. It will get taken apart, cleaned and adjusted. There are two other sub-assemblies that get attention if needed. That is the audio control board and the lamp board. This wallbox was in pretty nice shape cosmetically speaking. It is a dark brown that will go well with the SMC2 color scheme.

Other work going on were a black and gray box mailed in for testing and possible repair. They were good. I’m not sure why I do this except to help people out I guess. So many people buy a jukebox and know zero about it. A Seeburg has so many things that can keep it from operating properly. I have spares to go so it’s very easy for me to swap something out to quickly find out where a problem exists. And, like so many other things I have worked on over the years, pretty much the same things go wrong all the time. As an example: Mechanism scans twice and goes to rest no selections made. First thing to do is clean the detent points and the 3M1 points and adjust them. Same with the tormat and the tormat contact block. I’ve “fixed” many a juke on service call just by doing that. Anyway I got the fellows’ boxes on their way back to him. It can be very comforting to know that your black and gray boxes are good.

Tracy brought me the keyboard assembly from his 201. he was getting spurious selections picked up. If you have any Seeburg keyboard a quick test is to use your ohmmeter across the two end contacts at the top of each section. The 201 keyboard has three sections it being a 200 select machine. One of his sections measured about 30 ohms, the other two infinite or open. They were that dirty. And that is common. Not everyone likes my way of cleaning these but it very positively cleans a keyboard. I disassemble each section and use a Dremel tool with a small wire rotary brush to clean the contacts with. The slides get 400 grit sandpaper ran through twice. When I’m done each section will measure less than an ohm resistance. In addition to cleaning the sections all the start switches get pulled and the points cleaned on them and the snap spring inspected. I’ll take the service switch out of its mount and clean the contacts on that as well.

This keyboard assembly had a lot of burned wires centering around the terminal board for a single or dual pricing unit. Someone’s credit unit shorted out at one time and melted wires. A previous owner’s response was to wrap all of it in electricians tape. Not my reponse. It’s tedious but I replace each wire back to unburned and make sure to use heat shrink for insulating purposes. When I have the right wire I will color match as well.

Now that the computers are sorted out it was time to turn my attention to the DEC wallbox add-on to the SMC2 as planned. I keep a good DEC wallbox with cable already connected under the bench. I dragged it out and connected it to a 10 position terminal strip I placed on the bottom of the cabinet on the left side of the mech. The “blue box ” translator goes between the wallbox and the Gen2 board connecting to the wallbox at the terminal strip as well and then plugging straight into the Gen2 board. Three wires go from the PCC to the terminal strip for audio. Only thing left was power. I have several Seeburg light and power transformers. Any 27-30 vac transformer will work. I had all this connected up in a couple hours after dragging all my cables out and sorting them out. I plan to do the same thing, adding a wallbox, to the Hideaway SMC2 when the time comes so this was a little preparation for that project as well.

Comes the big moment, power, lights on the wallbox, Make Selection lamps lit. Punched 111 and the juke played 157. Yep….a few more selections with the oddest results. The two most common selections picked up were 157 and 175 no matter what numbers were punched. If I used the jukebox buttons to select then it operated normally. I disconnected the wallbox from the SMC2 terminal strip and went straight to the STD4 test juke. All selections normal. Wired the wallbox back into the SMC2. Tried the New Gen2 CPU, same results. I started picking all numbers ending in zero trying to establish a pattern. Not really any pattern at all with the former noted most often picked selections being 157 or 175.

I threw the Seeburg MCU into the fray. And out of chaos came order. All selections made with the wallbox using that MCU were normal. So…overwhelming evidence that something was wrong with the two Gen2 boards. I did not want to call Ed and tell the inventor of these boards plus more good things than I know of that his boards were bad. We do speak fairly often but still, I was uneasy. I called and he answered. I said,”I have some bad news. You won’t get angry if I tell you will you?” He laughed,”No, I can’t get mad at you.” I explained what was happening. Something was clearly wrong with the data lines. He wondered if these boards were leftovers from Ron Rich. It didn’t take him long to get his test SMC going using his prototype board. It operated normally. We made some comments about the possibility of components getting changed. He went to the bench where his techs assemble these Gen2 boards and picked one up. After installing it he made a selection and it played some weird number. I said, “Pick 111.” He did and it played 157. Bingo!

It did not take Ed long to narrow the problem down. I was able to help verify as I had my schematics and the boards out and on the bench in front of me. To make a long story short each input has a .1uf capacitor on it except the four data lines. The speed is in the nansecond range and a cap just sucks that line down. Well, no one knows why but C26 and C28 were supposed to be populated but those caps were placed in C27 Data2 line and C31 Data4 line. I was so happy we found the problem. I’m sure Ed had a lot to say to his assemblers. No telling how many boards went out like that but I had been the first to note the problem. I guess no one is running wallboxes on their SMC’s. He again verified which lines had no capacitors with an email the next morning. I waited until morning when I’d be fresh and repaired both boards in 20 minutes. Both select as they should. Another crisis over.