Pinball Vacation, Part B

Here's a perfect example of Why I Suck: I'm running errands today in the car, and on the radio comes Journey singing Don't Stop Believin'. Now, a normal person my age would think about high school, that party at Biff's house in our Junior Year, driving home with friends after watching, oh, I don't know, Comin' At Ya! and hearing that song. What's the first thing I think of? The freakin' Journey arcade game, where you controlled the band members with their little digitized heads as they flew around killing aliens with their instruments. That's me in a nutshell.

Btw, here's an interesting fact about Journey, a band which I largely avoided in the 80's thanks to Punk Rock and New Wave. I did an analysis of their song titles and lyrics when a friend loaned me their greatest hits CD, and I found that they almost never write ing, always in'. I mean, Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'? Come on, are gerunds so terrible?

So. Pinball Vacation Day 2... or shall we say, Day 2 of the Pinball-iday? (Yes! *fist pump*) I have to put this in the frustrating and somewhat productive pile.

Again with the music, I rerecorded the Doctor Who music, as well as a new recording of Star Trek TNG. ST took twice as long as usual because it has a lot of music, and then I got hung up on the zillions of speech calls. I also mixed together the weird high pitched reedy music I mentioned yesterday with normal music. The result was a horrible, horrible thing, discordant and strange, like the soundtrack to Tim Burton's Doctor Who.

I had a frustrating time with the coin door. I cleaned off the French door and then found that the screw holes to attach the door to the frame are slightly different. So then I went back to my old door, only to find that a metal tab that holds some wires hit the door switch mount and kept it from closing. So I bent that down a little and that worked, so I now have a functional coin door.

Then I got the bright idea to replace my broken launch ball button with a new one I bought a year or two ago from Pinball Resource. How hard could that be? First, I couldn't find a wrench big enough to unscrew it. After I gave that up, I managed to get the plastic nut off with my fingers. Then I found that the threads on the new button didn't extend past the wood of the cabinet (I later found this wasn't necessary, as the assembly snapped in). So then I swapped the new button cover with the old one, but then I couldn't figure out how the switch attached to the button shaft. After puzzling over that for a while, I thought I'll just use the entire new button assembly. But then I found that the holes on the switch didn't match the corresponding pegs on the mount (of course, I just now realized that I was trying to put it in upside-down, duh). So finally I ended up Krazy Gluing the switch to the shaft and calling it a day. As the before and after pics below show, it does look a lot better.

Stay tuned for Day 3, which may just involve a Road Trip...