Creature from the Black Lagoon
Reproduction Chase Lamp Board



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Technical Analysis of the CFTBL Chase Board
(A-15541 Chase Light II PCB Assembly)


This is a technical overview on the CFTBL chase ramp lights, to assist in troubleshooting your game.

The way the CFTBL ramp lights are set up, there are four lamp circuits ... L1, L2, L3 and L4. By design, three circuits are on, and one circuit is off. There is no way to light all four circuits at the same time. If you are seeing all the lights on at the same time, you have some sort of board problem. If the animations are simply incorrect, hopefully we can fix that.

The J2 connector toggles which of the four circuits is "off". If you pull the J2 connector off entirely, then L1 should be dark, but L2, L3 and L4 should be lit. Go ahead and start by doing that, then inspect the ramp lights to see what should and should not be lit. You can pull J3 or J4 to find out where the cutoff is between the upper circuit and the lower one.

You can then attach test leads to the two pins on J2 and connect one to ground (the game's metal side-rail should be fine) then the ground the other, then ground both. For each of these tests, a different circuit should go dark. By toggling these signals, the game is able to create the chasing effect with the lamps. Manually manipulating the signals allows you to isolate a problem, such as if you can produce the proper chase on one circuit, but not the other? Or, which of L1, L2, L3 and/or L4 are having issues?

You are welcome to Email me if you are still having issues, but please run the above tests first and let me know what you find out. If need be, you can order a new board by clicking on the "Purchase" link, below.

PS: If you have converted your game over to LEDs, the original (or repro) chase boards may not function properly. The board design uses a TRIAC to control the incandescent bulbs from the original design. TRIACs cannot turn "off" until the voltage reaches 0, and LEDs often do not consume enough power to mimic this behavior. In these cases, see if you can use one or more of the old #86 lamps, which may be enough to rectify this problem. I someday hope to produce a more LED-friendly version of this board.




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