Terry L. brought in a DCC3, black box, and a gray box for testing and repair. Says the jukebox won’t initate Scan after a selection is made. This jukebox does not have a Selection Pass button which has “gotten” more than one good jukebox tech including yours truly. The problem won’t be in the black box but could in the gray and most definitely in the DCC or Digital Control Center. I tested the boxes first on my STD4 test jukebox amd they were fine. Installed the DCC and sure enough-no scan. I swapped in the smallest board and the unit started scanning when a selection was made. This board sends a scan start pulse when told to by the gray box. Someone had attempted to repair it by replacing Q3115 and Q3116 with totally wrong components. It was cheaper to just install one of my rebuilt units in place rather than repair his.

I finally got the SMC2 chrome trim back from Morales Plating. They are good but slow. I installed the four pieces, two on top and two in front. Actually installed them twice as in my admiration for the pretty shiny stuff I forgot to put the black top and front stop trim pieces in place first. These stop pieces do just that- the upper and lower doors stop or rest against them. I’ll have to order weatherstripping trim to install on them.

The rest of my garage time was spent rounding up the volume control pieces that push onto the volume controls themselves and epoxying the steel balls in place. Each gets three. These mesh with three holes on the reciprocating piece that actually connects to the volume control motor gear box. There are two flavors for the later jukeboxes. Balled and hook and loop. I’ll be getting into volume controls soon.

Most of the day was spent trying to get another working MCU for the SMC2. I have several with only one working. It is out of the SMC2 Hideaway unit and is sacrosanct. It is my test mule and will eventually go back into the Hideaway when its turn comes for restoration.

Testing the boards on these requires a lot of patience and the ability to remember what was done with what. Mostly because these can only be tested fully assembled in a case and connected to the juke. So each change requires removing the boards from the case, dis-assembling them, changing out whatever is decided to be tested next then re-assembling. I cheated a little bit by holding the MCU in hand instead of mounting it and turning the jukebox on with the other hand while observing.

The first thing I did was test all the 40 pin CPU chips out of four main boards in the Mule. They were all good to my relief. They can have extremely fragile pins and I take extreme care when pulling and inserting them. These are the main processor chips that the mask was lost and cannot be replaced. If nothing else I have 4 good programmed processors. On one of the boards I got the idea that the P5101 RAMs were bad and replaced those with new ones sourced through ebay. Almost all the chips used in these are “obsolete” and ebay is a very good source. Two new RAMs didn’t fix it. To make a long story short none of the four main boards would work. One of the boards had several solder cracks around many pins and one of the factory jumper wires was broken. I found so much wrong on this one that I had high hopes for it working. Alas, it did not.

I find this sort of stuff interesting so you, dear reader, will just have to suffer through. The bad boards when assembled with known good display and pricing boards exhibited differing behavior. One was just dead. Perhaps a voltage regulator issue. Another would not scan for initialization. The last two would not stop scanning. Perhaps their issue has to do with recogizing either the detent pulses or the limit switches. One day I will break these out again and try to repair them.

I will have to get one of the Gen 2 boards for the SMC2. I think they’re a bit high-priced but what ya gonna do? We are lucky to have them available. Ron Rich had me fooled. I thought he was the source of these Gen 2 MCUs and when he passed away I thought “That was it. No more Gen2s. No more SMC restos.” After some searching I found out that Ed Fischer of Data Sync Engineering actually makes these among several other pretty neat jukebox stuff. I called him and we had a good long talk. He is an engineer extraordinaire. I actually understood most of his technical explanations which I think he appreciates and look forward to chatting with him again. And, to make it clear to get the word out. These GEN2 boards are available through their commercial site https://cdadapter.com/