Progress with a Capital P!

Again, real life intrudes on the light frothiness of the blog... our cat Ryo-ohki had a really bad day Monday, so we decided it was time to put her to sleep. I really didn't feel much like doing anything for a couple of days, but now I've got a few more things to write about. Again, this is going to be one of the more sedate entries. Sorry, no links either... but I've linked to everything in here before, anyway.

Last weekend my daughter came home for her first Spring Break, and I kind of vowed to have Doctor Who working by the time she went back. When I went up, we ate at Pizza House which has replaced Medieval Madness with NASCAR. That would have been fine, but it wasn't turned on. We'll see if it's been fixed when we go up Sunday.

Over the weekend it was time to do some work. The flippers were the major stumbling block, so on Sunday I had at it. First I tried to replace the Mini-playfield optos to see if a new one would help, but it didn't.

Looking carefully at the flipper mechanisms, I found that all three were just missing the coils, except for one which lacked the coil stop. I used the coils from the flippers I bought on eBay, and installed the coil and stop from the rebuild kit I got from Pinball Resource. Still unsure of my soldering skills, I just twisted the wires together and taped them up. I used a diagram from a repair guide to match the wires to their proper shunts on the coil. That worked out surprisingly well, and got me a completely
working left flipper, an upper left that works but doesn't hold, and a right that get stuck in the up position. It got stuck because the thing that closes the EOS switch was bending the switch blade to the point where it trapped the thing. I tried bending the switch blade but it would just rebend and get stuck. I have a new switch from the rebuild kit, but that requires me to desolder the old switch, so I'll do that this weekend.

Yesterday I found that working keeps me from thinking about the cat, so I tackled the outhole. It has always had very poor action... sticking, not hitting the ball hard enough to send it into the trough, etc. At first I thought the coil itself was weak, but an in depth investigation showed that the kicker assembly wasn't moving on its post very well. It was surprisingly easy to detach and take apart -- I love it when it's easy -- and it turns out some smarty-pants had greased the mechanism at some point. The repair guide said you should almost never have to lubricate a pin, and the grease had coagulated into a sticky goo. So tonight I sat down with some paper towels, q-tips, and 409 and started cleaning the gunk off. I was amazed at the results... not only did the mechanism look almost new, the degunked assembly actuated like a dream. I put it back together, ran the solenoid test, and it worked perfectly. One of my few unqualified successes.

So, if all goes well, this weekend could be the first game. I will ritually sacrifice some leprechauns to St. Patrick to hasten the inevitable.