More Tales of Maintenance

First, another fan-gush for Wizard of OZ... just read about+saw the playfield pic on Pinball News, and it looks pretty darn cool. Definitely a welcome departure from the current generation of Stern "make this shot three times to start a mode" design philosophy... not that I dislike the last couple of years of Stern games, but seeing WOZ as it develops makes me think I've been missing the variety that comes with a second pinball company.

Last Tuesday I took another day off to work on games at the museum. It turns out my timing was poor, because that happened to be the day before Mrs. Entropy's birthday -- which I also took as vacation, by the way -- but she saw me wanting to spend most of the day at the museum as an indication that I didn't want to spend time with her. How she leaped that chasm of faulty logic to arrive at her conclusion I'll never know, but I managed to smooth things over mainly by pointing out all of the times she's wandered away from me physically and mentally which I did not take as an indication that our marriage was over (such as her fanatical devotion to a zombie podcast or the recent binge of Facebook games, which she basically spent the entire month of June playing).

So, maintainin' the games: Based on my data set of two, my day-long binges seem to always involve one game that is a huge thorn in my side. This time it was Indiana Jones, on which I had my own personal pinball adventure. The problem that kicked things off was a sticky flipper, which I worked on for a while and managed to not fix. But I also looked at the test report and found that the game reported a whole bunch of switch errors on the mini-playfield. When I tested them they worked fine, but then I noticed that the diverter that sends the ball to the Path of Adventure vs the ramp was not opening all the way, which kept the ball from making it to the mpf. Taking a look, it appeared that the diverter had become disconnected from the linkage to the coil and some goofy jury-rigged solution on it. I looked up one part of the linkage on Marco and it looked fine, then spent a bunch of time trying to make the jury-rigging work until I finally gave up. Later, at home, I had the presence of mind to look up the other end of the linkage and found that what I thought was jury-rigging was the actual part, which may have broken but was reparable. So if it's still messed up on Tuesday, I have a picture of the part as it's supposed to look, so I should be able to fix it accordingly.

After that miserable failure, I moved on to another personally irritating project: Black Knight. Instead of a spinner, the museum's BK has always had a roll-under gate; this makes it somewhat re: tarded because when it lights for 2,500, a roll-under will give you two or maybe three scores, whereas a spinner will give you whole bunches. Luckily, I had a spare spinner assembly! You see, when I got my BK 10-ish years ago, it had the wrong spinner on it. So I got a correct one on eBay, but that auction was for the entire spinner assembly and I just needed the thing that did the spinning. Synchronicity! So I bought a BK spinner sticker set at the former Pinball Wizards show in May and I found the spinner stuff I had bought while organizing the basement a few weeks ago. I installed everything, spent a little more time than I expected adjusting it, and at the figurative end of the day I had a Black Knight with the proper parts.

While I had BK open I decided to run it through some diagnostics because it's a little wonky. Surprisingly, the switch and solenoid tests passed, but the lamp test had some issues... but they turned out (as we can see on the right) to be strictly regimented issues, which I suppose are the best kind of issues to have. So the lamps that are out either fall in one of two columns or one row, which should make trouble shooting a little easier. But that's a job for another day.

Then there was some this and that things I did: Avatar's flipper was supposedly sticking, but I couldn't reproduce it, though I did find that the Link gate wasn't staying up... need to look into that. I tried to fix the dollar bill slot on Breakshot but to no avail. I retrieved a stuck ball in the traditional position on Guns 'n' Roses, on the plastic next to the lower pop bumper (clearly Slash was remiss in his play testing). I think that was all I did. If I ever get another full fixin' day at the museum -- and I'm unlikely to, at least in its current location -- I'll have to try not to get stuck on one particular game to the exclusion of all others. o_O;