An Experiment

Tonight I was watching yet another playfield on eBay... this time it was a Medusa in Richmond. It spent the whole week with no bids at $100, but tonight people started bidding and it went for $200. I would have liked it... I like Medusa a lot. I played it back in the day and at a recent pinball show. Oh well... it was a bit rich for my blood. My adjusted max was $175.

I listen to a public radio show called Calling All Pets about pet stuff, and in this weeks show they talked about animal hoarders... like the old ladies who have 60 cats. Honestly, I recognized a lot of my own traits in the hoarder description... I've always collected things. Like when I was a kid, I collected baseball, football, basketball, and hockey cards, even though I didn't care much for sports. I collected Partridge Family trading cards even though I didn't care much for David Cassidy (though I was partial to Susan Dey). I started playing Neopets largely because I like collecting items. I spent about $1000 amassing and refurbishing a complete set of Colorforms Outer Space Men, of which I had all but three as a kid (and I still can't find my originals...). I just collect things. On the show they said that the urge to hoard is probably instinctual -- most likely a survival reflex -- and tightly bound to the limbic system. That probably explains why buying playfields is so much fun... they are just the latest in a long line of stuff my brain tells me I gotta have.

Anyway, the experiment: This week's obsession is fixing the lights in EBD. In the past I've tried replacing bulbs, and that's no good. Some of them used to work, so the wiring & socket should be OK. So I was reading the lights section in the repair guide and found the part about testing the components on the Lamp Driver Board. I realized that I had bought an Auxiliary Lamp Driver Board a few years ago to practice circuit board repair (it's actually the one they used in KISS to run the KISS lights on the backglass). I tested a bunch of the SCRs following the instructions, and all the ones I tried failed the test... the values were higher than they should have been. But, it was kind of fun testing them. Last night I located my bad lights on a schematic, and this weekend I plan to go in and see if I can figure out what's wrong with all those lights.