A Shocking Development: Repairs of Actual Substance!

I was going to write about the Mystery Box, but some actual pinball fixin' has been going on, so I feel obligated to discuss it.

Doctor Who is back up and running, thanks to the Shaggy Repair Guides, specifically the section on WPC resets. Basically, I worked through the steps and was fine until I got to the point where I measured the voltage on the CPU board. Instead of being the healthy 4.95 VDC on the power board, it was a slightly anemic 4.87. The next step was to reseat J101 on the power board, and that didn't help. But reseating J114 (the power->CPU connector) got me .01 V back. That was a step in the right direction, so I reseated (resat?) J201 on the CPU. That put me up to 4.92 VDC, which is just good enough to keep the game running. To celebrate, I played what turned out to be a pretty good game, making sure to whack the flippers more than usual to put as much stress on the system as possible. It played like a champ, albeit a champ with a bunch of features disabled. And fate rewarded me for my work, because I got the Doctor Cow Easter Egg for the first time while I was playing.

However, that is not the end of the story. As the repair guide says, reseating the connectors is not the fix, it's an indication of the problem. I need to level up my connector skills and replace J114 & J201. To do so, I ordered a crimping tool, connectors, keys, trifurcons, and etc. from the fine folk at Great Plains Electronics, who is on spring break right now but will be back Tuesday. So April will be Connector Month here at the Pinblog, because I need to fix this, redo the coin door connector, and finally get around to fixing the MPU J3 connector on Eight Ball Deluxe, so I can play more than one game at a time without reseating it. Yeah, baby.

This brings me to a painful topic, but one which I think needs to be addressed at this juncture: What I need to fix to get Doctor Who fully functional. They are, in no particular order:

1. Replace the connectors listed above.
2. Fix the column that's out on the CPU. I think I just need to flow some solder between the encoder chip and the resistor that precedes it, but it could be more complicated than that.
3. Fix the miniplayfield so it raises and lowers properly. This could be as easy as replacing the opto, or it could be much worse.
4. Fix the gray time expander buttons. I believe one of them has a bad opto, and I think the other appears to have a problem at the opto board.
5. Reconnect the wobblehead, which I disconnected until the reset problem was dealt with. Hopefully replacing the connectors will bump my voltage up to a healthy 4.95 V, because I honestly don't think 4.92 V + flippers + a functional miniplayfield + that crazy moving dalek is going to cut it. No sir, I just don't like it.
6. Lower priority items: install the new playfield switch, install a more effective backbox lock, replace the bogus plexiglass with actual translite glass (which I have prepaid for and should pick up at the Allentown show in 3 weeks!).
   
7. Give the game a thorough cleaning.
8. The unknown... things I don't know are broken yet, things that will break in the future, things in the scary darkness beyond the light cast by the single 555 bulb I'm holding in my hand.

So that's what I'm up against. Let's set a hard target of trying to finish this all up by the end of summer. OK, that's kind of a pretty flaccid target, but for a professional procrastination proponent such as myself, that's as hard as its going to get.

And as if that's not enough, I've got eBays going for a bunch of Mystery Box stuff, and they're up to $50 with a day to go and lots of watchers. So it's possible that I may be able to pay for all these repairs, as well.