Mortal Kombat 5.9 Vac Coin Chute Lights

[Susurrous]

I'm restoring a Mortal Kombat I arcade cabinet and the last bit of wiring left to do are the two 5.9 Vac coin chute lights on the door.

The cabinet has a newer Wells-Gardner monitor that doesn't require an isolation transformer. So all I have is a power supply for the MK1 PCB—but no fuse/fuse holder, no line filters, no distribution block, etc. The marquee halogen light now runs to a standard power outlet.

So my question is, what's the easiest method of powering these lights when the cabinet is turned on?

I have several free plugs inside on a power strip. Or would I just run the wires directly to the power supply? (12V, 5V, -5V?) I wouldn't do this is there was potential to damage or drain power to the PCB(s).

[asantora]

What kind of light bulbs are currently in place in your coin reject slot? I believe your voltage should be DC, not AC.


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[Susurrous]

They're just the standard GE#555 bulbs.

[asantora]

Being that these bulbs don’t run on AC voltage, tap into the switching power supply to get the DC voltage that you need. I wouldn’t worry about two bulbs drawing too much power and if you are, replace them with LEDs bulbs.


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[PL1]

They're just the standard GE#555 bulbs.

A quick check of the specs shows that those bulbs usually draw 0.25A @ 6.3VDC.

You can run ground and 12v lines from the power supply and wire the two bulbs in series like this:

    12v--------555 bulb 1----555 bulb 2--------ground

Each bulb will drop 6v (half of the 12v) and you'll draw slightly less than 0.25A.

Running at the lower voltage will slightly extend the life of the bulb.

Stranded wire between 20AWG-24AWG will easily handle that much current and be easy to work with.   


Scott

[Susurrous]

Update: I'm sure you guys will think it's overkill, but I ended up purchasing a 12V 5A 60W Power Supply off Amazon for about $12 so the coin chute lights will have their own dedicated power supply. I intend to turn the cabinet into a Multi-Kombat machine and have read that some of the boards are fickle depending on the draw, so I wanted to eliminate any potential problems down the road.

[pbj]

Pinball machines run their general illumination off AC, which is why LED replacement bulbs flicker.  And, yes, you can also run them off 5VDC.  The filament inside doesn’t care.  Glad you got it going but I felt compelled to correct some bad information in this thread.

 

[Susurrous]

Thanks, PBJ!

As it turns out, the 12V power supply works great, but was burning out the #555 bulbs pretty quickly (not to mention being a potential fire hazard).

I found out that the following wedge base bulbs run on 5 volts perfectly fine, but should never be run on voltage higher than 6 volts:
#159 - 6 volts
#259 - 6 volts
#555 - 6 volts

And these wedge base bulbs can be run from any 12 to 14 volt source:
#194 - 12 volts
#161 - 12 volts
#658 - 12 volts

So I picked up some #194 and will report back on whether that prolongs the lamp life.