Pinball Vacation, Day Four

The saga continues...

Today was the first sunny day of reasonable temperature that we've had for the entire week, so I was obligated to run out and do some yard work. We also went to a local park and perambulated about. And on the way back I convinced Mrs. Entropy to stop in at Sole d'Italia for some Family Guy pinball!!! Yes, it's one of the rare occasions when I played pinball with my wife... it wasn't a huge arm twist, since it was just slightly out of the way and she likes the show. I got a free game and she made what I thought was a respectable novice score, but she is a perfectionist so wasn't happy with her score. Regardless, at least I got to share my interest with the spouse, which is not always easy to do as we have somewhat mutually antagonistic hobbies.

In the repair corner today, I verified that the playfield switch will work with the hardware I have, but didn't install it since I didn't want to bust out the soldering iron. So the primary job was making a connector for the coin door test buttons. I would like to stand here and say that I added connectors to my pinball repair skill set, but it's only partially true. I did get some EP, but I don't think I managed to level up.

So I had a Molex .156" plug empties and a bag of Trifurcon terminals that I'd bought a few years ago. First I cut the plug to size, 13 pins. I don't have a crimping tool, because I rarely spend money on tools until I know I'm going to use them, so I did my crimping with needle-nosed pliers. The final score was Joe 2, Crappy Crimps I'll have to redo at some point 4. Then I inserted the first terminal into the plug and immediately discovered that I had was orienting the plug to the pin listing in the manual, which meant I put pin 3 into slot 11. At this point I discovered the importance of having a terminal removal tool, which I plan to buy at the same time I get a crimper. But get it out I did, and inserted everything into what I thought were the correct slots. I plugged it into the board and it fit very nicely. I turned on the game to test it and found that the buttons were completely backwards... the test button added service credits, and the service credit button got me into the test mode. But I did do it, I learned from my mistakes, I know what tools I need to get to do a better job next time, and I didn't hurt myself in the process. I've had far worse days doing pinball repair.