Very hard to find. GPE has/had them.

Looks like Marco has the capacitor... What the size is I do not know.
The capacitor can be small compact to 1"to 2" diameter.

It's more of a spark suppressor of I recall for the switches contacts.

Here is what you need.

https://www.pinballlife.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=5043-09443-00

Really?

No. The capacitor is shot. It is not nor will it work on the future. The solution that chad suggested is your answer.

My understanding is that the cap helps the processor register when the switch closes very quickly insuring that the score is tabulated and not missed

whirlwind_flipper_wiring_diagram.jpg

Not on a flipper switch what you're describing is for regular switch matrix switches. The one pictured is spark suppression.

Mouser.com
Look for a ceramic capacitor 0.1uf /500v or more. The shipping will be more than the cap

Very close! Its used to supress "switch bounce". It's where the switch makes contact multiple times within a millisecond and the machine is quick enough to pick up on that and register multiple switch hits. The cap smooths this out and the machine only sees one switch hit within that time frame.

If that were true they would be required on all switches.

The software does a nice job of the debounce function on its own, no caps needed. But because of this, short hits would be missed.

I'm asking because I don't know, but does it also help with power surges (volts or amps)? Circuit protection?
Just curious since it's being discussed.

I just ordered one of these from action pinball. How they look isn’t important aka you don’t need to have one the exact same size. What does matter is matching the rating. Here is a pic of the replacement I got. It is MUCH smaller than the original, but since the values are the same, it is electrically identical. You need .1uf 500v

image (resized).jpg

Capacitors pass changing voltage, and block constant voltage.

When a high-current switch connects, it has a not-quite-instant change of voltage. It's very, very quick. A small-value capacitor can pass that voltage to the ground terminal of the switch. That's what this does. It takes that near-instant blink of changing voltages that actually can spike quite high, and gets rid of it.

Think of a power surge, it might change quickly, but it STAYS at a high voltage for a while. Capacitors don't help with this.

Circuit protection. Yup, putting small value capacitors next to various chips, or where there is expected near-instant changes in voltage gets rid of the voltage spike. This is really, really important.

If you look at your circuit board there frequently be little yellow beads next to the chips (and elsewhere, lots of them). Those are small value capacitors 'bypassing' the voltage spikes so that the logic can work without being triggered by voltage spikes.

It's important in pinballs to get rid of the really high spike in voltages when you use this kind of flipper switch because the spike can create a really intense spark, and that spark will corrode the switch contacts and cover them with crud caused by the arcing of the high voltage spikes.

This particular capacitor does that job, and without it, your flippers will work, but you'll have premature failure of your flipper switches.

They were added mostly in the early machines to Europe bound games. The domestic US games got nothing and while the switches do wear, they don't really wear too quickly. I've only had to replace them on a handful of games out of a couple hundred.

Yours is .01ufd not .1ufd
markings from your picture 103M = .01ufd.
if markings are 104M = .1ufd

! You’re correct! I was not paying close enough attention when ordering with the various redirects it had for replacement parts.

I'm not surprised by this.

However, anecdotally, I've seen several examples of one flipper button switch seriously in need of replacement, and the other flipper button switch that was still in 'file it down' condition, and the difference was that this little bypass capacitor was broken off or missing on the heavily corroded contacts side.

*shrugs*

I think they make a difference over the lifetime of the switch, in a commercial setting where the game is played a LOT.

In home use? Well, if this cap leg was broken off, and I didn't have one in my truck when I came out to your house for a service call on some other problem, I wouldn't schedule a return service call just to replace this.

Good to have, but not something I'd feel bad about if it didn't get replaced in a home machine.

Looking at the circuit in reply #10 I see that there are diodes across both flipper coil windings on each flipper coil. Don't those take care of the high current, arc suppression duties? Does the capacitor offer a little more arc suppression, just in case? I'm curious if arcing occurs in this situation without the capacitor.

The lower right flipper button also feeds the lane change circuit through an opto isolator. A capacitor in that situation might be used to suppress spikes or for debouncing but since the cap is on all flipper buttons that's probably not what's going on here, unless all flipper switches were assembled the same.

Closing the flipper switch sends current through the circuit into the flipper coils. Sending current into an inductor like a flipper coil is similar to sending voltage into a capacitor. The current can't change instantly. Instead the current change is limited by the flipper coil. So closing the flipper switch doesn't seem likely to cause a voltage or current spike.

Opening the flipper switch is more problematic since there is all that energy stored in the magnetic field of the flipper coil. The opening switch does prevent current from flowing through the switch instantly but the solenoid doesn't care. It keeps pumping current out while the current through it decays (like the voltage in a capacitor). That's why the diodes are there. They provide a path for the decaying current from the flipper coils to recirculate back through the coil until all the energy is eventually dissipated as heat. Without the diodes the current would rush to the open switch, causing the voltage across the switch to climb, until there is enough voltage (potentially 1000s of volts) to arc across the switch.

/Mark

No. Diodes suppress back EMF after the coil powers down. The caps suppress sparks on the power-on cycle of the coil.