Rockola 471 Princess - Almost threre...

Hi Guys, thanks again for helping me get my 471 going again. I'm not even 60% sure of how it all works so I'm looking for a bit more advice on a song selection problem and I'm hoping I haven't broke it...

I've been so pleased with the old girl that I've gone and bought a load of 45s to fill the cartridge and printed and inserted the title cards; Brilliant! From doing this I found that certain songs would not play. The selection buttons appeared to work correctly when pressed, but nothing played. The songs that won't play all seem to be in the group of high selections (Js and Ks, 7 to 0's) although the highest selection possible (K0) does play. I tried a B side selection in the high range and was presented with the opposite problem; that is, the song selected was now on a constant repeat loop. I found I could insert more credit and select other songs that would play in between but the old girl would keep going back to the same song and play it on repeat without inserting more credit. I assumed something was stuck somewhere so I reached for the manual once again...!

You may recall from my previous posts that I'm a newbie to jukeboxes and my assumptions are often the opposite of correct; so this is what I think I've worked out after a read through the manual and an inspection of the 'read in' 'write out' plate (Is this the wobble plate?) . Please excuse my crude descriptions of the operating cycle!

I think I can see how the selection process works, post song selection, the Write in Carriage moves to the corresponding position of the wobble plate(?) and physically 'trips' the pins to the 'in play' position. Other 'stuff' happens. The read out carriage then reacts to the 'in play' pins to continue the operating cycle. I could see that the pins for the songs that would not play earlier were all in the 'in play' position, including the song playing on repeat. I hope I'm not damaging the system by doing this but I manually flipped that pin of the repeating record and this fixed that problem. I then flipped a random pin to 'in play' and found this would make the read out carriage stop and play that song. Sticky pins I'm thinking so I went ahead and manually flipped all the pins to the 'not in play' position.
What happened next concerns me. Upon the next pass of the read out carriage there was an alarming clicking noise and the mechanism stuttered. I quickly moved the service scan switch to stop and then moved it to scan. No problems with scan. Moving back to play I got the noise again and more stuttering. Thinking this has something to do with the pins I flipped to 'not in play' i quickly flipped them back and set to play. No noises or problems other than the same songs still fail to play. I thought it was back to normal so I sprayed a small amount of contact cleaner on the offending pins and gave them a wipe with no results.

I was manually flipping pins to 'in play' to test if the song would play and wondering why the read out carriage was not reacting to certain songs when even worse happened; the entire system came to a halt, half way through returning a record to the basket; completely dead in mid action. I went to get my camera to take a picture thinking I'd post it here but for some reason I thought flipping another pin into the 'in play' position might help, and it did! The system fired up again and returned the record to the basket. At this point I set the old girl to off and powered down.

So, hopefully I haven't broke it and should I assume that I need to remove the wobble(?) plate and clean the pins properly? I don't understand why the system was stuttering and having issues when there are no pins in the 'in play' position.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Mick,
It appears to me that you have only one problem--the "read out" slip-rings and, or wipers are not always making good contact. This is a common RockOla problem, and if "cleaned/sprayed" with the wrong product, becomes nearly impossible to cure. The ONLY cure I have found on difficult cases of this problem is to totally remove the read-out arm, clean the rings with a "safety solvent" - at least twice, clean / check the contact points on the arm ( see above post, on how to clean---), then, coat the slip rings with Deoxit-5. I have yet to find anything else that will do this job--
Re-assemble, scan the mechanism several times, and you should be "in business" !

Thanks Ron.