Update 2/2022: Our Star Wars has now completed nearly three years on location without a single deflection board failure, thanks to the Transistor Upgrade Kit. In fact, not a single game that we’ve upgraded with the TUK has since lost its deflection PCB!

Why do WG 6100 deflection boards go down so often? Conventional wisdom has always said “it’s the connectors” or “it’s the low voltage supply.” But after running four vector games on location at our arcade, 10+ hours per day, for over three years, we realized that every time we’ve had a failure, the “bottlecap” case transistors have blown. We’re running the LV2000 on all of our deflection boards, but that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference: the bottlecaps still blow, and they still take the deflection board with them.

Wells-Gardner uses the thin steel monitor case as a heat sink for the output transistors. This is a bad design: thin steel is a poor heatsink, the transistors get way too hot, and they blow. Our solution not only replaces the 40-year-old “bottlecaps” with more efficient modern transistors: it clamps them to a massive aluminum heat sink, actively cooled by a 24V fan. You can leave your game on all day, and the heatsink will barely get warm.

Our Star Wars cockpit at Flynn’s Retrocade (www.flynnsretrocade.com) used to go down every 2-3 months. After installing our Transistor Upgrade Kit, it’s been rock solid for nearly three years (and counting) of daily play — with the factory original deflection PCB. That’s an incredible improvement!