I done a bad thing... I bought another damn playfield. This time it's an Atari Middle Earth... not one of your great pinball machines, but it is -- get this -- the first pinball game I remember playing. Purely a nostalgia buy. Sorry about the lousy image quality, but I took this with my cell phone (both digital cameras are out of the house right now) and it's wedged in a corner so my wife won't see it.
Believe me when I say I was very conflicted about this purchase. It was on eBay for $35, and nobody bid on it. Shipping was expensive, but it was up in New Jersey and the guy said I could pick it up. So I bid on it with the understanding to myself that I wouldn't go any higher than the initial price. Nobody else bid on it, so I won. This was back in early December, and I arranged to pick it up two days before my wife got home -- so she need never know, heh heh heh.
I drove up on a Saturday... it was about 4 or 5 hours each way. I had bought my wife a GPS for Christmas, and thought this would be a good time to try it out. It worked out pretty well... not the choices I would make (I would have gone up the NJ Turnpike), but the GPS took me through old mill towns and stuff so it was an interesting drive. I got to the guy's house and picked up the playfield, and we chatted for a while in the cold. He was a pretty nice guy, and he had some interesting projects of his own... he was restoring a video game and a few pins. I don't know why -- maybe because I had been getting dvds of Seinfeld from Netflix while my wife was gone -- but when he asked me what I was going to use it for, I confabulated a complete lie about how I had a game that I was restoring and I was just getting this one for the parts and the boards looked OK but the CPU didn't boot and yadda yadda yadda. It was a real George Costanza moment. I still have no idea why I didn't just tell him the truth. But aside from that it was fun talking to him. Then I had a relatively uneventful drive back. I put the playfield in the basement under a blanket behind the Black Knight playfield on the off chance that my wife would see it, but as far as I can tell she hasn't even looked in that room.
In other pinball news, I have ignored Doctor Who but made progress on Eight Ball Deluxe. I cleaned the playfield and reinstalled all the parts, played a few games, then turned my baleful eye on the mechanical problems. With the help of rpg, I've determined that the chattering flipper is most likely a problem with the coil, like a broken wire or something. I tried to see if I could reattach it, but it looks like I should probably just replace it. Luckily, I bought two coils a long time ago for the chattering Paragon flipper, and EBD uses the same coils. Over Christmas I did practice soldering, so eventually I'll work myself into enough of a frenzy to replace it. The bad switches aren't as obvious, but with my newfound soldering skillz I can test the switch diodes and see if they're bad. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the lights that don't work (yes, I have replaced them with known good bulbs), but I'll worry about those later.
I also had some pinfun today, but I'm going to write a separate post for that.
